Today we welcome Kristin Marsh. This southern beaut has a way of melting pretense with her wit and helping you step past the struggle into the joy. Even if you’ve never met her in person, to sit a bit with her words is like sitting on the couch with your bare feet up on the coffee table in your best friend’s living room. Please  welcome Kristin Marsh!

Life challenges…oh those words..those two difficult, painful, and unwelcome words. They usually come when we aren’t expecting them.

BAM! Blindsided!

Challenges aren’t discriminating. They show up no matter who you are, where you came from, how rich or poor you are, how educated or uneducated you are, and your age does not matter. Challenges do not care. Every single challenge is different….not harder or easier or more or less painful…just different and I’ve had my fair share. They look killer compared to some and they look like a walk in the park compared to others. But big or small, it doesn’t matter.  What matters is what we each do with the ones we face.

My first series of challenges started when I was young. My mom died when I was only four and my sister was three months old.

Yep, BAM..blindsided, life changed forever.

Mom died of colon cancer that spread to her pancreas in an era where doctors just didn’t look for colon cancer in a woman in her mid 20s. Fast forward three years. Three months after my father had remarried, we lost our house in the 1981 Memorial Day flood in Austin, Texas. My little sister and new mom were separated from my dad and me by roaring flood waters. I spent part of the evening trapped inside our house, sitting on a floating hide-a-bed couch, watching everything we own float out the broken sliding glass door. I had no idea if we were going to be electrocuted by the floating fridge that was still running,  or if my mom and sister were dead.

Again, BAM…blindsided.

We lost everything. The following 6 years of life I endured merciless bullying from a band of girls at the private school I attended. I was admittedly a total dork and easy prey but this was during a time when bullying was just kind of a part of life and you learned to suck it up and deal with it. Back then it was the ones being bullied that were seen as the problem, not the ones doing the bullying.

Fast forward another 5 years. My first summer of college I was in a climbing and rappelling accident where I sustained massive injuries to my left arm (I still win most scar contests). Picture a 250 pound college football player hanging from a rope wrapped around the arm of a young coed who was hooked to a platform 30 feet up.  250 pounds of football hunk, hanging from my arm.  At this point in my life I was playing guitar and leading praise and worship in 5 different groups and my major was deaf education. Kinda need two hands for guitar playing and sign language. I still struggle with physical pain from this 23 years later.

Bam.

Fast forward another 7 years and I started my era of miscarriages. Three to be exact. I have six kids, three here and three in Heaven.
Yep, life’s ginormous waves of challenges.

There it is. It amazes me. How could all that happen in one short life? But here’s the thing. I could sit and cry. I could be a victim. I’ve earned that right.  I could stop my life and live in the past…OR…or I could stop and see the “but God”.  The what? The but GOD. In every challenge in my life I can look back and see God’s hand in it. I  can see past how bad I hurt to how He carried me through. I can see the good come from each of those challenges that seemed so evil and were so painful. In everything…but God!  He was there and still is. He has pulled me through every single one of those challenges.

So whom am I to think He won’t be there when another one comes along. I don’t know much, but this I know…God will never leave me or forsake me. God loves me. I am His daughter – a princess, royalty and as His daughter it is my honor to serve Him and reach out to others to help. And how would I know how to help unless I knew for myself how certain challenges feel. And how no matter how big the challenging wave might be, God is still in it.

Kristin is a daughter of our Most High King. She is blessed to be the wife to an amazing big, bald, good lookin’ man and to be the mom of three crazy kids. She loves Jesus, loves life and loves to laugh. Her heart is for women to experience God’s freedom. Her blog “A Beautiful Mess” can be found at  kmarshlady.wordpress.com