Great Things Come in Small Packages

It took me a while to realize that God wanted a relationship with me and that a relationship takes two active members to work.  And due to my holding back, my dark days lingered.

My oldest nephew (who is almost nine years old now) was born during this time in my life.  His arrival into my bleak world helped to push away some of the darkness because I had something else to focus on.  Here was a baby who knew no wrong and was perfect in every way to a first time aunt.

However, even with so much joy that he brought, those storm clouds still came, and with a vengeance it seemed.  It's not that I was suicidal.  I really didn't want to die.  I just didn't want to live with every day being showered with such great emotional pain either.  Of course, I didn't want to go back to the days of living with the physical pain of Crohn's Disease either.  But in some ways, this depression I was in was so much worse than that part of my life.  It's even more of an invisible illness than Crohn's Disease is.  With Crohn's, my doctor was able to run a scope of my intestines and see the actual disease inside.  But with emotional pain, on the outside, I looked okay, but inside, I was in absolute turmoil.  And there were no scopes to run to find that out.  It's a matter of the victim describing to someone what they are feeling.


Somehow, as always seems to be the case, my mom figures out something is not quite right with her daughter.  I can't recollect what brought about a conversation over the topic of my emotional distress, but one guess would be that I probably lost control of my emotions all together.  I'm great at letting them build and collect until there is no room left to store them and so I burst into tears and incomprehensible words that would sometimes come out in anger, but I'm thinking in this case, it would have been a flood of body shaking sobs.

I remember clearly stating that I had no interest in dying.  But living was awful.  And that the one thing that held me in check at all was my nephew.  I couldn't give up because he needed me.  I had to be an example of strength for him. 

Today, I still look at him and remember those dark days and think how amazing God is.  Even when I wasn't the person He needed me to be, He had mercy and love enough to send a baby into my life, and that baby helped me recognize that we all have a purpose and can all be used for His glory.  Because, at that time, my nephew unknowingly gave me the desire to keep pressing forward.  And that great things can come in small packages.