Hope in the Journey

"For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future."

~Jeremiah 29:11

This verse found its way into my life the year I graduated high school.  It came in the form of a little picture frame.  I remember thinking at the time it was cute, but what would I ever do with it?  My style at the time was fussy and the more swirls and curls in a design the better.  This little frame was incredibly simple to the point of boring.  It read Journey across the top and contained the verse from Jeremiah across the bottom.  Somehow through numerous moves and multiple rounds of decluttering this little frame held on.  Every time I picked it up to put it in the discard pile it found its way back into the keep pile.  It is probably the only thing that I still have from that day.  

Honestly, while I've considered it a verse that has defined my life for a while, I have a love-hate relationship with it.  Sometimes I really struggle with believing that God really does have plans that include hope and a future.

There are moments my life feels much more like The Waiting Place from Dr Suess's Oh The Places You'll Go...

...for people just waiting.

Waiting for a train to go

or a bus to come or a plane to go

or the mail to come or the rain to go

or the phone to ring or the snow to snow

or waiting around for a Yes or No

or waiting for their hair to grow.

Everyone is just waiting.

When I'm in that waiting pattern, it is hard to believe that there could be some greater plan at work.

The waiting place doesn't "feel" very hopeful.

Then I'm reminded of that little picture frame that now sits in my living room holding a picture of my younger self surrounded by larger picture frames filled with photos of my little family of four.  This little frame holds a reminder in the single word arching across the top "Journey".

Journey

 1.  a traveling from one place to another, usually taking a rather long trip

2.  passage or progress from one stage to another

A journey requires waiting...

As Dr Seuss reminds us it can be...

"waiting for a train to go or a bus to come or a plane to go"

When my husband and I were dating we vacationed with his family in Florida.

His family had a practice of driving overnight only stopping for gas and maybe one breakfast.  

We agreed that we would take this approach...

We have not done this since! 

One of the things we realized about ourselves as a couple on that trip is that for the two of us the journey is what we enjoy.  The destination is great, but there is so much to enjoy between point A and point B.  

That trip we pushed ourselves so hard to get to the destination that when we got there we were irritable, overly tired and we spent a part of our first day there just catching up on sleep!

I'd like to say I totally get and apply the lesson to every area of my life from that point on, but sadly that is not always the case.  

I think it is so easy to get focused on where we feel called, the goal we have set for ourselves or the future and hope we imagine God has planned for us.  In an intense focus on making that destination happen we lose sight of the lessons on the journey.  

Lord of the Rings in probably the most epic example of a journey we have.  It would have been so easy for Tolkien to focus on merely the journey of Sam and Frodo to destroy the ring, but he doesn't focus solely on this one journey.  Instead he winds together the journeys of several characters all crucial to the ending of the story.  There are periods where these characters had to spend their time in "the waiting place" because of the role they were needed to play in the larger picture.  A role that was critical to the "hope and future" of MiddleEarth.  

It can be easy to think of these stories as just that stories, but stories serve to remind us that a journey is more than just a destination.  A journey is an opportunity for discovery.  A journey is organic and ever changing as people and circumstances come and go.  There is a good chance that most of us will not finish our journey with the same people who were there at its start.  Twenty years later I still remember the person who gave me that small picture frame.  I haven't seen them in nearly a decade.  That little frame over time has served as a reminder that God's idea of hope and future doesn't always look like the destination we think we are aiming toward.  On graduation twenty years ago, I had no idea that a few years later I would graduate from nursing school.  When I graduated from nursing school I had no idea that years later I would complete my bachelors degree in a completely different field.  That little frame with that little girl is surrounded by pictures of a husband and daughters I some days thought would never exist!  

All of that still doesn't stop me from trying to rush to the destination on occasion though!  Do you ever have those moments where you feel that the hope and the future God promises are really distant and seem invisible and highly unlikely to ever happen.  I'm completely convinced that the people Jeremiah was writing to in Babylon felt the exact same way!  Sometimes the waiting while all the details line up feels excruciating.  

You know what still happens on occasion to my husband and I when we take a trip?  

Inevitably we get excited and want to push through to the destination.  

It is in that moment we have to decide if we are going to let the eagerness for the destination override the pace of our journey.

That is sort of how life is....

When we are in "the waiting place" we can juggle the bus, train and plane to get out of that space sooner, but what do we lose in the process?  

What opportunities or relationships are sacrificed?

So if you are in a waiting place (like I am right now) take some time,

slow down, meet the people around you.

Stop trying to juggle the schedule to escape and embrace this part of the journey!

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.

The Exhale in Our Journey

There comes a moment in every journey when the one traveling must exhale.  

On a hike it might be so you can crest the next hill.  You draw in a deep breath and push through to the top.

In life it often feels like the need to exhale comes before moving into a new phase. A new place of being.  Out of necessity we find ourselves driven to release something from the past so we can move on.  

It feels like I am at that point of my own journey.  I am feeling this need to exhale.  To let go of the voices that try so overwhelmingly to silence my own voice.  It is funny, but up to this point I had not realized how many people and influences I allow to silence my voice.

Somewhere inside I let a lie take root that various people over the course of my life have spoken into in a way that made me believe it as truth.  A lie that said my words do not hold the same value as another's.  The lie that said I was not good enough in a particular position.  The lie that said because I happen to be female my voice should not be heard as much as someone who happens to be male.  

I look at my journey and realize that as far as I have come and as much as I have grown, I still have pieces of the lies that have been spoken into my life that influence how I use my voice.  I move slower toward what I know to be right because voices with authority in past parts of my journey have convinced me that they hear God's voice for my life better than I could.  It makes me hesitate and think that God speaks to them differently than he does me because I hear a different message from him.  It convinces me that what I hear has to be wrong. 

Right now the need to exhale at this part of my journey feels so strong it is almost tangible, like I could reach out and touch it.  

Exhale.

The word is like a breath of fresh spring air wafting through the open window.  An invitation to forget the death and cold of winter and the past and an opportunity to welcome and embrace new life and new beginnings.

Exhale.

It is an invitation to rest in the present moment of our journey.  To welcome God into the very second we are in and to experience his truth in a completely new way.  It is an invitation to be still, to hear the still small sounds that we ignored in the busyness that has been our past.

What does that look like for you today?  How does it change your present to say yes to the stillness that allows us to hear most clearly from God?  

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.

A Beloved Valentine

It's quiet right now as I write.  After a busy morning my husband has decided a morning nap is in order and evidently our 5 month old and all three puppies agree with him as everyone, but myself appears to be napping right now.  The silence is good though today.  It's given God the opportunity to give me His own Valentine's Day message.

One of my favorite stories to go to when I need to remind myself to protect my whitespace moments is the account of Elijah in the period after his moment of triumph over the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel.  You would think that God's provision of rain in response to Elijah's plea as opposed to the complete and utter silence that followed the begging of the servants of Baal would put one on a fairly high note.  You would expect a certain calmness, confidence and poise to follow this success, wouldn't you?  

 That's not exactly what happens though.  After a powerful answer to his prayer, the next thing we see Elijah doing is running for his life from the kingdom's ultimate bully, Queen Jezebel.  His was a God who brought fire to consume an offering (that had been saturated in water by the way), but in that moment his God wasn't a God that could handle the threats of a woman.  

The truth is I've been struggling for a few weeks now.  Difficult decisions have become necessary for our family to make over the last month especially and to be honest I'm not really happy about them.  In my more positive moments I see them for what they are, necessary changes because we live in an extremely broken world.  However, it doesn't mean I like uprooting pieces of the life I was hoping to resume to start over parts of my life somewhere completely new.  

I'm an introvert so I tend to invest in relationships and I'm not really eager at the need to start the cycle over again.  I have moments that to be honest I get frustrated and even anger for a brief period at the fact that I have to move on while others are allowed to stay in the place I was comfortable at one time.  Of course then I realize that I really haven't "belonged" in that place for nearly a year now.  

I think those moments are the ones that make me come back to Elijah's story.  Today, evidently my constant reference to this particular part of Elijah's life has made my husband decide to read it because as I opened the Bible app on our shared iPad intending to look for some comfort in Psalms I instead find it opens to the part of Elijah's journey following his success at Mount Carmel.  I found myself rather than moving on to Psalms as intended reading Elijah's struggle and in that I found my Valentine's message.

This time I saw in the story the weariness that had suddenly consumed Elijah.  It very much feels like where I am right now.  Rather than just let me die, I actually said last night that I want to be able to settle for less.  I'm so tired and exhausted with this part of my journey right now.  I also noticed this time though that God provided rest and nourishment for him.  He sleeps, he's fed, he sleeps again and he's fed again and then strengthened by this he's able to journey on to the next whitespace moment God has for him.  

I think that the most impactful part of Elijah's experience though came in the part that I have spent weeks quoting.  I've spent a lot of time thinking about how the importance of spiritual whitespace is so aptly portrayed in this story as God does not speak through the wind, the earthquake or the fire, but he speaks in the gentle whisper that comes in the silence after all of the chaos.  What stood out to me this time was that the whisper only came after Elijah poured his heart out to God being real and vulnerable in his isolation.

"...and now they are trying to kill me..."

~1 Kings 19:10b

As I read that I found myself sharing with God that is exactly how I've felt for a while now.  Not that anyone is trying to physically kill me, but often times unintentionally those around me have tried to kill my heart.  It comes in ways that many times people don't even realize what they are doing.  It comes when I'm pressured to accept someone else's reality as my own when how I experience the events can't really be changed.  It just is what it is and that is my experience.  It comes when vulnerability is met with rejection.  It comes when isolation is magnified because people feel uncomfortable with what they can't fix.  

"Yet I reserve seven thousand...."

~1 Kings 19:18a

My dad was the first person to really bring this part of God's reply to Elijah to my attention over a decade ago.  I think though somehow I've always interpreted it as a reprimand from God for Elijah's lack of faith.  Today, however, it was my Valentine as His Beloved.  Rather than hearing it in this "stupid human, don't you know I've got more people than you over here on the sidelines" tone, I heard it today more like this:

"You're not alone.  I'm here, but I also have so many more kindreds that I want to share your journey.  If I leave you where your heart feels threatened you will only focus on the perceived danger.  That's not where you will do your greatest work.  Come and let me surround you with the ones you need for the experiences I have waiting for you.  You're My beloved and I take care of what is Mine,"

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.