Ruth Chou Simons grew up in a Southern Baptist church and attended a Southern Baptist seminary, but it was only when the life she had planned was broken and changed that God’s purpose for her life became more clear.
Those experiences led the author, artist and founder of GraceLaced to write her latest book, “Now and Not Yet: Pressing In When You’re Waiting, Wanting and Restless for More.”
“Everything you see that seems to be flourishing in my life right now was born out of a time that seemed like a total dead end, where it was a loss of our ministry dream. It was a loss of our vocational dream. It was a time where I would say that my ‘right now’ at that time seemed like a wasted season of my life.
“[I want others] to understand that even if they don’t like the ‘right now,’ they’re facing, that God is purposeful. God is at work, and He doesn’t waste any seasons. Some of the very best ways that God redeems His story comes out of times where you’re very hidden and possibly looking like the opposite of success,” Simons said.
Comparisons
Simons is a self-proclaimed overachiever who spent a lot of time and energy trying to find worth and purpose through collecting accolades.
This focus on herself led to her becoming utterly exhausted. Simons got married, started having children, was in full-time ministry with her husband and was ministering to the women in their church.
“That meant a lot of things that I thought God had given me passion for were going to be wasted or set aside or forgotten. It felt like the opposite of succeeding or achieving or living my best life. That was the season that I started the GraceLaced blog, with the tagline ‘Finding Grace in the Everyday,’” she said.
Walking with God
When starting this blog 16 years ago, Simons had no desire for recognition; she simply prayed she could show the small ways that the gospel mattered in everyday life.
“It wasn’t overnight. It wasn’t that everything just suddenly opened up and opportunities came left and right. I wrote for years without anything stirring, without it being some huge impact in the Christian inspirational world,” Simons said.
By the time she had her sixth son, her oldest children could help more. She was able to write more and began painting again. She started combining her art with the insights she was learning. In 2013, she opened an online shop for her artwork.
“When I look back at those 10 years, I can still testify to a ‘now and not yet’ lesson. Even when your dreams do come true, you can see where you have not yet arrived.
“The lesson is that it doesn’t matter where you are. Even when you get to whatever ‘there’ is, you still have to reckon with the fact that on this side of heaven, we’re meant to walk with God, not ahead of Him,” she said.
Point of peace
Before getting to this point of peace, she went through a lot of twists and turns. She and her husband were part of founding a school they really loved. Her husband was a passionate headmaster and imagined that he would be in that position the rest of his life.
After seven years, due to some “misalignment in decision-making” by other leaders at the school, they chose to step away, to relinquish what they wanted to do and allow the Lord to work out what wasn’t right.
They not only lost a lifelong dream but the career that provided for their needs. They wanted to run away due to potential backlash from being misrepresented.
It was a long-drawn-out season of pain.
“I have this expression that I say — ‘You don’t have to be blooming to be growing’ — born out of a time when I looked at my neighbor’s garden and said, ‘Why does it seem like their flowers always grow well?’ It’s really easy to think that we can measure what God’s doing by the blooms in our lives.
Trusting and obeying
“That was the season that taught me that God was growing us; God was anchoring us; God was humbling us. That was actually how it works — Him working all things for good.
“Maybe we thought on the other side of this, we could just be in a better place, but the ‘now’ was that God wanted us to press in and trust Him and believe Him, even when everything looked like it was falling apart for us. However, we can press in and be faithful right now because of the ‘not yet’ already promised and fulfilled in Christ.
“For us in our everyday life, even when it doesn’t look like it’s never going to work out, and even when our circumstances are the opposite of what we want, even if this feels like 40 years in the desert, God is actually using it for our good. We just can’t always see it.
“God’s grace is laced through everything.”
Go to www.GraceLaced.com to find out more about Simon’s artwork and her books.
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