Holy smokes, I see it now...

I had the coolest epiphany today. It was one of those light-bulb moments where all you can do is just sit back and say "Wow. I'm an idiot for not seeing that sooner."

So just a little background... when I first came here, I wasn't thrilled about chapel twice a week. See, chapel for me was always the opportunity to sleep or do homework or study for a test. So having it twice a week with nearly three thousand students wasn't exactly my idea of a great time. In fact, I was all excited about sleeping until ten on those days, but that didn't happen anyway... and I digress. But I figured that I could give it a try, and so far, in the 5 chapels I've been to, it hasn't really been all that bad.

But today was one of those "Oh my gosh" chapels. First off, every song they played was one of my favorite songs. Literally. If they had asked me to pick out the songs for worship, those would have been the ones I would have picked. But that's not the coolest part.

We had a fantastic speaker come up. He was talking about the effects of sin on our lives, and he actually broke a vase in a pillowcase (which happened to belong to his wife). After we strained to watch the glass shatter and whispered amongst ourselves about how his wife was going to wake up with glass shards in her face, he held up the pillowcase and said "This is what sin does to your life. It shatters your heart. And you can't put them back together. But you know, there is Someone who can." And he picked up another vase and started filling it up with water. He said, "This is what Jesus wants to do. He can put back together your shattered heart, and He wants to fill it up with His Holy Spirit. And then He can overflow into someone else's life, so when they bump into you, they see how great God is."

I sat back and was like, "Whoa." See, for the past year, I've been dealing with an extremely broken heart, caused by sin that other people had committed against me. The epiphany was something so incredibly simple that I felt like an idiot, but at the same time I felt like I had discovered a cure for cancer. GOD CAN USE MY PAST FOR HIS GLORY! How cool is that? God can use my screwed-up, broken heart and He can mend it, and He can use me to overflow into the lives of those around me.

Believe it or not, it gets even cooler. I went to church with a friend for the second Wednesday in a row, and the message was incredibly similar to the one in chapel. Rodney (the youth pastor) said that God wants us to quit sitting around being saved and start following Christ like we were meant to do, and allow Him to develop us as believers. He also said that God wants us to follow Him with abandon in every age we pass through, including the rough times, so He can do something through us to glorify His name. The cool thing is that because of what I've been through in the past, I feel called to help people in the same (or worse) circumstances.

It's not really something new I've learned, but sometimes God has to slap me upside the head again and remind me of what He's taught me before. I guess that qualifies it as an epiphany.

I know God brought me here for a reason. Last year He brought me to UMHB to deal with a lot of issues that I had left unresolved. Maybe now He's bringing me here so that I can finally put those issues to rest.

I love it when God moves in mysterious ways!!!