Personal Highlights Video

My life has been a whirlwind since I took this new job at Harvest Bible Chapel. I was warned it would be this way, and I thought I was prepared. I wasn’t. It hasn’t been a bad whirlwind like a devastating tornado. It’s been more like a milk shake. It tastes great but needs to be shaken up to become what it is.

Here’s what I do when I need to refocus: I do what David did in Psalms 40:5.

“You have multiplied, O Lord my God, your wondrous deeds and your thoughts toward us; none can compare with You! I will proclaim and tell of them, yet they are more than can be told.”

I stop and I replay the highlights video of my life with God that got me to where I’m at today.

There I am a 16 year old girl standing on a rock at camp having dedicated my life to walk with God the rest of my life, and sensing a deep peace in the heart of my soul.

Next I’m a co-ed at an unaccredited Christian college, unsure of how I’d make it into medical school. My MCAT results just average, yet God’s hand opening an unshakable door to medical school. I see myself working hard for 4 years in medical school continually struggling with the standardized tests – not my forte – yet pushed as if by God through the doors that landed me in one of the best residencies in the county in Houston.

A few years later I’m sitting with the residency director being accused of having ADD, misunderstood, yet running to the Lord for guidance. My last minute mind finally figuring out that people with undiagnosed ADD end up working in the ER, and seeing God’s hand open wide a last minute door to a pediatric ER fellowship well after the application deadline.

I watch myself, a young woman with a broken heart, tended to by the Lord after a severe heartbreak, guiding me to begin teaching His word to women. It was the last thing I ever dreamed I would do. It was the moment I learned I could fly.

A few years later, after overcoming a great professional failure, I see God landing me in one of the most prestigious jobs in the country, a job I didn’t imagine I could get, nor did I particularly deserve. I would become the best pediatric ER doctor I could be in that environment.

Then I see God opening miraculous doors to teach the Bible to women at Harvest Bible Chapel, a church filled with talented teachers and mature believers in many ways far more equipped to teach God’s word than I was.

I watch as women’s lives are impacted by God through my teaching, and in my mental highlights video, things go a little in slow motion while the music gets louder as the apex of years of waiting come closer to a chapter’s end.

Now I watch a collage of personal lessons one by one, quickly in my mind’s eye, where pride is destroyed, and love is built up, and character is made. Some of these trials will be etched in my memory forever, while others have already been forgotten leaving me just a little more like Christ, but far from where I will be a few years from now.

Finally, I see highlights from the last year. Changes – a new home made just for me, a new job with my name written on it, freedom from personal clutter. Uncertainties, confusion, hurt, then hope, faith, and a certainty that God’s hand has led right here right now.

And I step over that ledge. And I fall. Quickly, quickly.

Into the hands of my Savior who had it all figured out back at that moment when I was 16 standing on the rock, dreaming of the future.

And that’s just the first part of the video. The best is yet to come. What does your personal highlights video look like?

“He has done great things for us. We are glad.” Psalms 126:3.

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