Expectations and Hope

In the last week or two I started to notice that a joy leak had sprung up in my heart; I had let a sneaky thief in through a back door and I was (still am) paying for it.  A couple of dear friends helped me pinpoint its name in just a few minutes but the eviction process is taking much longer than that.  Expectations.  In my younger years I used to say that if you don't have expectations you can't be disappointed, and in some ways that worked, but in many ways I hadn't actually let go my expectations, I just started expecting the worst.  In more recent years, in my quest to be "more spiritual" I had decided that it was holy to have expectations, and in that way I fell prey to the common confusion between expectations and expectancy (more on that in a moment).

To be real, I hadn't realized just how many expectations had risen up in my life.  They created a landscape of unholy mountains for myself and my loved ones to climb.  And each time that one of these monuments to perfection proved to be insurmountable, my heart was left open to disappointment and bitterness.  Over the course of years, the ruins of these expectations left scars that would send ripples of pain through my soul each time I would think of the situations that led to them.  And what I'm learning is that the only way to overcome these scars is to allow myself to mourn the loss of those dreams.  The dreams of how things could be, of how things "should" be.  Because the pain of a broken dream is a real pain.  But for true healing to occur I can't stay there, and neither can you.  We have to clear the landscape.  Not only of our broken dreams, but of every vision, realized and far off, of what life should be like.  For me, I had to even clear away the things I believe are going to be God things in the future, because anytime I focus my heart on the gift of God rather than God Himself I fall hard.  (There's a tiny story in the Bible about that too, if you want to read about Abraham and Ishmael).

But here's where the beauty and joy begins to make its return.  I can't leave the landscape of my heart empty.  I must fill it.  So instead of expectations I choose to fill it with expectancy, or a word I like better: hope.  I don't hope for the gift of God.  I hope because God is giver.  He is good.  He is faithful.  He will come through.  He has great plans for me.  And I know that not everyone is like me.  Some people God gives extremely specific plans and they see the map of their life and they follow it and their perseverance is rewarded.  I've practically begged God to do this for me.  I've been gently prodded by people to make this map for my life so I can be more godly.  But that isn't how God speaks to me.  He asks me to trust.  To sit quietly and let Him be God and wait on Him to open the doors.  And when I receive that, I feel such a flood of peace and joy.  And when I surrender to God's will, I see those things that I walked in, that didn't work out, truly were places God had led me, He just used them in a different way than I expected.  He used them to make me who I am, to bring me to where I am.  And in that moment, hope brings new hope. 

As always, I am a work in progress.  Every day is a challenge to choose hope over expectations.  Every day I make the wrong choice.  But I'm starting to choose right sometimes.  And God has more than enough grace for me.  What about you?  How does God speak to you?  Does He use long winding maps or does He ask you to take step waiting for the next to be revealed?

Be-You-tiful

At their core, a person, or take it one step further...at your core, you, before the fall or after Christ's redemption, are good. You are created in God's image and were never meant to "lose yourself".  How do those statements make you feel?  To me, those statements feel like heresy.

But it is no heresy, the secret is the tiny phrase "in Christ".  In Christ I am new (2 Cor 5).  In Christ the person I was created to be is the real me.  God created each of us uniquely.  He created us wonderfully (Ps 139).  We were meant to be seen because we, the real us, reflect the glory of Christ (2 Cor 3).  A phrase I've heard over and over again that sounds so godly is: "I don't want people to see me, I want people to see Christ".  But this is a lie.  If you are in Christ then when people see you, they'll see Christ.

After my last blog post, I've been on the journey of learning about how to feel emotions rightly.  Not to shut down but also not to listen to every whim of my heart.  To be healthy and grounded.  And so when my sweet coworker told me about the book study her entire church is doing, "Emotionally Healthy Spirituality", I wanted in.  The questions above were inspired by this book as I wrestled with the chapter, "Finding yourself to find God".  The idea that God doesn't desire us to continually die to ourselves, but that our old self died with Christ already and that our new self, the self created in God's image was meant to be discovered and nurtured was a hard pill for me to swallow.  As usual, I decided to take this up with Holy Spirit and Scripture and what I found surprised me.  While we will lose our lives if we seek them, Scripture did seem to back up this concept of "our new self" rather than the understanding I had of my "self" being lost in Christ and that anytime that "self" popped up it was getting in the way of His glory.  Our new self is created in the image of Christ, it is immersed in the depths of Christ and it is growing into His image.  Would God want to hide something that looks like Him?  Would He want to hide something that brings Him glory?  The answer that I'm finding is no, He wouldn't.

So that begs the question, who are you in Christ?  To answer that question, I'll ask another.  What are your favorite parts of Christ, what is it about Him that draws you?  Because those will give you a clue to who you are.  For me it's these: Always there. Faithful.  Rich in MERCY.  Abounding in steadfast love.  Beautiful, the One who paints the sky in shades of pink, purple and blue.  Delightful. Glorious.  Your personality is from Him.  It isn't something that needs to be changed or overcome.

This journey is far from over (same with the book, I've only read 3 chapters so far!)  But I'm excited to take it, and I hope that you too find the strength and support you need to take on the journey before you.  Feel free to reach out to me to talk about your own journey or with Scriptures you love about this subject!  And thanks for your patience with my thought jumble.

The Journey Back to Self

You probably think this post is going to be about how I lost myself after the birth of my first child, all the work of diaper changes and feedings and the eternal nights, because according to society my son is a terrible sleeper (p.s. according to me he's just a baby who loves his mom and is not so great at the sleeping bit).  That is not what this post is about.  In fact, it is the opposite.  Surprisingly, the Bible is right when it says when you lose your life you will find it.  This is the story of how almost 12 months ago now I began to find myself again. 

You see, about 6 years ago I began facing some formative moments in my life.  They could have made me, but instead I let them break me and I haven't felt like myself ever since.  It began when I had to leave Africa because I just couldn't stop getting sick.  Oh, nothing major or terrible.  But a staph infection here and strep throat there and before I knew it I was missing so much of the work I was there to do to be sequestered in my room trying to recover but the relief just never came.  So I, along with the leadership there, made one of the toughest decisions of my life and I "came home" a couple months early.  It didn't feel like home.  I thought that was going to be the springboard to the rest of my life.  I loved the work so much.  I loved the people so much.  I didn't want to be in America, I wanted to be in Africa.  It felt like a resounding defeat.  And I left it as that.  When I arrived home, I was welcomed with a barrage of rumors.  The most well-meaning, kindest people I know were asking if I'd "left my calling" so that I could be with my boyfriend.  Out of respect for the wonderful people involved I won't belabor this part of the story, except to say that I faced the devastating destruction of relationships over the course of the next few years.  Perhaps the reason it haunted me for so long was because I wasn't an innocent victim in all of it.  I was as much responsible for causing these beautiful people pain as they were responsible to me.  In what I was sure was supposed to be the happiest time in my life, I struggled with deep depression, sobbing on the bathroom floor, begging God to take the pain away, and swearing that inasmuch as it fell to me I would never hurt anyone like that again and I would never be hurt like that again.

And this profoundly emotional and intuitive soul did just that, I didn't hurt like that anymore.  I didn't feel at that level.  I didn't speak my mind at that level.  I restricted myself from judging any action of anyone else and slowly my ability to discern what was happening around me faded away.  I constantly carried with me the weight of shame and failure.  I hadn't been enough for Africa.  I hadn't been enough for the ones I loved.  I failed them and I failed myself.  And no matter how I fought to lose the numbness of it all, I couldn't.  Don't get me wrong.  In the last 6 years, God has been incredibly good and faithful to me.  I married an amazing man, I achieved my goal of finishing my bachelors, I've been surrounded by many friends both new and old, and I experienced the wonders of new cities, beaches, and the majesty of forests and mountains.  But in the midst of it all, I've longed to truly know who I am again.

One of the biggest signals to me that there was something out of place in my personality came a couple of years ago when I took a personality training at work.  The pre-training assessment told me that I was a pure, unwavering analyzer.  According to this, I'm closed off and prefer to focus on problems and solutions than on people.  I would prefer no one talk about themselves to me but instead get to the issue at hand and leave my personal life in the mysterious shadows.  I was shocked.  I have a good dose of German efficiency in my soul, don't get me wrong.  I also like to solve problems, but mostly because problems effect people and I want people to have the best.  I knew something was amiss.  But I still couldn't put my finger on what was going on or how to fix it.

Then came Elijah.  There was something sacred about that immediate post-partum phase.  Maybe it was the extreme exhaustion or the roller-coaster of hormones, but I felt again.  I cried every week at church for a month or two.  I sat in silent wonder at the immense responsibility that Josh and I had taken on.  Suddenly, the things that happened years ago didn't seem to matter anymore, what mattered was the new weight of raising this little baby, whose destiny I can feel on him just as strongly as I can smell those wonderful presents he leaves for me to clean up.  Y'all I'm a mess.  100%.  But I love it.  I love it because life is meant to be messy.  Our emotions were never meant to be bottled up and kept hidden from the world.  Perfection isn't something to be achieved, it's who we already are.  And so I'm taking this next step of raw vulnerability to be more honest with you than I've probably been in years, because we weren't meant to live in the shadows.  We were created, I was created, to shine bright. 

If you feel so bold, please join me in this journey to be who we truly are.  Share with me what's going on in your life.  The people who walked with me during this time in spite of my distance are precious to me and I would love to walk with you as well in the reality of who you are.