I’m really missing my kiddo today.  It kind of comes in waves now.  Most days are great…I’m thinking about what he is doing and how proud I am of him, praying for his heart and well-being.  But then there are those days that I wake up with the missing.  At first, when those days came around, it was really overwhelming and I just felt like crying.  Now I like to think that it is God’s way of speaking to me, whispering my son’s name to me…that maybe it’s going to be a day where he really needs some focused prayer…maybe he is struggling physically, or in his head, or in his spirit.

For so many years I used to think that my emotions were a curse.  They were something I hated.  I felt like such a freak because everything felt so, so big to me.  Simple things became so complicated because of the largeness of my feelings.  I used to look in the mirror and tell myself that I was a freak, that I was useless because I couldn’t do anything without crying.  I know now how I hurt the heart of God when I did that.  He made me the way I was for a reason….I just didn’t know what it was yet.  Now, I at least have a glimpse of what those reasons are.  The first and most important is to have a real, intimate relationship with Him.  Once I was awakened to His heart for me and His desire to be friends with me, it began to change everything.  He started showing me the value of my emotions…how they could be effective in praying for others.  When you can truly relate to how someone is feeling inside, you have a window into what their struggle really is.  Most of our internal struggles are born out of emotion and we forget that emotions are not facts, that they will lie to us.  I had to start asking myself what the “truth” was.  Did the Word of God and how He felt about me line up with my emotions?  A lot of times they didn’t.  A lot of times they came out of my past experiences and how I filtered things in my current life.  Is this making any sense?  I hope so, because it was such a huge revelation to me at the time.

As the Lord began to teach me about Himself and about why he gave me the emotional personality He did, something began to change.  I started to realize that there was no emotion I could feel, or thing that I could do that would change His heart for me.  Nothing could change it.  Nothing.  My emotions were okay, He just wanted to teach me about balance with them and looking at His Word and Truth.  I began to understand what a gift He had given to me.  It was no longer a curse.  I was not a freak and I was not useless.

In these new days of learning the life of a military mom, I’m realizing that all of those things that the Lord has taught me up now have a point.  I could never have walked this road even a couple of years ago.  He knew what I needed to be able to walk through this and He is going to teach me a lot more for other things that I will face later in my life.  So yes, I have days like today where I miss him so much.  I want to be able to just pick up the phone and hear his voice and tell him how much I love him.  I cannot.  I have to learn to be okay with that and do it in prayer instead.  I know that I can stand in the gap in prayer for him and know that I am holding back the enemy when he is advancing on Tyler.  I can use the emotion that God gave me to understand that he may be missing his home and his friends and his family….and then turn it into prayer for him.  I have to stop focusing on what I cannot do and put my heart into what God has given me the ability to do.  Pray. Always. Without Ceasing.