Change

Change.  It's something we look forward to at times and yet dread in other moments.  It's the thing that signifies progress, but it can also be what moves us away from something we need to remember.  

I've really felt the impact of change in the last week as I've watched my baby girl turn one and move from infant to toddler.  It's in me as after a 13 year absence from college I once more begin classes to pursue a bachelors degree. 

As I've observed so many things changing in lives around me I find myself contemplating that word a lot.

Change.

Why do we so often want it so badly we go to great lengths to achieve it?  As I look at myself I start to see that often I want change so I don't have to actually deal with something that God is trying to walk me through.  Often dealing with the thing that is in front of me is hard.  It means facing things that I've spent years trying to ignore and it means that I have to go into those places that hurt.  

Know how I know that?  Because I have this awesome husband that won't let me quit these classes I've started.  The last week and a half have been one panic attack after another for me.  

Quiz time?

 Que the panic attack.

  Paper due? 

 Panic attack.

Lengthy reading?

You get the picture.

The reality is I've wanted to quit since day 2, but we keep wrestling through the panic attacks to uncover the reasons that I have test anxiety.  And through that process God is showing me things about myself that I had used frequent change to ignore.  

One thing in my reading for class this week that really stood out to me because of what I'm experiencing in this moment of my life is the moment in Scripture where God changed Jacob's name.  We focus on the part of the story where Jacob wrestles with God all night and then the next morning God tells him his name will not be Jacob any longer it will be Israel.  This time reading through that story looking for things I hadn't noticed before and reading what comes before in the same sitting I was struck by the change that was going on in Jacob all along.  So often I think we tend to go "Oh, God changed Jacob's name and then Jacob was different", but that's not the case at all!  Jacob was letting God change him long before God ever changed his name.  The thing we can easily forget about the night Jacob wrestled with God is that it was the night before he was to meet with the brother who the last time they were together threatened his life.  I'm convinced that God didn't change Jacob's name to change him, but to remind him who he was.  Jacob was already coming back to face his past, but this new name was God's way of reminding him in a very real, very physical way that he wasn't the same man who ran away all of those years ago. 

I'm not an expert, but the thing I'm realizing about myself is that too much change can be me trying to take the easy way out.  I can use the surface change as a distraction to keep me from dealing with the hard things that are going to bring the lasting change.  And so (with the help of that awesome husband I mentioned) as much as it hurts I choose to move through the anxiety and the panic attacks for the slower, substantial change that will lead me to that new identity that God has waiting.

Living Life Differently

I find myself wondering lately when did we buy into the idea that overextending ourselves and filling our calendars past the bursting point was acceptable?  When did we decide that if we could spend just 5 minutes in the morning letting our Father fill us that we could make it through the day?  When did we start to believe that it's normal and okay to live like our lives are a fast food restaurant doling out the minutes of our lives to all of the various work, church, charitable and family commitments that clamor for their share of fractions of seconds of our lives?

I've noticed an overwhelming amount of my friends that seem desperate for a few more hours in their day. a few more minutes to their week or even just one more second to the month, just to get everything that life is demanding from them.  I'm starting to form a theory about this pattern that I recognize creeps up even into my life after nearly a year of consciously choosing to work on changing those patterns in myself.  I fully believe that all of those "good" causes are ways the Enemy chooses to distract us from being the best possible version of ourselves we can be.  

I mean face it....  Work is something we do to sustain our families so it's not exactly something we can just decide not to do one day, but it takes a huge amount of courage to ask if the job that demands so much of our time is really the job we need at this moment of our lives.  And church and charity...  Who is going to dare say that maybe you should turn down that request to provide a meal to a family in the need or say no to the latest suggestion that maybe you should volunteer in yet another ministry that is beginning to form?  And I think it goes without saying that we can't exactly leave our children and spouses to survive on their own and expect those relationships to survive unscathed....  So how are we suppose to manage all of the things that demand our attention and drain our lives of the vital resource of time?

For myself I'm finding that it requires that I break the cycle.  It means that the word "No" has become vital to my vocabulary.  Now it doesn't always come out of my mouth that way, but learning to recognize and verbalize that something doesn't work for me right now is key to my survival in this current phase of my life.  Giving myself permission to "just say no" has been invaluable.  It's changed how much and how often I feel overwhelmed and over-extended.  

By their fruits you will know them.

Matthew 7:16a

I think about this verse and wonder what people see in my life as compared to the life of Christ?  Do I value the same things that he did?  Do I show it by the choices I make?

Out of this line of thought have come some life changes for me.  Through my search for what I value, God has brought some amazing women into my life through books, blogs, conferences and a church who's motto I've adapted and adopted as my life motto.  Let me introduce you briefly to these inspiring women and the lesson each taught me.

First into my life in the middle of some hard life changes came Bonnie Gray, a blogger (Faith Barista) and author, who introduced me to the concept of Spiritual Whitespace.  This idea of stopping my life and letting God share His truth about me was life-changing.  It meant that rather than living in the middle of anxiety and panic attacks I could begin to live in the truth that I was God's Beloved.  It didn't matter that I wasn't good enough for certain jobs or roles in other people's eyes, God had a plan and saw me as something to be cherished.

Next God built on that idea of Whitespace by introducing into my world yet another author and blogger, Ruth Soukup and her book and blog, Living Well, Spending Less.  The idea that stuff can be distracting isn't really a new concept, but Ruth shared her own story in such a way that one of the changes I've implemented into my life this year is working toward living life more intentionally and living with only the things we need.  It's a work in progress, but I find the more I say no to stuff the easier it is to say no to the things that attempt to demand my time and energy.

Following the idea of Living Well, I was introduced to Jennifer Dukes Lee, at a women's conference.  As I began to say no to those things that vied for my time and attention I've noticed that the fear of what other's think always hides in the recesses of my mind.  Who would be offended if I posted this very real thing in a blog post?  What will they think when I say no to this event?  And the list goes on.  Through Jennifer, I was given the perspective of I don't need others approval.  I've been Pre-Approved by God!  He loves me just as I am.  I'm a work in progress and that's ok.  

Three women with very different messages over the past year have helped give me some traction in how to adapt the motto from a church that has come to hold a special place in my heart over the past year and a half.  This church has the motto of Doing Church Differently, while staying true to the message of Jesus Christ.  I love it!  It permeates everything they do as a church from their services to their businesses to their community involvement.  I find myself taking the spirit of that motto into my personal life.  I want to live my life differently, while sharing the message of Jesus Christ in every choice I make.  

Living life differently for me has begun to mean, purging the stuff that hangs out in my house demanding time, attention and energy to organize and clean it.  It means carving time out for Whitespace in the middle of a world that says doing more looks productive.  It means learning to live without the approval for others.  I know their are so many more things that will continue to go into living life differently, but this seems to be the foundation of a good start..... 

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.  

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.

What Jurassic World Taught Me About Relationships

Today, I find myself reflecting on the recently released Jurassic World, the 4th installment in the hugely successful Jurassic Park franchise.  As a teenager growing up in the 90's I wasn't allowed to go to movies so when the original Jurassic Park was released I had no idea why everyone was so worked up over the first 3 movies.  Then in my late 20's as part of catching up with the highlights of modern culture over 2 decades I was directed to the original Jurassic Park film.  Instantly I understood why they were so successful.  I'm not sure I'll ever forget the feeling when I saw the first of the dinosaurs pan on to the screen as the music swelled with the classic music of John Williams.  From that moment on I was hooked.  I love these movies with their si-fi, horror, action-adventure twist.  I love the characters they gave us and even more, I love that they made dinosaurs believable in all shapes and sizes.  

After discovering that there were plans to release a 4th installment 20 years after the original I was ecstatic!  In the two days leading up to our date night which was when we planned to go see it, I was like a little kid.  I could hardly contain myself!  While I wasn't going to be able to recapture a moment that wasn't possible 20 years earlier at Jurassic Park's original release I did have the opportunity to create a new memory with Jurassic World.  So into the theater I went with my husband, as excited as a 13 year old must have been to see the first dinosaurs 20 years before, but with me I took the experience of a 35 year old which meant this movie ended up leaving me contemplating the lessons that can be learned from this particular film if we allow ourselves to get over the parts we might or might not agree with scientifically.

My favorite dinosaurs since the first movie have been the Velociraptors.  I'm starting to think maybe it's because they remind me of people that we don't exactly understand.  In all three movies they are portrayed as highly intelligent, but there is a communication barrier and the fact that the world and mind of a velociraptor is so far removed from the modern reality that all of the humans have been a part of for decades.means that they are to be feared and avoided at all costs.  Lets face it the first 3 movies get a LOT of screen time out of people running from or fighting against the raptors.  

The approach of this movie where the lead character, Owen, is actually working with the raptors to turn the very traits that make others fear them into a positive thing was a plot point I found interesting.  There's a line where he is describing what exactly it is that he shares with the raptors that I found extremely thought provoking.  

Owen

It's not about control.  It's a relationship based on respect.

Not control, but respect.  I won't completely break down how this impacted me since I don't want to spoil the film if you haven't already seen it, but it has left me thinking how that statement should apply to my own life.  

I'm starting to realize that I need to live more like Owen's character.  He joins the raptors where they are, accepting everything they bring with them into the relationship which interestingly enough includes the ability to kill him at any given moment.  Rather than protect himself from them constantly he becomes one of them. even referring to himself as the Alpha, or pack leader.   There's something about that relationship that made me ask how does that need to look in my own life?  If God has called me as a Christian to "make disciples of all nations".  Then I think it has to look something like that relationship between Owen and the Velociraptors.  A relationship that others can return to even when they might have forgotten what the relationship was really suppose to be.  I'm becoming strongly convicted that it doesn't look the way I've always been told church and Christianity are suppose to look.  It looks much more messy like the moment that the raptors lose sight of Owen as one of them.  It means taking the risk of being hurt and forgotten.

It feels like so often we put our toes in the water of doing church and life differently only to pull them back when we get a cold reception, but the example we as Christians were sent was rejected by his own family, country and ultimately even some of his followers turned from him.  We, however, jump from project to project never fully committing to anything enough to completely see it through because when it starts to get hard we give up forgetting that building muscle which grows us requires extreme pain at times.  

I suppose in one way, Jurassic World in the middle of its fantasy and science-fiction as given me a very real and emotional picture of relationships.  The pain, but also the good that can come out of them.  Always in the picture though I see respect.  Respect toward those who might be different from me and my life experiences.  Respect toward those I don't agree with, but even more those who don't agree with me.  It's choosing to live respectfully my daily life with people who have the ability to hurt me at any given moment realizing that the relationship is dependent on that one component.  I have to be honest though, it gets a little hard to know what that respect looks like when really crazy things happen.  I don't have the answers to all of that.  What I do know though is that it won't happen until I can learn to run with the raptors....

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.

Living Simply

Live simply so others may simply live.

~Mother Teresa

I find myself pondering lately the complexity that we invite into our lives and accept as reasonable.  We run from one activity to another never genuinely having time to stop and live our own lives much less genuinely engage with others in their journeys.

When did we decide it was acceptable to create a normal that leaves no time to invest in caring for ourselves or to actually see and listen to those around us.  

Over the past year I've been so frustrated at the things I thought were keeping me from leading a normal life.  Health issues, panic attacks, job loss, relationship changes.  I fought them until I wasn't able to any longer and then somehow when I stopped fighting God was able to begin to use all of those things to mold me into a different person.

I feel that my life as now started to be summed up in those words of Mother Teresa,

"Live simply so others may simply live."

I find myself wondering occasionally how many opportunities I have missed to share life with others because I filled my plate full of things that weren't truly important.  How many times did I miss the opportunity to chat with the clerk at the store because I chose the self-checkout for expedience?  How many times was my head buried in my phone so that I missed the fact that the woman behind me in line needed someone to share her struggle that afternoon?  How many times have I missed a crucial part of a conversation with someone I called friend because I was texting another person I called friend rather than being present?

Recently, I had a mentor challenge me to look everyone I meet in the eyes and I would be amazed at the change it made in my life.  It's only been a couple of weeks since I started doing this, but I've been amazed at how true that has proved to be.  It has introduced an unbelievable number of conversations, some casual and some that give me a glimpse into another's life, but conversations that make me realize how lonely the lives we live are even in a society that provides more opportunities to be connected than ever before.  

I begin to realize as I reflect on the last year of my life that God has been preparing me for the moment that I could have someone look me in the eyes and challenge me to do that for others.  It makes me realize that health, panic attacks, the introduction of whitespace, decluttering both my home of material things, but also my schedule from empty busywork have all been the work of a graceful God helping me learn to clear my life to make space for all of these people he wanted to introduce.  The people that I only meet in line at the store once, but also the one's that I start to share life with as I begin shopping at our local farmers market and get to know the various vendors that show up week after week.  

So often we make agreements to fill our lives with things that are simply time fillers.  They fill our schedules, they eat at the patchwork of our lives, leaving us empty and cramming our schedules to the overflowing point trying desperately to fill our lives with a small scrap of something that brings us joy, but then we are too exhausted to actually experience the joy we were looking for.  

Living simply doesn't mean having nothing.  It doesn't look like a paupers house.  It just means letting go of the things that consume our time and energy leaving little to no time for living life with others.  What I've discovered is that I have the ability to show up for more things now than I did when I was overfilling my life.  I'm more available for those "best yes" moments because I'm learning to say no to so many more things.  Sometimes it's stuff, sometimes it's not committing to things I know drain me.  It looks different for all of us, but simple starts to create a beautiful pattern when more of us commit to living it.

What does your simple look like?