Our “everyone is sick” Easter Sunday picture. :)
enough already.
of the fluff and the intangible.
I crave the real and the true in day-to-day interactions. Life is too short for the pretend versions, the make believe and the image projections. I’m drawn to people who are vulnerable in a healthy way, able to share the heart without expectation but offer the encouragement from a place of broken humility.
I’ve been listening a lot to my favorite artist and he spoke poetically of this, of what I’ve been saying here on my blog for the last year, of being real in brokeness as you are walking through it, not after you’ve worked through it. Sharing the pain of where you are in the process of walking through the pain in your life allows people to get that life is like that, we’ll never be free of our problems and suffering, but how we respond it it can be radically changed.
I’m walking through a lot right now.
I woke up the other night, heart racing, feelings of insecurity bubbling to the surface, pain spilling out all over me of a perceived slight by friends not inviting me to attend an event. Writing this now is skin-crawling humbling, the reality that the insecure girl is still alive inside of me no matter how hard I try to leave her behind is a hard truth to accept.
I want to be strong, confident and secure- and I am becoming that.
a set back doesn’t define me, it actually shows me how far I’ve come.
This was the thing that finally broke me after a few weeks of being worn down. My grandfather died, a close team member at work resigned, I had an early-on miscarriage and almost had to be hospitalized with a bad case of bronchitis. But none of that broke me- no- a simple slight by friends sent me into the spiral.
I marvel at myself.
I wept at my weakness into my pillow, hating my feelings and praying that God would restore what was broken in me that made this way.
I pressed in.
Instead of flopping over in bed, as I often do, turning my physical back to to my feelings I moved towards the pain even as I cringed inside.
“why do I feel this way about a something so meaningless when so much REAL stuff is going on?”
I thought of all the times in middle, junior and high school when I knew my friends were going out and didn’t think (or want) to invite me to go with them. I pretended it didn’t hurt as much as it did. I thought of a few times in my twenties when the same situation repeated itself. I realized that I had worked so hard to make myself physically and mentally attractive to others so that they would like me and not reject me. I worked to say the right things, make them laugh, and in general always be pleasant and and never offend. You see…I had experienced that truth seemed to alienate people- they didn’t really want to know what I thought or felt unless it was a reflection of their own beliefs. I’ve experienced rejection … so much.
wait… this is sounding familiar…
18“If the world hates you, you know that it has hated Me before it hated you.19“If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you.… John 15:18-19
What if my whole existence since middle school had been built accidentally in conflict to my entire belief system?
That is why this moment, as small as it was, was crippling me with grief. It wasn’t an event I had wanted to go, likely I would have said no if invited but I had wanted the option to say no as validation that who I was as a person was valuable.
Jesus whispers, “I am enough. I have set you aside from birth for me, my love. I am jealous of anyone and anything that takes your beautiful eyes off of me.”
and it’s the truth.
Pressing through the pain, like a infection that needs lancing, is where the peace lies. The truth will set you free. When I realized what I had been doing- I felt peace flood over me, intoxicatingly so. These are the moments that count, where the truth that there is a God and that he loves us and craves a real relationship with us is a crystal clear.
Be blessed.