Intentional Vulnerability

Yesterday we met with a financial planner.  Not because we have unlimited wealth and resources, but to help us prioritize and achieve some personal goals for our family.  Now just making it to the office was huge for me.  I have major panic attacks related to money discussions, but there I was sitting in an office discussing our budget with a financial planner.  I did great in the office and then on the way home in the car by myself I dissolved into tears.  I became incredibly angry with my husband over some innocent comments and I was so frustrated with myself because of my reactions.  It is only today that I finally realized why I had the reaction I did....  

I had made the choice to be vulnerable.

You see...

I set up the appointment.  We had tried doing this a few times before, but my panic attacks had ended up in us finally taking it off the calendar.  I was the one to re-initiate this meeting.  I told my husband I could handle it and then when the tears showed up afterwards I was angry at myself for a perceived weakness.  

I don't know about you, but letting someone look at my mess is something I avoid at all cost! 

I want to look like the ideal little family of four.  All put together and perfect.  I mean we all know it is not true for any one of us, but we still want that to be how others see us, right?  

And so comes our financial planner into the mess that is our budget.  We might not be swimming in debt, but our budget is the thing that we have wrangled with since we got married.  It feels sort of like trying to wrestle a greased pig....  Sometimes we have it and then it slips and gets away again.  So we decided to enlist the help of a coach.  

Enter vulnerability....

To invite someone in to look at how you spend you money, where you have debt and what you haven't even thought about preparing for is hard.  You open yourself up to fear of judgment.  

Theirs and your own.  

Recognizing the way this makes you vulnerable has made me look at my life to realize that this meeting yesterday, even with my meltdown which lasted less than an hour, was one step in a series of choices to be vulnerable.

The thing about choosing to be vulnerable is that you open yourself up.

Sometimes it is to rejection. 

Other times is it to new or deeper relationships.

My life lately has been a series of choices to be vulnerable.  

To let people into my story in a different way.

There were some who ended the conversation.

They walked away uninterested in understanding me better

 or going deeper in our relationship.

There were others though, who met me in my vulnerability.

They tackled the hard issues that I was wrestling with or just sat and listened and then shared part of their story.

Vulnerability drew us closer.

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another:

'What! You too?

I thought I was the only one.'

~C.S. Lewis

Vulnerability is something that as humans we fear.

We fear the rejection that will come from some when we open up, but when we live in that fear we miss what happens when someone says,

"What! You too?  I thought I was the only one."

Vulnerability provides the opportunity for us to see who genuinely wants to share our journey and who merely is there because it is convenient.  

Vulnerability allows us to recognize when boundaries are necessary.

Vulnerability moves us closer to the heart of God.

One of the things I think we can miss in the story of Christ is that at the moment of his death he was stripped bare.  He was exposed to anyone and everyone.   

When they had crucified him, they divided up his clothes by casting lots.

~Matthew 27:35

There were people who chose to mock.  There were people who chose to desert him.  There were also those who chose to draw closer.  Vulnerability is tied irrevocably to the story of Christ.  Letting someone into our messy life is the only way we truly heal.  

If we let them the fears that keep us from practicing vulnerability will destroy us.  They will isolate us and restrict us to "safe" relationships that never challenge us.  If we push past our fears and begin to practice vulnerability though, we find those with shared experiences.  Some will join us where we are on our journey and others will show us how to make it through the parts that we are unsure of the path.  

Vulnerability builds community.

Embracing Brokenness

One of the crazy things I am learning in this phase of life is that sometimes I do not always understand why God directs our lives the way He does.  Why does he direct one person to go while telling another to stay and fight?  Why does He allow some people to experience unimaginable abuse?  Why does He not step in and just "fix" things?

To be honest these are questions I struggle with a lot.  On a personal level I have questioned many times why the direction for me was "Leave now" while another person heard "Stay a  little longer".  Why are my experiences in church different from other peoples?  In some ways I envy the person with incredible happy memories of church camp with friends, youth conventions and end of summer pool parties with friends.  That was not my experience.  And so I question.... "Why God?  Why are our experiences so different?"  

I am in introvert.  I take vast amounts of information and process it internally.  I probably overanalyze  any given situation trying to make sense out of it.  My counselor often challenges me with the question "Why does it need to make sense".  I think over time I have learned that sometimes that can be my way of trying to cope with incredible pain.  Other times it can be an overdeveloped need to take responsibility for everything that happens in my sphere of influence.  

Don't get me wrong.  We need to evaluate from a healthy place what we are responsible for, but the reality is that we are not responsible for everything.  There are two people in every relationship.  All we can do is identify and recognize what we are responsible for.  

So what happens when life doesn't make sense?

Well, that is where waiting and faith come in.

One of my favorite stories in Scripture, is the story of Elijah.  Immediately following this amazing victory over the prophets of Baal, where God sends fire from heaven.  We see Elijah running from the queen and hiding in a cave.  

What follows for Elijah is a period of rest and restoration after which he is sent to first a brook to be fed by ravens and later to a penniless widow and her son.  

Can you imagine what trusting God looked like for Elijah?  

He had to think God was insane!

First you are telling me that birds are going to feed me, and not any bird, but a bird that eats roadkill?

And then you are going to send me to the most needy people in the country for food?

I think that is the beautiful thing I'm learning in this season of life.  When life doesn't make sense.... That is when God creates his greatest work!

The part of Elijah's story that has captured my attention in the last few years, however, is the fact that to follow God with complete faith and confidence, Elijah had to rest and listen.

God's voice is often heard best in or after moments of quiet and rest.  

The world clamors for our attention every moment of every day!  

The thing I have learned about myself is that the quiet and stillness grounds me.  

It allows me the opportunity to connect with God on a deeper level and gives me confidence that I do not naturally have to move forward and stand my ground on what I know to be right.  

At the same time it allows me the space to hear and question God for the things I might not fully understand.  

The truth I am learning is that when something is broken, it is in pieces.  It can be incredibly difficult to put back together and it requires patience and time to fully reconstruct.

We live in a broken world, so of course life doesn't make sense.

When God says "leave" He can be directing you away from the thing that would completely break you will and spirit.  A will and spirit that He designed you with for a holy purpose.  When he tells others to "stay" He knows that this is an area that they were designed to take on.  

The different roles we play in life do not mean that one of us is less than another.  God created us all with a intricate design that only He fully understands.  We live in a broken world and we live as broken versions of our true selves.  God's greatest desire is to see us become the true self He designed us to be.  If we try to force our lives back together with glue and sheer will power we will break crucial parts of ourselves.  When we listen closely and let God direct the re-assembly of our sin-broken lives, we can begin to see how He created us.  

God sent us His Son, Jesus, as an example of what an unbroken life looks like, but all of our personal breaks are in different places.  If we look to one another for the way to "fix" our brokenness we will forever remain broken.  We are looking into a clouded mirror.  When we look to God for our healing, we begin to examine the person we were intended to be.  We can invite Him in to walk through our own story.  When we do that we see all the places that He was with us when we felt alone and isolated.  We find that He surrounded us with just the people we needed for that moment in our healing.  As we examine our story through God's eyes we begin to correctly re-assemble the broken pieces of our lives and it is in that we find our true selves as God designed us.

Intentional Communion

When you hear the word communion if you have any exposure to faith you likely think instantly of the solemn ritual of the Last Supper where Jesus shares his final meal with his small group of followers.  

Or maybe you think of it as some solemn "quiet time" where you spend a set amount of time reading Scripture.  

That one is torture for me!

Yep, I will own it, I am called to ministry.  Pursuing a degree in Biblical Studies and reading my Bible in some ritualist expected fashion is worse than the Spanish Inquisition for me!

I suppose it could be because I instinctively associate not "reading your Bible" enough or as expected with the threat of punishment it held for me as a child. 

 Seriously!  I remember as young as 8 or 9 years of age, sitting in "chapel" at the school I attended trying to determine which story I could pull from memory enough if someone decided to grill me on my "quiet time" that morning.  I do not really remember if that ever actually happened to anyone around me, but it was definitely a fear for me.

Sadly, that concept of being punished for not spending enough time with God has overshadowed a lot of my adult life.

Communion:

The sharing or exchanging of intimate thoughts and feelings, especially when the exchange is on a mental or spiritual level.

Keep this Book of the Law always on your lips; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it.  Then you will be prosperous and successful.

Joshua 1:8

Blessed is the one... whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on his law day and night

Psalm 1:1-2

There are things that are starting to reshape my perception of what communion looks like.  Rather than a set number of verses or making my way through a year long devotional, I am discovering communion with God in moments of spiritual whitespace.

My brain retains concepts rather than exact information.  I connect concepts in Scripture to real life and I am starting to recognize that I do this in a way that is supported in Scripture!  From the early days of Israel's inception as a nation, Joshua is reminding them to mediate on God's word.  

Just reading it, only creates a mere string of words.  Meditating on it creates opportunity.  Opportunity to share and exchange thoughts and ideas with the God, who created us.  Opportunity to ask how any one verse of Scripture applies to me personally.  Opportunity for self-discovery as we allow ourselves to find pieces of our story in the stories of David, Paul and even Jesus.

For some the ritual of reading a set number of Scriptures each day for a certain period works.  It ensures that they have moments of time set aside to connect with God.  For so long I have held myself up to that model, feeling like a complete and utter failure because for me it doesn't work.  The reality I am learning is that there is no magic formula for connecting with God on a daily basis.  It looks different for all of us.  I can read one passage and dissect it for two weeks!  Others need to get the idea and move on.  Still others need to commit the verse to memory word for word.  

The thing I am learning in this season of life is that communion with God looks different for all of us.  There is no perfect model.  It has a unique look and feel for each and every person because God meets us where we are.  

Mine looks like a marinade.  

What does yours look like?  

If you don't know if yours is working or want to try something new, I would like to invite you to join me in reading Whispers of Rest by Bonnie Gray.  It is a 40 day devotional and there is even a book club you can join!