Hey, I’m Celeste and it’s an honour to be here! I had the absolute pleasure of calling Tat my friend. We met at Mountainside Church in Binbrook, Ontario where there’s a street called Magnificent Way. Tat fondly tweeted about that street once. (She adored the people at Mountainside and there is no doubt that the adoration was mutual).

‘Why God?’ is a question I’ve found myself asking a lot more often over the past year. It’s usually followed by the different situations or feelings I find myself in, like why do I feel lost?… Why am I struggling?… Why did you need me to leave my comfort zone?… Why did you challenge me like this?… Why won’t any plans I make work out?… Why can’t I know the plans You have set for me?…

I ask God that last one often. Most recently when He decided He wanted to completely flip my life around and I did not understand why He would do that to me.

Out of all the things He could ask me to do, God tugged on my heart and asked me to leave my comfort zone, my community, my safe place. He asked me to move churches and I was TERRIFIED. My conversation (more accurately very one-sided questioning) with God went something like this:

God, why in the world do you need me to move from where I am comfortable and go to a church where I know no one and they don’t know me? Haven’t I been through enough this year?

This was in October of last year. I’ll spare you the details, but I want to tell you this: I’m so happy now. I have this incredible community around me and I’ve never felt more at home than I do where I am now.

If I could have fast forwarded and had the chance to see how His plan for this would play out, I wouldn’t have had any hesitation or doubt in my mind that God had a purpose and plan for me with this move. It’s so hard to not know what His plans look like for us when we’re here and the struggles of life seem to overwhelm us. We walk through the why’s daily – the list goes on and on.

In Jeremiah 29:11, God says He knows the plans He has for us…

I think that sometimes, to take us deeper in our faith, God places us in situations where we need to rely on Him completely to walk us through. He needs us to trust that He’s gotten us this far and will take us further. He tells us in His word that He goes before us, so shouldn’t that be enough to make us trust Him completely? Many times it seems unfair as we go through tough situations, that God’s being mean, but at the end of it, He really is taking us deeper into a beautiful relationship with Him.

Verse 11 goes on to say that the plans He has are to prosper us and not to harm us, to give us a hope and a future.

It’s not easy to trust God in the why moments, I think we’ve all experienced this first hand time and time again. The best thing change has taught me is that God’s love, and the way He cares for me is constant. It’s the one thing I can always count on.

So friends, can we agree that we need to learn to seek Him even in our moments of struggle? There should be no doubt that He sees us, knows us, and is with us.