Irony: Opening and running a Christian bookstore has been the biggest challenge to my faith. It trembles, it questions, it screams, it huddles in shambles in the corner. My faith survived the loss of my husband, my life goals, my marriage better than running this business. I've started to doubt almost everything about how I feel about God and the relationship I have had up to this point in my life with Him. The image of gold being purified, melted down to a flowing, shapeless liquid mass to bring out the sludge to create a finer more perfected end result: I identify with the extreme heat necessary to melt a prior image into something with an unknowable future. I have no idea what I'm supposed to look like at the end of this process, and it's wearing thin on my spirit; I'm losing vision of what the result is supposed to look like. I beg God to show me at least a shadow of hope for what my future holds, only to be shown silence. More important lessons are learned in the delay rather than in the deliverance, but hope deferred is weighing down my soul. So I step out for another day of inventory, accounting, scheduling, marketing, ministering with a raw soul, weak, ineffective bandages on the wounds, hoping that my Savior will be right by my side even if I don't feel Him right away.