Written by Sarah Evangeline

“If you try to go to university, you won’t make it.”

Those words hit me like a ton of bricks. I’d spent most of my life coping with learning disabilities. School was a hard place because I was the student who always took much longer to understand a concept and who missed out on a lot of social events just so I could study longer.

It was my final year of high school, and I needed to be reassessed before I applied to universities. Those words from the doctor were full of doubt, uncertainty, and disbelief. After getting back into the car, my mom held my hand, looked me straight in the eye, and said, “We serve the God who makes the impossible possible.”

The dictionary definition of faith is “complete trust or confidence in something/someone.” In Scripture, we read that faith is the “substance of things hoped for and the evidence of what is not yet seen” (Hebrews: 11:1).

That day, my mom reminded me that I had a choice. I could either put my hope in another person’s definition of me, or I could put my trust in the Saviour who has my future in His hands.

Growing up, my mom was a daily example of how to live by faith and not by another person’s words about me.

As a single mom raising me, she had overcome so many obstacles. She knew how to be fully present and dance in the moment. She was true to who God made her to be, despite what others thought about her.

She lived out her creativity and passions and showed me what it looked like to work hard to achieve her goals and dreams. She inspired me to live trusting God is in control rather than by only looking at my circumstances and letting them discourage me.

It would have been much easier to live in the doubt and disbelief of my limitations. Yet, God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, love, and self-discipline (2 Timothy 1:7). When our faith is grounded, we can become unshakable, no matter what our futures hold.

Of course, nothing happens overnight. Hard work and discipline are still needed. We cannot go around the hard times, we have to go through them. It took a lot of focus to discipline my mind on Scripture instead of on a negative perspective from someone else.

It took hard work to get my grades from 62 per cent to 85 per cent. It took perseverance to endure the setbacks throughout university. Life doesn’t become easy simply by trusting. Yet, every single day has been worth the fight to put my faith in the unseen.

It’s been a fight to get through six courses of statistics when math never came easy to me. It’s been a fight to persevere even when I failed a course. But failure is a part of faith. Failure reminds me that I cannot live on my own strength. 

Today, when hard situations still come my way, I reflect on my mom taking my hand and reminding me that we serve the God of the impossibly possible.