Little Girl Shoes

Since I was a little girl, I’ve been telling my dad that when I grow up, I’m going to save the world. I would look at him incredulously when he would reply that Sure, I could change my little part of it. “No, dad, I’m going to save the whole world.” And I was serious about that. As a child it didn’t seem very hard. The world’s “problems” seemed simple and somewhat romanticized, not large, messy, and complicated as I now know them to be.

But even as I grew up, I held onto a piece of my optimism no matter what the world told me. Even as I learned about the complex nature of suffering, poverty, and oppression, somewhere inside I still heard the ten-year-old inside of me echoing, “I’m going to save the world, dad. The whole world.” Problem was, I was taking into my small hands a world that doesn’t belong to me, and it was a matter of time before I realized how small I truly am.

I wouldn’t say that I have learned exponentially more about oppression this semester, factually, than I knew previously. I have definitely learned more than I knew, but not enough to knock me into the despair that I’ve experienced at times. I think it was seeing it up close and not being able to escape that really did it for me. All of the sudden the little girl inside of me looked down for a moment and saw the size of her shoes, and they were not God-sized. They were the shoes of a little child, and they were trembling under the weight of what I thought I could carry.

It has been hard for me to accept my humanity. For some reason, one of the biggest lies I believe is that I am utterly responsible. Responsible for my family, my friends, society... and I feel like a failure if I can’t do something to help. These past few months I have seen and felt so much pain and oppression that I have had to admit, finally, painfully: I can’t fix it.

Now before I make myself out to sound like some sort of suffering servant, much of the responsibility I feel comes from selfishness as well as from compassion. In coming to LA, I thought that I would learn something directly applicable to what I would do with the rest of my life. That’s because I thought the rest of my life would consist of what I thought to be a glamourous career, organizing some movement or helping thousands of people. Part of it was so I could go back home and say “Look! Look at what I’m doing with my life!” I wanted to feel validated, worth something.

But the bottom line is, I thought for sure that I was strong enough to do this. No matter how much I learned about my own gifts and capacities, I resisted them with all my might because they didn’t seem important enough to me. I just couldn’t justify doing something with my life that I might doubt at certain times was helping anyone. So I came into this semester overly-confident in my ability to handle whatever it was that came my way. 

But rather than feeling validated in my desire to “save the world,” whether for compassion’s sake or for vanity’s sake, I instead found myself secretly dreading the rest of my life and what I thought that I would have to do. I could hear God telling me to let it go, but I held on with all my might to my sense of responsibility, clinging to my anxiety like a security blanket that was suffocating me. I wanted to play God, because I didn’t have enough faith to believe that God’s work would continue, with or without me.

I then came to a point similar to Rob Bell’s story in The Gods Aren’t Angry, when a friend sat with him and repeated the words, “You don’t have to live like this,” over and over, until he finally believed it. God told me a long time ago who I was. He’s been telling me over and over, and I believed Him, but I didn’t truly hear the words until this semester: “You don’t have to live like this.” And then it all came together.

I am not the savior. I am not organizer, founder, visionary, or activist. I don’t know who told me that in order for my education to mean something, I have to rock the foundations of society, but I bought it. And I put enormous pressure on myself that was never mine to own in the first place.

I got burnt out so quickly because I was trying to operate in gifts that the Lord has not given me, and I wasn’t trusting Him to take care of His people. Part of the beauty of the body of Christ is that we don’t all serve the same function; we’d be quite an odd creature if that were true. Thank God for the community organizers, activists, non-profit managers, and politicians. I think I can finally be ok now in saying that I am not one of them.

I have extraordinary gifts. I know this because I was created by an extraordinary God who loves me, and He has taught me who I am. I know He’ll use me somewhere, and I pray He gives me the faith to know that He is constantly working, and He doesn’t really need me to help Him run things.  He is awesome enough to want me to work alongside Him though. 

I can’t save the whole world. I say this now, not with the heartbreak and defeat I felt at first, but with relief. Lord knows that I can only do my part in saving my little piece of it, always relying on Him to work through me. I’ve said it before: I am so thankful to serve a God that doesn’t expect me to be the savior.

So now I continue on in this semester and I hope and pray that I can see it with new eyes. All that I’m learning I wouldn’t trade for the world, and it is sometimes heartbreaking, but now I see it as a gift rather than a burden. My optimism has unfortunately run out, but hope now takes its place as I walk through life, proudly sporting the shoes of a child-- the child of a God that truly can change the world.