The Journey of Discovery

You know that feeling when you feel like your entire world has been rocked on it's axis.  You know in that moment that nothing will ever be the same.  You just cannot see the world in the same way after "that" event happens.

I am not sure about you, but my favorite part of a movie is the moment the lead character realizes, who they were meant to be and just grabs on to it and holds tight.  It takes "that" moment, but then the entire story changes.  We move a little closer to the edge of our seats and try to reach in to the character.  It happens early in our lives.  I think instinctively even as young children we have the desire to be known for who we really are.

One of my favorite things right now is watching my two toddler daughters watch "that" moment in their favorite movies.  For my youngest, Eden it means at 20 months mimicking the motions of Elsa as she runs up the North Mountain and belting out the word "Go" at just the right time.  For my oldest, Myka it means getting out her guitar the moment Ash, in Sing starts to stomp out the beat to "Set It All Free", in a fierce determination to let nothing hold her back any longer.  At a year and a half and three years old my little girls recognize that in this moment these characters have recognized who they are and they want to be a part of that.

As we become adults the movies change, but the draw to that moment does not.  We see it when Aragorn comes into his own in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy.   Right now I see it in the song "This is Me" from The Greatest Showman.  As I see this scene I lean in a little closer because I want to feel that moment that this group of misfits leaves the opinions of other behind them and owns their uniqueness.

Uniqueness.... Have you ever noticed how humanity will fight to own a one of a kind original piece, but wants the most unique creation of all, humans, to fit and conform?  This is a brokenness we see all the way back to the beginning of our existence.  The suggestion to Eve that by eating the fruit "you will be like God" is the first invitation to humanity to abandon our uniqueness (Gen 3:5).  From there on humanity manages to consistently find ways to lose or hide our uniqueness.  Overtime we became obsessed with a need to fit in to the larger whole.  To find our place by conforming to the expectations of the most powerful personalities in our sphere.

Now we become resistant to our own uniqueness because it now includes unique brokenness.  If we begin to examine that brokenness we begin to feel exposed.  Our brokenness prevents us from conforming.  So we hide it and call it a weakness, trying desperately to conform when we see the glaring evidence that our very brokenness makes us distinctly unique.  No one shares our brokenness exactly because they do not live our same exact story.

C.S. Lewis wrote,

Friendship is born the moment when one man says to another "What you too?  I thought that no one, but myself.."

That is the power in exploring our broken uniqueness.  It is only by understanding the unique gifts we bring to the world that we can truly say "This is me".

Our messy brokenness can be so difficult though.  When we start to explore it, we will experience rejection.  It will make some people who have shared our journey uncomfortable.  We will experience discomfort as we learn about the unique individual that we have spent years and even decades hiding.    We will find beauty.  The moment we lean in to the screen when Elsa throws her glove or when Aragorn give a speech worthy of a king becomes something we have the opportunity to experience ourselves.  It allows us to look at the characters we admire and feel kinship.

I have often spent my life feeling like Mia Thermopolis in the Princess Diaries.  I'm really good at being invisible.  If I stay invisible maybe I won't get hurt or will at least avoid conflict.  Maybe I won't get yelled at or punished.  There are so many advantages to invisibility.  It's the next best thing to conformity.  If you can't mimic everyone at least make sure they don't notice you.  Then I started to realize as did Mia, royalty cannot hide.  If I genuinely believe in this whole God the Father thing, then I need to learn as Mia did how to conduct myself like royalty.  And so I learned to explore my brokenness.

That exploration led me to realize a lot of big things about myself.  I struggle with depression.  I have panic attacks and experience anxiety.  I have PTSD.  I stress eat.  I have moments of crazy insane mommy guilt.  I yell at my husband on occasion.  I also learned that I have a massive amount of grace to extend to others.  I am an introvert, but I am also relational (yes.... those two things can co-exist in one human).  I learned I actually enjoy camping and I love the outdoors.  I realized that I have a gift for details.  I learned that in spite of what that mommy guilt tells me, I actually have daughters who regularly expect to go on "adventures".  I learned that I never outgrew cartoons and I absolutely LOVE Disney Princesses.  I learned that fresh flowers bring incredible joy to my life and that it is ok to have them.  I learned I enjoyed listening to Podcasts.  I learned I love Bible Study and Application.  I learned that I could earn a Bachelors Degree while raising toddlers.  I also learned there were some soul deep hurts that still haunted me.  The crazy thing about emotional and spiritual healing that I am learning is that you never really "arrive".  You can't actually get to a place and say well... Mark that off the list.

The journey of discovery is unique to each of us.  We get to take it at our own pace.  God will stretch us, but he doesn't force us.  He will challenge us, but he doesn't dictate.  What we do get in that journey of discovery is our own moment to say "This is me".  The more we embrace and learn who God designed us to be the more we are able to live in confidence in our uniqueness.  As we embrace the brokenness and the lessons and healing it holds we are able to stop letting others dictate our lives and we are able to listen more closely to the still small voice that knows exactly who we are suppose to be.

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.

Reflections on 2015 and My One Word 2016

It's been months since I've posted.  I debated whether to even bother with it.  I'm pregnant, a mommy to an extremely active toddler, a wife and an adult college student.  All of those combined make life feel really overwhelming at times.  It's not really extreme busyness, but all of them combined mean that posting on a blog that isn't accomplishing a school assignment has fallen off of the radar for me.  

I suppose that all of that led to what has become my One Word for 2016.  2015 was full of choices made by myself and with my husband that definitely lived up to my word/s for 2015.  Recklessly Abandon.  In one simple year with only the agreement to follow God wherever that phrase led I find that it's been a year filled with change and challenges for both myself personally and for our family. 

Following God with Reckless Abandon means that you are challenged on whether you will do the things that do not make sense to anyone around you.  For us it meant leaving the church we were part of and over the next few months joining our lives (however painful slowly it might seemed to have taken) to a church plant 30 minutes away because God says "that is where I want to grow you".  It means reaching out to someone you've admired from a distance and risking rejection by asking "Will you mentor me?"  It looks like starting school when it hardly makes sense as you are no where near being in the career field that this degree will qualify you for and it means saying "yes" to God when He says you are finished with the job that is helping pay some of the bills.

For the past two years, I have chosen one word to live out through the year.  To be honest, the first time was largely driven by the fact the church I served at on staff decided to do a series on One Word and as part of the staff I felt a certain amount of pressure to perform and felt I should chose a word.  I find it funny how God can take something that you do out of a sense of duty and make it something that redefines your life.  That first year my word was Pieces.  I don't think I will ever forget that year...  It literally felt like my life fell apart.  I lost the one job I had that made sense to me and felt like it was suppose to be in line with my calling.  I experienced an isolating pregnancy and went into the end of 2014 depleted, alone and feeling extremely broken.  Coming into 2015, I had a certain amount of trepidation at choosing another word, but this time the challenge came from a blogger and author I had come to love and respect so I decided I would once again try the word for a year.

Entering 2016, I once again wondered if I really wanted to chance letting a word define my year and my answer came as I listened to a song that had come to my attention over the past few months.  Plumb's Exhale.  

Exhale.  It's a word that speaks of letting go.  Getting rid of the toxic things that hang over our lives and moving toward the grace, freedom and love that God offers us.  One of the things I have learned about myself is that as a relational introvert, I can have a tendency to hang on to relationships long after they have outlived their purpose in my life.  What I'm finding in this season of my life is that I have less capacity for things so I am going into the New Year knowing I have to be intentional with my time, energy and resources.  It means choosing wisely in what I hold on to and what I let go.  

Exhale.  

Let go. 

Somehow I already expect 2016 to be painful in some ways, but I have also learned out of two years of words that proved painful that in our greatest pain, God is doing some of His most powerful healing in our lives.  He is growing and stretching us because He knows what we are capable of becoming.  We become the one's to halt our own growth when we let fear dictate our lives and decisions.  What about you?  Have you ever tried One Word for a year?  Is this the year to try it?  I'd love to hear if you do!

Musings on #nospendOctober

So we are past the halfway point of our #nospendOctober.  We're surviving it....  Although we did discover that due to some unexpected things we had to alter it after the first couple of weeks.  We discovered that for some crazy reason, I wasn't able to study quite the same way if I didn't have my study sessions at Starbucks.  So we decided to add that particular luxury back in.  The scramble to try to do the studying in the house all of the time was just too much.  The library didn't seem to work very well.  Crazy, right?  I think I might get distracted by all of the other books begging to be browsed there so studying becomes difficult. 

I haven't been very successful at accomplishing all of the cool little organizational and cleaning challenges that Ruth at Living Well, Spending Less put together as part of the #31DaysLWSZ challenge.  I had to give up on that after the kitchen!  While I dream of organizing Myka's room, clearing out paperwork and cleaning out the bathroom closet, alas those items will have to wait until another time.  

Another thing I discovered last week is one way I tend to take some Spiritual Whitespace for myself is to grab lunch out on my lunch break once a week and go to the park.  After about 2 weeks of not doing that, I crashed.  I got to Friday last week and wanted to disolve into tears!  We decided that this was an acceptable compromise to the dining out budget, since eating at work can be a little challenging.  

My husband is much better at this no spend thing than I am.  That said I'm pretty sure he's planning a flea market binge November 1st....  In one way I'm glad we tried it.  On the other hand I'm ready for it to be over.  I haven't started counting days, hours minutes, seconds (mainly because that's math and it gives me a headache....), but I'm ready to be done with this particular challenge.  While it has helped us reset priorities, I'm quite tired of asking the question of does spending this money violate our no spend agreement.  I'm even questioning whether it has the same impact it does for us that it does for others since I hear us saying a lot of "we'll get it when #nospendOctober is over".  

I don't think I exactly regret this trial month of no spending, but I do think I expected different results when we started.  Maybe trying it when you are in school, are actively working through some heavy "stuff" in counseling and have a 1 year old presents a different set of challenges that make it just a little more than I think I care to take on again anytime soon.  Don't get me wrong I think it's an amazing idea.  But it's difficult in different ways from what I expected.  In retrospect I think I start to see this challenge as a great way to deal with our need for things.  I think maybe part of the reason this challenge is different for us is that we don't really have the ties to material things the way we did at one time.  We like to purchase the furniture, home decor and things that make our house uniquely ours, but we were already taking the question of do we genuinely need it?  Do we have a place for it?  What do we need to get rid of if we buy it?  before taking the challenge.  I think in that respect the challenge hasn't served the purpose intended.  So while I don't see myself jumping on board to do this challenge again anytime soon after we finish this month out, one thing I have learned is about extending myself grace.

When I was the one we needed to make exceptions for I felt like a failure.  Like somehow I was the reason this wasn't going to succeed.  After my time with God on Friday though, I came away with a different perspective.  In choosing to eat out that one time a week so I could go spend my lunchtime with God, it changes that lunch hour from something inward focused to using the resources around us (even if it's Burger King) to allow God to draw us closer to Him.  Rather than grabbing food because I'm running crazy, we chose to allot resources to provide an opportunity for some Spiritual Whitespace.  Can I share that after a two week absence from the trail I like to walk on my lunch, I cried?  In the "rules" of our #nospendOctober my heart had taken a huge hit.  I was following the rules so well that I had ignored for two full weeks what my heart was begging for.  I kept pushing through trying to do the task perfectly, not letting my heart be heard.  

I think that's the danger of challenges, church programs and all of the activities we use to fill our lives.  We are so busy trying to do all of them perfectly and not fail at any of them that we miss hearing our hearts beg for what they need.  So can I ask you to join me today?  Take some time out.  Say no to the craziness of life and let yourself hear your heart.  Take more than just five minutes away from the activity and let your heart hear from God in the stillness.  Introvert, extrovert, we both need those moments of stillness for our hearts to hear our Father.

Finding Me

It's been a struggle to write lately.  I try.  I sit down and I start, but nothing seems to come out quite right.  The words feel forced and like they aren't coming from the real me.  They are from the me who has been instructed for years to keep it together.  Even in the places where I discovered the concept of genuine and authentic, ultimately the message I received was leaders do not let themselves show that much emotion.  How am I suppose to function that way?  How am I suppose to go through life tamping down my emotion?  I'm discovering that it is similar to tamping gunpowder into a musket.  Eventually.... It goes off.   Eventually my body can't handle the strain any longer.  I start having headaches, panic attacks and tension that turns my entire back into a mess of knots.

Sunday as I sat in the auditorium of the church we've been attending over the past few months, God sent a reminder in the message.  A reminder of the masks that the Pharisee's lived behind every day.  It was a much needed wake-up call for me.  It made me remember the 30 year old who had tearfully wrestled with God about changing churches nearly 5 years ago.  It made me remember the 32 year old who left what many saw as a secure job in nursing to follow a calling God placed in her heart.  It made me realize that somewhere along the way, while being on staff in a church, in the place most people would think you'd be closest to God, I lost sight of how He wanted to care for me.  I lost sight of my faith somehow.  The faith that made Abraham pack up and take a journey for which there was no map.  The faith that sustained Joseph even in the prisons of Egypt, that allowed him to continue to believe in a crazy dream that God had given him.  It had faded in my life.  Somehow I began to rely on the things I could see.  The way things had always been done in the past.  I believed the messages of I wasn't as talented as others, therefore I didn't really make sense where I was.  I let myself become persuaded to initially agree to a job that I wasn't suited to as a potential means to an end because it made sense.  And somehow agreeing to all of those things I lost who I was.

God's brought some rather interesting things into my life in the last week that have had me re-evaluating and re-discovering myself.  The first is a program called Dressing Your Truth.  It's a program designed to help women discover who they are and how they can best present themselves in a way that enhances their natural-God given beauty and personality.  For me, having taken personality tests, DISC profiles and extensive counseling, I was pretty impressed at how one particular type of beauty/energy they described fit me.  It was like seeing the potential in myself through someone else's eyes. (As a squirrel side note: I discovered I have curly hair.  That was super exciting for me!)   The really crazy thing is that I had started this make-over process before hearing the message on Sunday about Hypocrisy.  Earlier in the week I had begun to sort through the clothes in my closet searching for what they refer to as Type 2 colors as the best reflection of who I am as a person.  

As I sat listening to the pastor I realized that I had already begun the process of pushing away the lie of the masks I had begun to wear again.  I want to live as the truest version of myself!  I don't want to be what someone else tries to convince me I need to be in order to be effective.  God created me with everything I need to be effective in the role He has called me to fill.  Since it's my own unique role it's not going to look like anyone else.  Even mentors, who I greatly admire will look different as they live out their unique call.  I'm called to learn from them, not be them.

Today, as a date my husband and I went to see Disney's new Pixar film Inside Out.  While many have commented on it's cuteness, I suspected going into it that it would be an extremely emotional film for me.  I wasn't wrong (I'm starting to know myself well...).  As the story-line progressed, I recognized something about myself.  Much like the trailers for the film show there is a lot of attempting to suppress Sadness.  To not let it have it's way in the story of our lives.  I tend to try to do that myself a lot.  Somewhere along the line I bought into the belief that sadness is an emotion that is not acceptable.  That it is an emotion to be hidden.  The thing I took away from an animated children's film is that we experience the greatest joy after we've acknowledged the sadness that exists in our lives.  The truth, I've experienced great sadness this year.  I cry when it seems like I see my friends moving on, celebrating the addition of others to their lives, when it feels like I've been forgotten.  I realized today that I spend a lot of time apologizing for this necessary emotion, rejecting it's existence and hiding behind a false mask of joy.  When I do that, when I deny sadness it's crucial role in my life, I deny a part of who I am.  There's a saying "Don't cry that it's over, smile that it happened."  I'm not sure I agree with that anymore.  I'm not so sure that the smile isn't a mask we use to reject the sadness we don't want to experience.  Cry that it's over.  Mourn the loss of something that was special.  Because only by experiencing the sadness is it possible to experience the joy to it's fullest.  

So what do a make-over, a sermon and a Pixar movie have in common?  Well, in my life they share a message that God seemed determined to get across.  Live in who you  were created to be, allow yourself to experience every piece of life and stop hiding behind the masks.

The Grace of Repentance

I recently had someone ask me if I believed in repentance.  It's funny because it feels like it should be such an easy answer, but for me it's not.  For me the word repentance brings back nightmares I had as a child.  Waking up at night to a silent house, straining to hear the slightest noise that would tell me I wasn't the only one left in the house.  At 10 years old my fear wasn't that an ax murderer had broken in and killed everyone, it was that God had decided to take everyone who had proved they were sincere about their "repentance" to Heaven and I was the only one in our family who was left because I knew my heart.  I knew as much as I might try I wasn't perfect and that I messed up a lot!

We would sing Jesus Loves the Little Children and I never believed it because I didn't feel worth loving much.  I looked at myself even as a child and just saw all of the things I couldn't get right.  I lived in fear of God rather than basking in the love and grace of God.  I saw God as someone who wanted to punish me not bless me.  Over the years I came to see blessings as things God gave you for performing as expected.  Not the result of the overabundance of his love for me.

Over the weekend I came up against a piece of my past that I thought I had moved through.  The heart wrenching fear that God didn't love me after all and that nothing I could do or say was good enough.  The incident had me sitting in a chair begging God to show me the truth and counter the lie that inside I knew was wrong, but the message from my past of an unforgiving God was so strong that it triggered my panic attacks.

Earlier in the year I purchased a necklace that reads pre-approved and has the definition inside a pendant.  I purchased it because somehow I knew I needed the physical reminder that God has pre-approved me.  Others opinions of me do not matter and they do not define my relationship with Him.  In this particular moment that message became the exact thing that God could use to speak the truth of who I am and who He is making me into.  It reminded me that I'm his Beloved, he values me and loves me more than I can imagine.

Over the course of the next 24 hours it felt like God just began showering me with reminders of his love, grace and truth.  He reminded me that David who failed so much was someone he called a man after God's own heart.  David, who killed a man after sleeping with his wife.  David, who didn't pay attention and tried to move God's ark in a way much different from God's directions.  David who had multiple wives.  This was a man who lived a really messy life, but the Psalms are filled with his searching for God.  I was reminded that the simple definition to repentance is not a list of rules I have to keep up with.  It's not penance when I've screwed something up.  It's realizing I'm walking in a different direction from God and correcting course.  It's changing my ways, not beating myself up over the fact I can't be perfect.

Grace is not something I can earn, but for repentance to be genuine it has to be something I can accept and live in.  Love. Grace.  Repentance.  You can't separate them.  Without love and grace, repentance is only judgement and humiliation.  Without repentance, love and grace are only tools to excuse anything we might want to do.  Separate they can be abused, but embraced together they become a thing of beauty and life change.  Together they give us David's story that inspires us to strive to be called like he was "a man after God's own heart".

So do I believe in repentance?  Absolutely!  I've lived it.  I experience it every day when I screw up.  I experience it every time that I let the lies from the past overwhelm what God is doing in my present.  But I also believe that it must be embraced with love and grace to have any effect in our lives.  Repentance becomes the means to repair relationship with God, not the means for our brokenness to be held over our heads.

Kindred Cravings

Friendship is born at the moment when one person says to another: "What! You, too? I thought I was the only one". 

~C.S. Lewis

Remember kindergarten?  When you had been turned loose for the first time in a room full of other little kids you didn't know.  Your mom and dad nowhere in sight.  

Just you.  

Alone.

And then it happened.  

From across the room another little human much like yourself smiles and waves and suddenly you've found your best friend forever!

Wouldn't it be awesome if all of our relationships happened with the ease that those early childhood friendships tend to develop?  Sadly, as we get older and wiser, we learn to guard ourselves more and it becomes much harder to have those moments where you find those kindred friends.

I don't know about you, but I've gotten really good at being friendly without letting people close.  You see I tried it and I'm still recovering from the pain that came out of letting others see the real me.  It makes me reluctant to reach out again and share myself with others.  I know it's how God wants me to live my life, but the truth....

I'm afraid.

I'm afraid of being rejected again.

I'm afraid of feeling once more like the kid that no one wants on their softball team.

But at the same time I crave friendship.

Not just having people I can bestow the title friend on, but kindred's who get me.  Kindred's who are willing to accept me with all of the flaws that I bring into the relationship.  Because I don't need someone to point those out to me.  I know they are there because God and I are working on them every day.

And then somehow in the middle of the pain that remains in what use to be my authenticity, I find one of those people that make me say, "What! You, too?  I thought I was the only one...."   I thought that I was the only one to struggle with following God when what He asks of me doesn't make sense.  I thought I was the only one to feel rejected when people can't comprehend why I make the choices I do.  

And out of that recognition of a kindred comes the courage to send an email, a Facebook message or make a phone call.  Somewhere I find the bravery to reach out to that other figure that reminds me of myself.  Maybe it becomes a kindred relationship.  Maybe it's only purpose is to remind me as God reminded Elijah so many centuries ago, that He has 5,000 others waiting in the wings.  

Whatever it is and whatever it's purpose I suddenly feel the stirrings of a hope that soul deep friendships really do exist.  

That there are people following God's leading to a path similar to mine.  

And I desperately need that hope.  

Because I crave friendship.  

I was made for relationship and not just with God, but with others as well.

And so for tonight at least, the fear is conquered and the hope of a friendship glimmers in the future.

And the thought remains that where there is the hope of one, more surely await....

Accepting Brokenness

My journey to find rest is now a journey toward wholeness.  A putting back together that includes broken pieces.

The journey of rest is leading me to recover all of my soul.  This peace makes no detours around reality.

~Finding Spiritual Whitespace

A couple of years ago I was presented with the idea of genuineness, authentic relationships and being accepted even in my brokenness.  It sounded wonderful.  I loved the idea of being accepted for who I was without being judged.  I loved the idea so much I even started to incorporate it into my vocabulary.

I really bought into the idea that this was the way to do church, ministry and relationships.  We needed to be willing to accept one another in our brokenness and to just be real.  Open and honest.  That was my new motto.

And then something happened.  I came face to face with my own brokenness.  In sharing that brokenness, my ideals of genuineness was challenged to say the least over an extended period of time and eventually the attempts to remain open and authentic became a little too much to handle so I retreated to the protection of my shell much like a little turtle.  And there I began to find the answers I was looking for so desperately.

One of the most important parts to having my brokenness accepted is learning to accept it myself.  So often as humans it can be easier to give verbal assent to something while not truly accepting it as reality.  When I'm busy filling my life as full as I can and I stay busy doing more and more I'm in reality hiding my brokenness behind the work I'm doing.  

The visual that comes to mind is that if you fill a pitcher with numerous cracks as full as you can get it with water and then proceed to dump it upside down releasing all of the water at once you never truly realize the magnitude of the broken nature of the pitcher.  On the other hand if you fill the pitcher full and allow it to rest on a table.  Still, not moving.  That is how you will discover the broken nature of the pitcher.  Over time with rest the pitcher will let water seep out of the broken areas that no longer have the capacity to hold it back.

That is how I discovered my true brokenness.  When God brought me to a place where rest was all I could do.  When I had to stop turning the pitcher that was myself upside down and emptying myself all at once then God could introduce me to the parts of me that needed healing and wholeness.  

Actually, I'm still there.  I'm still in the middle of journeying through my brokenness with God.  It's a journey that explores all of my soul.  Not just the places I'm comfortable with exploring.  Sometimes I don't like it so much.  It very often feels like physical therapy of my soul that stretches soul muscles I didn't know I had.  And I usually hurt a lot afterwards!  But I'm also learning that accepting brokenness doesn't mean just accepting the brokenness of others.  It means accepting my own brokenness and letting God journey with me through it to (as Bonnie Gray so eloquently puts it in Finding Spiritual Whitespace) recover my soul.  

I'm discovering that this part of the journey is much more difficult than merely accepting someone else in their broken place.  It means that I have to be real with myself in a way that so often I'd rather breeze past.  It means letting God into places that I've wanted to ignore myself, but am finding that in my quest for authenticity God is requiring deep soul searching so that He can step into my brokenness with healing and truth about how He sees me.

Reflections on My Journey to Whitespace

The white area over the window while it drove my husband crazy when it happened ended up being a daily reminder of the spiritual whitespace that God was calling me to.

Finding spiritual whitespace isn't about carving out an hour of time to escape the things that stress us.

It's the opposite.  It's getting away from everything we do to distract ourselves from all the hidden pieces---in order to nurture our soul.  It's getting away from  the lie that spiritual rest is something we have to work hard at in order to get closer to God.....   Spiritual rest is a journey of awakening our hearts to fully receive.

Finding Spiritual Whitespace by Bonnie Gray

This week has had me reflecting on my journey to spiritual whitespace.  I've shared in bits and pieces parts of what I've learned out of those moments of whitespace that I've learned to embrace, but my journey into whitespace came in a rather unexpected way.

In June of last year I was seeing a counselor related to panic attacks I had started having a year earlier and while we were working our way through dealing with them some life changes began to occur one being the discovery that my husband and I were expecting our first child.  Another being the loss of a job that I had come to care about a great deal more than I had even realized at the time.  

So my job officially ended at the end of May and somehow as imperfectly as I had managed to hold it together while finishing up my final weeks there when it was gone I found myself emotionally falling apart.  My panic attacks which had been manageable prior to the job ending suddenly began coming on full force.  Nearly every day I would find myself dissolving into uncontrollable tears.  

It was in this moment that God brought Bonnie Gray and her story into my life through her newly released book Finding Spiritual Whitespace-Awakening Your Soul to Rest.  As I read Bonnie's story about her battles with anxiety and panic attacks in her own life and the journey God had lead her on I felt like I had found a kindred spirit.  And so my  own  journey into spiritual whitespace began.  

Over the next several months I found myself surviving an extremely lonely and isolated pregnancy by learning to take the isolation and silence to listen to God.   It was so hard.  I spent a lot of time in bed feeling sick and exhausted and found myself often crying as in the silence God started to bring me face to face with my truth.   When I found myself focused on what I saw as my failures, God insisted on showing me that He loved me in my brokenness and isolation because in that I became more dependent on Him.  He showed me how much I needed to fall apart because that is where He could put the pieces back together in a way that no one else could.  It was in those whitespace moments that He could truly show me what I was to Him.  A thing of beauty that I honestly don't see in myself most of the time.  Someone that He created for a very specific purpose.  

So while it could be easy to look at spiritual whitespace as a chance to escape the busyness of stressful everyday life, it is so much more than that.  It's the opportunity to stop and shut everything else out just to give myself a chance to connect with God in a way that brings me joy.  Tonight it is a few stolen hours at Starbucks writing part of my story to share with you.  Yesterday it was taking a couple hours to sort CD's with a friend while our baby girls napped.  Sometimes it's a walk through the neighborhood I live in asking God what He plans for our family in the future here.  There are so many opportunities to connect with God in the everyday things that we so often don't slow down for because we are hurrying on to the next task to do.  

Bonnie Gray puts it best when she describes it as a concept taken from art and design.  She calls it something that breathes beauty and gives the eye a place to rest.  Something that keeps art from being overtaken by clutter.  When put in that context spiritual whitespace becomes what keeps our souls from being cluttered with the least important things and allows us to prioritize feeding and giving rest to our souls and in doing so having more to give to the important things in life. 

Brokenness

The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself.     - Ralph Waldo Emerson

I've spent a lot of time over the past year thinking about brokeness.  To be honest, I've spent a lot of the last year feeling pretty broken.  If I had to describe the last year I think broken and in pieces would describe how I've experienced it.  It just feels like I've spent months wrapped in darkness that would never lift.

Today I find myself with an interesting perspective on the last year.  I find myself realizing that brokenness is essential to life.  The seed has to break for the plant to grow.  The cocoon has to break for the butterfly to emerge.  In that same way if we are truly serious about growing then we have to allow God to break the shell we protect ourselves with that hides our true self from the world around us so that we can be who He created us to be.  

In all of those situations I mentioned if the brokenness fails to occur then life cannot exist.  The plant never grows, the butterfly never emerges and we shrivel inside as our true identity is never realized.  

God assures us that He knows the plans He has for us.  If that is truth then do I have any choice but to trust that He knows exactly how my shell needs to be broken so that I grow he strongest?  

If a shell hides my true identity then as Emerson observes I'm disunited with myself. I'm letting something stand between myself and the person I'm suppose to be and only in being broken myself will the brokenness of the world around me begin to change.

Reflections on 2014

I find myself in a contemplative mood tonight.  I suppose it could be that it's the eve of the eve of a New Year.  It kind of makes one reflect on the events of the current year.  As I sit here the words of a song by Plumb come to mind...

"Standing on a road I didn't plan

Wondering how I got to where I am

I'm trying to hear that still small voice

I'm trying to hear above the noise"

It feels like that's been my life this year.  Struggling to hear above the noise of my doubts.  Struggling to hear the still small voice that is God when everyone around me is trying to advise as to what He is or might be saying about me.

I look back on 2014 and I'm nowhere near where I wanted to be.  I should be a semester into a Bachelor's in Biblical Studies.  I'm working the job that I thought for sure God was going to phase me out of this year.  Instead the job that I felt He wanted me in the most is gone.  And so I question, "How did this happen?  What did I hear wrong?  What's wrong with me that You changed the plan?"  

Then I think about all of the thought that went into picking out my word for the year.  To be honest I argued with God over my word.  It was weird.  Everyone else got to pick words like give, fight, love, etc.  Not me, God give me Pieces.  

Pieces....  Kind of what my year seems like.  It feels like the dreams from January are in pieces around me and most of them seem to be lost.  Pieces kind of indicates something is broken, right?  Who wants to go into the year with a word that hints of brokenness?

Of course God also gave me a really awesome song to go along with my word.

Still, it feels like my brokenness gets put on display for anyone to see.  Pieces means vulnerability.  It means that people all around me get to see the messiness of my life.  

As I reflect on the past year though I start to see the truth in the line that says...

"He knows how to make your pieces fit."

See the beauty of the word pieces means that I am broken, I am messy, I'm emotional and I've hurt a lot this year, but God has taken those pieces and is making a mosaic out of them.

A mosaic by definition is a picture or pattern produced by arranging together small colored pieces of hard material, such as stone, tile or glass.  In my case the material is the broken pieces of my hopes and dreams that when God steps in He knows exactly how to take the things that might not have quite worked out the way I had hoped and He makes them something beautiful all the same.  The even better part is that they become something far more beautiful than they would have been otherwise because God designed and redesigned the mosaic of my life.

When I'm in pieces that's when God's work shines through the brightest.  When I'm in pieces I'm not trying to hold myself together so people see the God I think they should see.  They see the God that is designing and redesigning me.  I suppose when I look at it through that lens the painful moments where I was being broken in some way have a new beauty and meaning.  

So..... What do you think God will do with Reckless Abandon for 2015?  Yep, technically it's two words, but it needed the adjective....

Oh, and I have a song for that too...

My Paradigm Shift

The paradigm has shifted and there is no going back to what was before....

We all go through periods of change.  Some moments are easier than others.  A little happier and with change that is something to celebrate.  Other moments are a little less enjoyable, but survivable.  Still others leave us devastated in their wake wondering if life can ever be alright again.  I think the latter ones are the moments when we feel that paradigm shift.   

I don't know about anyone else, but I for one am not overly fond of things that change in a way I can't recognize anymore.  It leaves me feeling off, wondering where I fit in and more often then not if it is a negative experience I find myself trying to find a way to blame myself for the fact that the change happened.  

Often lately I find myself feeling much like Frodo returning to the Shire after his journey with the ring.  He left the Shire an idealistic hobbit thinking very much that he would deliver a ring to the Elves and he would be done.  Little did he know that a long, difficult journey was before him that did not end at Rivendale, but went all the way to Mordor.  When he returns he is so changed he never really finds a way to fit into life in the Shire.  A shift had occurred and he was no longer the same hobbit that everyone remembered.  

I think that is very much how I feel at this moment in my life.  I'm a Mommy, but it's not my sole identity.  I have things I feel very passionate about, but fail to see a way to live them out.  After months of isolation I'm returning to a world where everyone's daily life has continued on, but I'm no longer a part of it.  Where does that leave me?  

I feel like God's been showing me some interesting things about where that leaves me.  It leaves me in a world where I see much better the "what was supposed to have been" rather than the "what happens now".  But I think that's ok.  It leaves me realizing that it's alright to stop pretending things are ok when they aren't.  It leaves me valuing my whitespace moments that provide the opportunity for God to speak to me.  It makes me realize that maybe the well-meaning white noise around me keeps me from hearing what God wants from me right now.  Maybe God blesses me with silence and isolation to bring me closer to Him.  

I look around me and see so many activities going on under the guise of good, Godly activity and I start to understand that we've become so busy doing for God that we've forgotten how to just be with God.  Or did we ever really know that?  Are we afraid of what God will say to us if we stop long enough to hear?  Will He ask us to do something uncomfortable?  Something we don't want to do?  

I'll pretty much guarantee that He will.  How do I know this? Because when I stopped to listen that's exactly what He asked me to do.  To stay in a situation that brings much more pain than joy.  A place that it's impossible to explain to others why I stay except for the simple explanation of God says stay.  But in staying He's asked even more.  He's asked me to stop pretending.  Stop pretending that I'm strong enough to muscle through each moment He asks me to spend there.  To stop pretending that I'm not messy.  

The reality is I'm exactly that.  I'm messy, I'm emotional, I'm not ok all the time and the truth most days I don't want to stay where God has asked me to join Him.  But that's where my paradigm shift has left me, in a place I don't feel I belong, but God says I'm there for a reason.  My paradigm shift has changed the landscape that I'm returning to like an earthquake disrupting the beautiful California countryside.  In its aftermath my home disappeared and I'm left trying to figure out the pieces that are left of that former life.  

Pieces....  My word for 2014....  It begins to make sense of my paradigm shift....  It destroyed the facade of genuine and authentic and makes me see myself differently.  It brings to my attention others that struggle with shattered pieces that belonged to what used to be their reality and in doing so leaves me feeling a little less lonely in my messiness.

The Beauty of Brokenness

I started this post 3 weeks ago, coming back to it today I found myself able to finish it.  Probably a little differently then it started, but I think that demonstrates the point all the more...

I find myself contemplating the much overlooked beauty of brokenness today.  I suppose that could be because today I feel exceptionally broken and God's needed to show me how that speaks to him.

You see tomorrow I enter the 30th week of my pregnancy.  A pregnancy which honestly has been extremely difficult both physically and emotionally.  Life change is never easy, but when pregnancy, job change and a move to a house in much need of TLC come all at the same time it brings an entirely new meaning to the word overwhelmed.  Add to that the unexpected limitations that pregnancy brought to my life-style physically (making it to work each day I'm scheduled is the equivalent of making it to the top of Mount Everest!) and what should have been a time of great celebration and joy becomes more like surviving the Amazon armed with nothing, but a pocket knife.  That's caused a lot of frustration for me since I truly am excited about and look forward to meeting our Little Miss Muffet, but the struggle to survive and get things ready while not being able to handle the day to day routine of keeping a house in order and making supper often takes precedence over the excitement that I'd love so much to live in for even a few days.  As I see other expectant mom's able to continue their lives with full time job demands and still take care of the children they already have it makes me feel less than adaquate most days.  Every so often the thought crosses my mind that I can't judge my behind the scenes bloopers by the highlight reel of their life that I see, but the truth is in my brokenness I'm often guilty of doing just that.  I see all of the pieces of me that aren't good enough and don't measure up.

"The pieces of me" it's really an interesting choice of words since at the first of the year when challenged to choose a word for the year God kept bringing me back to the word  "Pieces".  Everyone around me is picking words like give, strength, fight...  Words of action or substance and I kept coming back to the word "pieces".  I didn't understand it completely, but I went with it.  It wasn't long after my word choice that we discovered we were expecting, pregnancy soon exposed the need for some job changes where my second job was concerned as stress brought on blood pressure issues and hormone changes soon meant that pushing through the difficulties became nearly impossible emotionally.  So again I start to see the pieces of me that don't measure up to other people's expectations.  The pieces that make up me that aren't ok with other people as they start to come to light.

It's interesting when you start a blog post only to come back to it 3 weeks later...  As I write now I sit in a hospital bed waiting to see if our Little Miss Muffet is going to be joining us several weeks earlier than planned.  Waiting....  It's become another of my pieces.  It seems to be one that God feels I need right now.  It's interesting though as I find myself chatting with the nurses taking care of me sometimes baby chat other times lapsing back into the chatter that was a natural part of my life in my 10 years of nursing I find that God seems to be using this time in a hospital room to give me what my favorite author, Bonnie Grey , refers to as spiritual whitespace.  He's taking this time in my life to slow me down, take away the responsibilities that feel so overwhelming at home and He's showing me how some of those pieces fit.  He's reminding me what it's like to be able to share my story with someone else while at the same time reminding me to stop and listen and rejoice in their story as well.  To hear the similarities, but recognize the differences in our stories that have intersected for this moment in time.  Considering that when faced with the idea of a hospital stay earlier in pregnancy I fought it and argued against it, I find that right now it's exactly where I need to be.  It's given God the perfect opportunity to show me the beauty that is the brokenness I've felt for so many months.  A chance for him to remind me where I have been, but at the same time to reinforce where He's leading me.  

So right now in the moment while the pieces of my beautifully broken life have me resting in a hospital bed I find myself enjoying the whitespace moments God is sending me.  Moments where Dustin and I can just rest and listen to our Little Miss Muffett's heartbeat, moments like now where her little heart tones become the white noise I go to sleep by, time spent with my own mom learning to listen to the stories and experiences I haven't always listened to well, but thankful for the time hear them again and learn what might apply to my forthcoming adventures as mommy to my Muffet.  Brokenness, pieces of me and whitespace... The one thing they share in common?  The beauty of a picture that God wants to create in each of us.