Finding rest in the Lord

Hi SPV Family Grace here,
It was one of the busiest floral holidays of the year- Mother’s Day Eve- when my husband called to let me know that, for the second time in five days, he’d been in a vehicle accident. Both times not his fault, both times with others that were impaired and shouldn’t have been behind the wheel. 
It feels like it’s been a year of anxiously waiting for phone calls; a year where one plan falling apart leads to another, and then another, and suddenly the rubble feels so massive that it’s nearly impossible to consider cleaning it up, only to sweep the final bits of dust and find that we’ve returned to exactly where it all began with little to show for it but the battle scars. 
I left a lucrative career last summer to teach math, and lasted all of a month in a public school before the pressures and difficulties of post-covid teaching had me running for the hills. I still feel like a failure when I look back on the students I abandoned, still can’t help but shutter knowing I left the security of my years-long career for a month-long chance that didn’t pan out that likely left a mess in my wake. My husband was supposed to be deployed. Instead, we waited for eight long months to find him discharged instead, and not sure through those eight months if he’d still be deployed the next day, and while I’m grateful he’s not overseas, we built our lives around the thought of him being gone. I built a small business, and then was asked to leave one of my best markets for circumstances unrelated to the business or me, and have scrambled to restructure. Summer holds uncertainty in teaching as my students find summer camps and new hobbies. My husband built a business requiring every ounce of him, filled with the constant volatility of a self-employed and hard-working person, and has since decided to take a step back and re-enter the workforce. Family has come and gone, friends more so than we could’ve imagined. Our whole lives changed a year ago, and here they are now, changing once again, in the midst of a year of unexpected curveballs. 
Sometimes God works in these ways where I know He is there, but I fail continually to acknowledge Him. It feels like I’m the one holding my world together, and I’ve pieced it together with all of my past failures and thoughts of who I thought I might be, and I use my two small hands to grab ahold of everything within my reach. Sometimes there’s far too much weight, and something snaps, and in the moments after lies the knowledge that I can’t do this alone, and the understanding that I can only let the weight crush me, or I can hand it over to the Lord. 
Sometimes surrender doesn’t look like the perfect Hillsong music video, where you fall on your knees to the twenty-seventh bridge of Oceans, and the world feels so light and so filled with joy. Sometimes surrender looks like a deep breath in the midst of it all; the still small voice whispering “we’ve got this,” and the knowledge that no matter how hard the road, He is there to shoulder the load and walk with you. He reminds me that circumstances do not make me a failure, and reminds me that good things are coming, and tells me in the moments where I can’t face who I’ve become that He is still continually working in me.
In the moments where I can’t hold it together- where I haven’t washed my hair in a week and the emails stack higher and the bills and the phone calls and the what-ifs pile higher than that, there is a comfort in Matthew 11:28 Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. - in the simplicity of the short and sweet verse of the Lord offering us rest. He offers it freely, and sometimes it takes that phone call, that last straw to add to the pile building for months and months, to finally accept that His rest is the only comfort we have left to seek, and that while He doesn’t tell us how everything will be okay again, we can rest knowing that somehow it will be, even if the whole world seems wrong.
Much love, 
Grace