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!

Learning About Myself

It's funny how many posts I've written between this one and my last one that I could never bring myself to hit the publish button on.  I'm not completely for sure why unless its that in the end they seemed to just be the jumble of thoughts in my head that only made sense to me.  

The last few weeks have been hard to describe for me.  There's been a lot of internal wrestling as I've sorted through various things I've been discovering about myself.  I mentioned in one of my last posts about a program I had just started to try called Dressing Your Truth.  I loved the idea behind this program that a blogger I follow shared.  The more I looked into it the more I liked the idea that I could dress in a way that instantly began to inform others who I am.  The idea that certain colors, textures, shapes all can compliment the way God created me and the gifts he's given me was definitely something that appealed to me.  

I think what I did not expect going into this is that it would open the door on some things from the past I'd pushed way back into the recesses of my memory.  As I began the process of embracing who I was created to be in a more visible way I discovered that there were things over the years I have loved that I've not allowed myself to experience.  I shut them off and pushed them to the side for years because I felt it made me look weak or less than others.

The creator of Dressing Your Truth refers to four energy types.  I struggled with that a little at first, but then I realized that like so many words in our vocabulary, the word energy has various meanings.  In this application the definition of forcefulness of expression seems to fit the best.  So as I explored the types of energy or expression that she outlined from her years of study I discovered (at first much to my chagrin) that I fit into the Type 2 Energy or Expression.  What this means for me is that I express myself in more subtle and softer ways.  I'm not the life of the party, but I won't be hiding in the corner from everyone either.  I'll find myself a small group that I can feel connected and comfortable around and those are my people for the night.  

It's crazy because I've spent so much of my life thinking that I needed to be more extroverted and that I needed to be all things to all people when all along I was created with the purpose of connecting in smaller more detailed ways.  It's interesting for me because some of the difficult moments that have come out of the last few years start to be explained as I looked into my type of expression more.  I realized that one of my strengths becomes seeing and recognizing unhealth in situations in the earliest stages.  The fact that I'm sensitive when used in the right way can help uncover the little things that will keep something from moving forward in a healthy way that allows for growth.  I start to see the reasons that I instinctively knew over the years it was time to remove myself from a particular situation.  It was part of a gift I've been given as opposed to a crazy emotional roller coaster I was on.  

As a little bookworm over the years I've read The Five Love Languages, I've taken Personality tests, DISC profiles and anytime someone posts a test on Facebook I usually end up taking it always wanting to learn more about myself.  I've often struggled if I didn't get the results I viewed as more positive expressions, but now I'm beginning to see the strength in the answers I've gotten over the years.  I've started to explore ways that I can live out of my strengths as opposed to merely wanting the energy/expression that someone else has.  It's so funny how they all begin to come together and form a picture titled TONYA when I start to look through the lens of I was created with a unique set of gifts and talents and God gave me all the tools I need to be the best version of me from day 1.  

All of this causes me to reflect on my word for the year Recklessly Abandoned.  I start to realize that it takes form in this instance in that I can start to let go of everything that people have tried to tell me about myself and embrace the part of me that I've been afraid to acknowledge existed.

There is a line in the song Live Like That by Sidewalk Prophets 

Recklessly Abandoned never holding back.

To live in who you were created to be means letting go of what others have said about you and living in the truth of who God made you to be.  It means embracing it in every way possible and for me that next step has been to begin dressing true to who I am.  

My Word/Words ~ Recklessly Abandoned

"but for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short."

-Jane Austen

Have you ever thought of your life as a story you are writing?  When given the challenge to write about my one word for 2015 I found myself thinking about it.  I felt pretty sure that my one word required two words rather than just one, but upon further consideration I realized that One Word becomes a start.  Something to build the chapter of my story titled 2015 around.  Thanks to a vision casting Sunday from a pastor I've come to admire greatly, I have found myself contemplating the last day and a half how the direction my husband and I feel God calling our family during this year works with my word and of course like any good story, there is a back story.

I'm not sure if it's unique to myself, but when presented with the idea of choosing a word for the year last year I did not do so lightly.  It was with much thought, conversation and even arguing with God that I landed on the word Pieces for 2014.  Now, personally I thought that God would use this word to do great things in my life.  You know the kind that grab people's attention in this "wow, we want to be like you" or "just look at what God is doing in her life" sort of way.  Somehow that didn't happen though.  Instead the word Pieces became appropriate as it felt like I just watched my life fall apart.  Job loss, health issues, isolation...  It never seemed to stop, but somehow in the middle of all of that God was doing just what a line in the song He gave me said He would do,  He was making my pieces fit.  Through all of the falling apart that was happening He was introducing me to key people essential to prepare me for the coming year of 2015.  He was taking all of the pieces that had been or were trying to be forced together and He was making them fit the way He knew they needed to fit together.  In the middle of my crazy life, He brought a new counselor, D, who challenges me in so many amazing ways but at the same time provides the tools I need to set healthy boundaries that allow me to give myself permission to follow the advice of a kindred, Bonnie Gray, and find spiritual whitespace in which to connect to and hear God more clearly.  He took me back to my hometown using my husband's friendship with someone to bring Pastor Debbie Salters to my attention, who just through passionately following where God leads in a community I know well has inspired me to live my own life very differently.  Being on the 2015 side of 2014 I start to see the picture that formed in 2014.

So as November rolled around I began to consider whether I would choose a word for 2015.  Honestly, after the painful experience of 2014, I will admit to being reluctant to let God use one word to define my life yet again.  But something happened....  One day when listening to Live Like That by Sidewalk Prophets, the phrase "recklessly abandoned" came to my attention.  I found myself thinking about that phrase a lot over the next few weeks and after much debate with God realized that I had found my word/words for 2015.  If you insist on one word I suppose I'll have to go with Abandoned.  If I get to have it my way I use the phrase Recklessly Abandoned.  Abandoned by definition means giving up control, but when you add Recklessly its meaning becomes to give up control with no regard for the consequences.  I think that's why I like the phrase over the word.  I want to learn to live saying no to the less important things in life so I can say yes to the most important things.  I want to learn to simplify my life so that spiritual whitespace and sharing my story (all of my story, not just the pretty pieces) become second nature.  I want to learn to cut out the busywork and white noise so that I can build relationships in unlikely places.

While I'm one of the first people who will argue that life is much less overwhelming when you have some structure and a schedule I want to live holding those things in an open hand, using the structure and schedules to enable me to live intentionally so that I can give up control in the areas that matter most.  Sounds crazy doesn't it? But I believe it's possible.  In 2015 I want to learn to use those tools to enable me to intentionally live Recklessly Abandoned.  

So I find myself thinking that while it seems that in some ways the words I use to describe what I want to do with 2015, simplify, intentional living, whitespace...  While they all could be words for my year, they become the action verbs to my year.  Pieces of a story that God is putting together to create the story of me.  So what's your word and your story?