2. Dot to Dot

Written February 19, 2020 REPOSTED

As a kid, I remember enjoying a good ole fashion dot-to-dot from time to time. One of my favorite things to do was
to look at the page before I started connecting the dots to see if I could guess what the finished picture would be. Sometimes it would be rather simple but the more dots that laid on that page, the bigger the challenge it was to see the end result. Over the years, I have learned that our life is just like a giant dot to dot. I have come to LOVE looking back and asking God to show me His dots in my life that I may have missed that have led to one situation or another. And every time, He beautifully shows me some (not all) of those dots. This experience was no different. While I was walking the day to day during my fifth pregnancy, I did not recognize them as a dot in this story of sepsis survival. But looking back, He has shown me how He was in fact preparing me for what lay ahead. ***************************************************

“My Fear doesn’t stand a chance when I stand in your love”

We belted out in our top notch car singing voices one morning as Me and my four kiddos were heading down to visit my mom for the day.

“Peculiar.” I remembered thinking 4 hours later as the same song came through the radio within minutes of us heading back home that same day. Nonetheless, we again sang the song loud and proud.

“My fear doesn’t stand a chance when I stand in your love!”

It didn’t make sense at the time, but in the months before it seemed as if this song followed me. I turned on the radio at home, and it was on; nearly every time I got in the car it played. I heard it almost daily and sometimes twice a day. My attention was caught and my memory stored the frequency away with no real explanation. There was no reason for me to really dig deeper into why I was hearing the song so often and regardless, nothing was keeping me from belting the chorus each and every time it played:

“My fear doesn’t stand a chance when I stand in your love.”

It has been 8 months since I came home from the hospital and have since heard many people say, “that must have been so scary.” The truth is, the first three days I was in the hospital, I didn’t even think about what was actually happening. I didn’t think about how bad things were or how sick I was. I didn’t feel afraid.

As I look back, I realize that every single time the song played, I wasn’t just singing the words but I was declaring this particular statement over my life to the point my heart and mind already knew it was true and walked in complete and total agreement: I was standing in His love and fear didn’t even stand a chance to shake that….No matter what.

DOT.

Even as a kid, I sometimes couldn’t resist and halfway through the dot to dot stop and see if I could guess what the picture would be: thinking that since I had more dots connected, surely I’d be able to see it all. But that wasn’t often the case. The only way for me to truly see the finished image was line each dot up, one after the other and then look back and admire what was created.

I can now see many dots like this one that I believe God was laying down to guide me as He prepared me for what was to come. I believe that when that moment did come only a few months later; the moment that was supposed to be so scary, I in fact felt the most calm I have ever felt and His dots were the reason “scary” was not ever a word I would use to describe my experience.