This is my 100th post, or so WordPress tells me. It’s the 100th time I have sat here, stared at a blank white box and filled it with something scribbled from my heart. The 100th time I have given myself enough of a moment to pause and ignore the frantic must-fill-every-moment pace of my life.

And this morning, it’s not about my busy life or my quickly growing children or homeschooling or dirty floors or laundry piles or my loving husband who works so hard. This morning, it’s about me.

It’s about being a thirty-three year old woman, wrestling with God (which really just means, it’s about me, struggling against the inevitable, undeniable truths that I know in my heart, making my best attempts at rationalizing and reasoning my own desires with God’s, swinging my fists but not landing any punches, stomping my feet for a bit until eventually, finally, submitting. And still pouting a little, because, hey, I’m human.)

At the risk of oversimplifying a very complex and larger than my brain can even comprehend God, it really just comes down to this: he is good.

I don’t think that there’s any trial or situation I have faced (yet) in my life that I can’t see how he was working (sometimes in spite of all the stupidity I could throw at him), and/or that I can’t turn around to glorify him as a result.

That isn’t to say that he caused any of the trials or that any mistakes I have made in my life were part of what he wanted for me. I don’t believe God makes us sin so that we can turn around and give him glory when we climb out from our depths. (I don’t actually believe God makes us do anything. We make our own choices, folks.)

But I do believe that when we are earnest in our repentance, when we are truly seeking purity of heart and are filled with a holy longing for a closer relationship with him, our hearts start actively seeking ways to shout from the rooftops just how miraculously we have been rescued and we long to glorify the God who still hears our heartbeat, even down beneath the rubble of our own self-destruction.

Also, I am pretty sure God has an in with social media and he will use any avenue he can to wave red flags all up in our faces.

Even as I have struggled and wrestled these past few months, there hasn’t been any escaping the reminders that I was veering off the path.  Like, email messages, Facebook status updates filled with quotes or questions that dug straight to my core, Bible verses leaping off the screen (of my phone, because I’m super hip now and pretty much only read on my Galaxy S4) and slapping me upside the head, friends messaging me to ask “Hey, how are you?” just as I was praying for someone to confide in.

Quite literally, every moment that I wanted to sit and dwell on things that were counterproductive to me as a wife, mother, friend, Christian, I was smacked back down to reality by a loving God who wants what’s best for me, in spite of my own wandering heart and human nature that sometimes wants otherwise. In spite of myself, in spite of however many times I am that heartbeat beneath the rubble, I can say that he is good.

Though come to think of it, there are many moments where my shortcomings as a parent seem to be laid bare, they are more often than not accompanied by moments of “hey, they still get it, even though I didn’t do a good job of living it right there.”

And every failing I have as a wife is met with encouragement and renewed commitment from my husband. And occasional a more simple: Well, don’t be an idiot, Melanie. (All’s fair and all that.)

Actually, when I really get right down to it, so much of what is good and worthwhile in my life has come in spite of my own failings, and because I have a God who does throw out those red flags and warning signs. And, because I have a God who cares about these little failings of mine, who doesn’t want to leave me just as I am, in spite of how much bigger and complex (and infinitely better at wrestling than me) he is.