See It Like God Sees It
Romans 8:37 – “No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.”
Kristie’s favorite compliment was, “You’re a big person.” She would smile every time because she knew exactly what they meant.
She was five-foot-nothing, maybe a hundred pounds soaking wet. But big? Oh yes. She had a heart like a freight train, stubborn as the sunrise, and she never once let anyone tell her she couldn’t do something.
At seventeen, she laced up her boots and stepped into a calling. She wanted to protect and serve, no matter the cost. She never imagined the cost of military service could come so high.
A helicopter crash in Afghanistan shattered her world. She was pulled from the wreckage, bleeding and broken. Face. Spine. Shoulder. Leg. It took doctors three years to piece her back together, and even then, they had to take her left leg.
Still, what hurt more than the surgeries or scars was losing the one thing she had built her whole identity around: her mission to protect others.
But if you think that’s where the story ends, you don’t know Kirstie. It dawned on her that she gets to choose how something slows her down. She can look at this latest journey as a problem or as possibility.
With a prosthetic leg and a fire in her soul, she learned to walk again. Then she learned to climb, to snowboard, and to take on challenges most people wouldn’t even dream about. She did it to raise money for nonprofits that help veterans, children with disabilities, and trauma survivors. She did it because, deep down, she still believed people were worth protecting.
Since then, she has scaled six of the seven continental summits, and somewhere along the way, she stopped seeing herself as broken.
…And that changed everything.
Dear One, you are a big person too! It’s not your size that determines your strength. It’s your sight. How you see your wounds, your detours, and your delays, that makes all the difference. God is not asking you to pretend it didn’t hurt. He is inviting you to see from higher up, and to catch a glimpse of what He sees.
So go ahead. Take that next step. Climb hard if you must because what looks like a dead end from here will look entirely different from the mountaintop.
