Pushing

It’s strange when you discover a part of yourself, a longing, a hurt, a love, that you never knew existed. It’s like hearing the sound of a baseball game far off in the distance and suddenly discovering that you want nothing in the world more than a good hotdog. We push things down, we push them aside, we push them far away, but soon we realize that we only pushed them deeper into ourselves. We push them because we don’t have the time or the energy. We push them because we get distracted. We push them because they hurt too much.

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I have been pushed before. You know you’ve been pushed when you wake up one day and find that you don’t exist anymore. You reach out and where there once stood flesh and bone and love, there is only an empty void. The only choice once you’ve been pushed like this is to close the gap, to keep moving. To sit at the opening of that void and mourn will only drive you crazy, because it’s the choice of the other person to turn their face toward you once again. And sometimes they never do.

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Sometimes things get pushed out of necessity or chance, like they just drift into the margins of our psyche as other things take their place. People drift apart or move away, and at some point or another, they don’t occupy our thoughts anymore. Our focuses shift and our priorities rearrange, but nothing ever really leaves.

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Our pushing, I believe, whether by chance or choice, is never permanent. Someday the things that drift, or those that we try with all our might to distance ourselves from, will reappear in our line of sight, suddenly and without notice. It happens without our permission, when we run into a face or a smell or a sound that we thought we had forgotten. It’s seeing a picture of an old love whom you thought you had left behind, and finding yourself wishing that you were in the picture too. It’s hearing distance in someone’s voice and feeling a rush of pain at every rejection you thought you had overcome. This is our minds screaming at us, fighting against the movement that takes us further from ourselves, that distances us from feelings we were supposed to look full in the face. We cannot run from our own minds, and soon enough they will force us to be honest with ourselves.

Get ready.

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This happened to me last week when I helped my parents move the rest of our belongings out of our house in Elko, NV. My family moved to Arizona a few months ago, and this was the final step in making the transition complete. I thought before coming that I was ready to leave Elko. I used an interesting mixture of denial and bitterness to distance myself from the goodbye that was imminent, and it would have worked had I not come to help with the move. Walking through my home with no furniture inside of it, I started seeing everything with new eyes. Home, I thought. This is my home. It started to sink in, started to become real. Denial was no longer useful, as I could not ignore the permanence of the move any longer. And bitterness was slowly slipping away as I came across fragments of old memories. One afternoon, cleaning out my parents’ closet, I found a lamp that a very old friend gave to me on my 16th birthday. Nostalgia and longing washed over me at the thought of Julian, this friend who had left Elko a few years prior. I hadn’t talked to him in so long, hadn’t thought of him in ages. But my thoughts became consumed with him for the rest of the day, wishing I had his number so I could tell him that I found this lamp. But it was too late, and I would never see him again.

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That night, God rearranged the universe in order to give me a gift. Circumstances that should not have been, were, and I found myself all of the sudden face to face with a flood of memories that had only been slowing creeping back into my line of sight as Julian walked around the corner into my yard and caught me as I leapt into his arms. And I suddenly discovered that I need him. I suddenly discovered how much I have always missed him. My heart remembered a time when he was utterly important to me, and suddenly I was 16 again and Julian was one of my dearest friends.

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My house in Elko.

It wasn’t a new feeling, or even a renewed one. It was more like a reminder. I found my love for Elko all wrapped up in my love for Julian, just waiting for me to remember it and accept it, despite the most certainly painful goodbye it would cause. And it was a painful goodbye. Goodbye to Julian after so many years and so little time to make up for it. Goodbye to my home. Goodbye to my memories.

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But it was a goodbye that needed to happen. If Julian’s presence hadn’t pulled my love for Elko out from the corners that I had pushed it into, there would have been no goodbye, and such a huge step in my life would have been left incomplete. As humans, we are meant to experience things, good and bad. We are supposed to make transitions, leave things behind, love so deeply it hurts, and hurt deeply for what we love. To avoid any necessary action of human emotion or growth denies what our hearts and minds are at their very core, what they were made to do. Our challenge is to avoid taking the easy way out, when we have a choice. Sometimes things get pushed out of chance or necessity; they need to be pushed. But we must not push those things that our hearts and minds yearn for us to pay attention to.

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What we must understand is that pain, while unattractive, is not necessarily a bad thing. Our culture places a stigma on pain that is unhealthy, most especially on men. Strength, interpreted as the ability to hide emotion, is preferred-- but it is dangerous and destructive to our hearts. Our lives are essentially a journey in which God is drawing us to Himself, growing and changing us until we reach Him, our ultimate goal. We can resist this drawing. We can resist it by knowingly resisting Him, or by refusing to live the life we have been given by Him. We do it all the time when we lie to ourselves and to others about we we want and what we need. 

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I don’t need to say goodbye. I don’t love you anymore. You’re not important to me. I’m over it. It’s not a big deal. It was a long time ago. It doesn’t affect me.

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Our challenge is to be honest with ourselves in saying Yes, I am hurt. It does affect me. I miss you. It certainly hurts more to acknowledge these parts of us, but if we don’t, there is something lingering inside of us that is incomplete, and it will surely rear it’s head someday. It’s in the man who hated his father so much that he turned into him, or in the woman who ran all her life from intimacy and one day woke up to realize she had no one. Saying yes to whatever life brings our way is a step. Saying yes to our past, no matter how painful or confusing, is a step. And then the Lord will help us in dealing with it, face to face. This is how healing comes.

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There is something beautiful about recognizing our humanity, even in small ways. There are profound moments when we discover a part of ourselves we had forgotten or pushed away, and we remember that we are made of flesh and bone. We are mortal. And it is ok. May we run this race to the finish, you and I, and reach the end complete.

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I Am Not A Robot- Marina and the Diamonds

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Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. James 1:1-4

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It is better to go to a house of mourning 

   than to go to a house of feasting, 

for death is the destiny of everyone; 

   the living should take this to heart. 

   Frustration is better than laughter, 

   because a sad face is good for the heart. 

   The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, 

   but the heart of fools is in the house of pleasure. 

   It is better to heed the rebuke of a wise person 

   than to listen to the song of fools. 

   Like the crackling of thorns under the pot, 

   so is the laughter of fools. 

   This too is meaningless.

Ecclesiastes 7:2-6

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There is a time for everything, 

   and a season for every activity under the heavens:

   a time to be born and a time to die,
   a time to plant and a time to uproot,
   a time to kill and a time to heal,
   a time to tear down and a time to build,
   a time to weep and a time to laugh,
   a time to mourn and a time to dance,
   a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
   a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
   a time to search and a time to give up,
   a time to keep and a time to throw away,
   a time to tear and a time to mend,
   a time to be silent and a time to speak,
   a time to love and a time to hate,
   a time for war and a time for peace.

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

20 Highlights from my 20th Year

1. The birth of my precious niece, Jade Lynn Blaesing, on January 5th, 2010.
2. Switching from a global studies major to sociology.
3. Switching from a global studies minor to a business minor.
4. Living with three incredible roommates, again, Spring semester!
5. Weekly meetings with Team Himalayas: love, friendship, and revelations from the Lord!
6. Triple Holly Thursdays! and Smoak’s Hebrew class.
7. Being the omelet girl in the dining hall three days a week: getting up at the crack of dawn to work with my favorite chefs, Maged and Hani.
8. Human diversity with Carrie Peirce.
9. Life and teachings with Baloian.
10. Getting on a plane that took me to the other side of the world-- 1st out of country experience!
11. A 19 hour layover in Singapore airport. :) 
12. 2.5 weeks in India: precious children, adopted grandmas, answered prayers, and miracle after miracle among and through my beautiful team! Praise the Lord.
13. 8 days praying over God’s beautiful creation in a closed country.
14. Revelations in Starbucks in Singapore with 3 beautiful girls :)
15. Spending ten days in Hawaii with my roomie Kim and her awesome family!
16. A summer trip to Colorado to see good friends.
17. Spending a semester in LA with a most valuable and wonderful friend: Kimberley Winther. Tears, joy, anger, and adventures in the City of Angels together for 3.5 months!
18. The second birthday of the most handsome little man in the world, my nephew Haiden Eric Blaesing.
19. Getting to know my host sister, Stephy Gonzales, the craziest and funniest little beauty ever!
20. Spending Christmas with my family in our new home in Kingman, Arizona and finishing off the year with them.

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This year, EVERYTHING changed.

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My hopes for next year:

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That the Lord would solidify in my heart all that He has taught me.

That I would embrace the woman He has made me to be.

That I would run with more conviction toward the dreams He’s given me.

That the old and new friendships in my life would blossom.

That my time would be well spent, and that I’d always be willing to put aside obligation for the sake of love.

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May the change be EVIDENT in my life!

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Praise the Lord.

Praise the Lord!!

Matthew

I write this to those compassionate hearts who want to help those in need instead of arguing about whether they deserve it or not. If the notion of deservedness is your concern, I ask that you don’t read on, because I am one of those who does not deserve your patronage.

The first time I saw Matthew I liked him immediately. He was young, 30 perhaps, maybe younger. Dressed in baggy blue jeans, a heavy coat, and a canvas backpack, he had a beanie on to cover his mangy long hair. He reminded me of someone I went to high school with, one of the boys I hung around my sophomore and junior years. I could imagine myself hanging out with him: playing hack or going to lunch, everyone piling into the back of my car like we used to every day. I immediately saw his face in my rear view mirror, laughing just like he had been there. As soon as I saw Matthew, he was my friend.

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For a long time I watched Matthew with a strange sense of affection, but I never talked to him. He walked down the aisle of the Blue Line train every night with a Burger King cup and a sign taped to it, asking for change. Unlike the other Metro salesman with clever catch-phrases to sell their candy and pens (50 cents a piece or a dollar for three, candy even sweeter than me! Don’t be shy ladies and gentlemen!), or the persistent men on the street that dish out compliments to get change (That’s quite a sexy haircut, ma’am. Spare a dollar?), Matthew never said anything. He stared straight ahead at the other end of the railcar and walked slowly with his hand barely extended to receive whatever spare dollars or cents might make it into the cup by chance. No gimmicks, no announcements, not even any eye contact. Just a slow shuffle and a blank stare to the other side. He looked just like a person who had lost all hope.

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I saw my friend when I looked at Matthew, like I was gazing into some horrible prediction of the future. It was like seeing my laughing, joyous teenage companion at our high school reunion, and he didn’t have a home or cent to his name, and all of the light had gone out of his face. All I wanted to ask was, “What happened?” And how could I have let this happen to you?

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I finally got to ask him one night when my roommate Kim and I were waiting for the train and Matthew shuffled onto the platform to wait as well. All Kim and I had between us was a five dollar bill and a Ziploc bag half full of almonds and cranberries. So I approached Matthew with my meager offering in hopes of striking up a conversation with him.

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It was the first of several conversations in which Matthew looked to the side as he talked, never meeting my face for more than a second. Something always kept him from looking at my face. But he did talk. He talked about how he got there, and why. He assured me he was going to get out, assured me that he wasn’t “like this” before. But when he came from Seattle to be with his girlfriend who was with child, she disappeared. And when he was robbed and left with no money or I.D., that was it. Now here he was, without a home or a friend or an identity, as far as the state was concerned. A full year had passed and Matthew was still on the street.

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To make matters worse, he had health problems. The next few times I saw Matthew, I noticed that he was in pain. He grimaced each time the train turned and he bumped up against the rails. Nerve problems, he said simply. Lots of pain. I asked him once if he knew anyone in L.A. that he could stay with. He said yes, he is a musician and has some friends here who are musicians also. But he is afraid they would look down on him for being homeless if he went to them for help. Maybe someday, when he got onto his feet again, he would give them a call. He would start playing again. He would play for money instead of beg for it. He would live life without a constant, unavoidable stigma that made him an exception to almost every opportunity. Maybe someday he could live life for real again. Someday, outside of this temporary hell where has no name and no purpose outside of the struggle to survive.

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When it came down to it, I was just another sympathetic passer-by in Matthew’s life, one of the many who will come and go, dropping dollars and cents into his story. No matter how I wanted to help, my presence in his life was temporary and fleeting, only of enough significance to provide a few meals and a few conversations. I’m sure he forgot me the moment I stepped off the train, for $5 and open ears were not enough to give Matthew his life back again. And who knows if I would have, given the chance?  I hope that in the grand scheme of things, from the kind of perspective God has, my role in Matthew’s life did have some significance. I think that it did. But compared to what he needed, I was helpless indeed. When it came down to it, I could not save my friend. I could not give him a home or a job or a committed friendship that would see him through to stability. But someday I will be able to.

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Someday I will be at a place in my life where I am stable, God-willing. I might have a home of my own, or an apartment with an extra bed. And I might have money for extra food and some time away from work. And I hope and pray, I deeply wish, that when that day comes I will see Matthew again, in the face of someone else who needs a little help. I hope that when God asks me if I am ready to be hospitable I answer, “Yes.” I hope that when I am faced with the long, hard task of radical love of the stranger and Biblical hospitality, I rise to the challenge. I hope that I remember my Father’s open arms when I came running home, ready to accept and celebrate a daughter who had squandered her inheritance. I hope this for the whole Church: that we would invest ourselves in others, that we would be generous beyond the reaches of our immediate family and hold nothing back. Because there are so many people who need more than our spare change. When their mothers and fathers fail to, or are not able to, open their arms and their whole lives to them, I believe that it is our job to step into the gap and provide that love, as far as we are able.

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I understand, and I honor, the wish of so many to help those without a home by offering food or money. These are necessary acts of love and they make a difference, they fill the bellies of the hungry in our nation. They bring hope. But $5 a day, spread across the many homeless men and women one may encounter in a day, is a band-aid. I know there are too many hurting people. I know it is impossible to help them all as an individual. But I believe that all of us will have an opportunity in our lives to give more. If Matthew had a room to stay in for free, with a shower and new clothes and three meals a day, an opportunity to look for a job... if only the circumstances of his life would align with another’s in just the right way, I can imagine him being free. This is what I call a miracle. All of us have chances to participate in miracles. Sometimes it’s filling a hungry belly. Someday it might be saving someone’s life by letting God use our resources (His resources) for the good of another. I hope that when my time comes, I am less selfish than I am now.

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At the end of the semester I made Matthew a Christmas card. I saw him on the Blue Line the last time I ever rode it and I gave it to him. He looked at the card through his broken glasses, only one lens, and then he smiled at me, and said “Thank you.” I told him to have a good night and to stay warm, and then I walked home. It was the last time he saw me, but I know it will not be the last time I see him.

For those who want to be new...

I’ve felt very far from God lately. Very far from everything. I’m in a strange place where nothing makes sense, like another world completely separate from my own. Nothing is finished. Nothing is familiar. Nothing is old.
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I realized that I’ve often put God on hold these days, just like everything else, because I’m waiting for things to make sense again, putting everything off until life starts  and I can focus. Where am I? I don’t know this place, this house, these people. Everything is new.
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I find myself coming to the end of what I knew was My year. A year filled with change and growth and crazy adventures with the Lord. It’s been marked by intense joy and heartbreak, and it followed a year filled with the same. I had expected something to be complete by the end of this year. But now here I am, Christmas day, and I don’t feel like I’m at the end of anything. I feel, rather, like I’m in-between things, with nothing but time to discover this new life that has somehow unfolded around me.
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A little over two years ago I had my life figured out, a plan and a dream and someone to share it with. I had two lives: one at APU, new and exciting and terrifying, and my comfortable life in Elko to fall back on: friends, family, boyfriend, job. Home. And then everything started changing.
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Exactly two years ago I was in Elko, helping my mom with Christmas dinner, and I stopped and turned to her with tears in my eyes: “It’s Christmas, mom. It’s Christmas and he’s still not here.” Suddenly home was filled with pain, a place marked with memories like fingerprints on a dirty glass, no space left without a painful memory. My mind reflected that glass, the fingerprints covering my thoughts. Everything was old.
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Over the next year I felt God cutting my ties to Elko, wiping clean those fingerprints that covered my life, and I thought it was so I could branch out more, maybe stay in California after I graduated. And then I met the 9 most wonderful people I could imagine and went to India for a month, and I felt God taking the broken pieces of my life and sewing them together. God healed me, and I felt so new, like a child. And as I was gone, my dad transferred to a new job in Arizona to start a brand new life for our family.
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These past few months I felt rocked, broken, challenged. Those things God spoke to me through my team at APU and abroad were reinforced, dramatically, and I felt myself more humbled than ever. I felt heartbreak, that old familiar feeling, but it was not for myself this time. It was the most overwhelming few months of my life. And then I packed up all my things, left LA, moved most of my stuff into a new apartment at APU, and brought the rest to a brand new town and a strange home where my parents now live.
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In all this moving and changing, I hadn’t realized just how much was different until I came here to Kingman. I think it’s just now settling in... I’m not going back to Elko. I’m not going back home. I’m thankful that God cut so many ties there now, thankful that this isn’t as painful as it could be. But it’s my mind that has to cut it’s ties now.
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For those of you who know me, especially my friends from college, it’s clear how dearly I hold home in my heart while I’m away. I define myself partly by where I come from; Nevada is in my blood, it’s my culture, my heritage. The desert raised me, taught me how to be human and how to be quiet. Elko is where I grew up, became a woman, met Jesus.
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But all of the most dramatic transformation in my life has come from out of my element. My first semester of college with no friends in a new place... A semester in the mountains of Yosemite... A journey to the other side of the world with new friends... Los Angeles, almost more foreign to me than India was. These are the places God broke my heart to make room for more of Him. These are the places I discovered what I was made to be.
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And so now I am in Kingman and I am in a period of rest... nothing mind-blowing is happening at the moment, and so I step back and look around me to realize that this place is not familiar, and it is not temporary either. There is no lifeline home anymore. Everything is new.
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And I’m scared. Sometimes, in moments of realization like this one, I’m afraid of where this journey is going to take me, and if I’ll be prepared when I get there, with nothing old and familiar to fall back on. I’m afraid that I’ll end up somewhere and be only a mix of different parts incapable of doing anything for God’s Kingdom. My crutches are all of the sudden gone, my lifelines broken, my regrets unimportant, my mistakes behind me, and my past... past.
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And so there’s only one constant to fall on, the One who’s brought me through this journey and to this crucial point in it. I find myself needing to be reassured, to hear that every ounce of this instability is in His hands, every possibility under His control. I’m going over the past year in my mind to remind myself of what He has done, and that it was real, and it was beautiful. And I’m starting to see this time in life with new eyes... everything is new.
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Instead of emptiness where there used to be something, there is something new. I haven’t simply lost my crutches; I’ve been given the strength to walk. I’ve lost old friends, yes... but new ones take their place. And I know that I am a different person in so many ways. But my mind hasn’t fully settled into the idea yet. I am in-between two people right now... I am shedding the old, saying goodbye, coming to terms... so that I can fully walk into the new, embrace it, believe it.
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It is faith that tells me God will finish what He has started in me. And then He’ll start something new, because He is always moving, always creating. I feel distant right now, but I know that He is not distant. I feel lost, but I really am not. I’m just taking in the scene before me, floating above it until it becomes more real, and praying for encouragement from those who have seen me bloom this year.

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Life, the big journey, is full of little journeys. Periods of growth and change, mountains and valleys, in-between periods and culmination points. It’s ok to be in those places. It’s ok to be in a different place in life than what you are used to, to shed the old and embrace the new, to have your heart broken or ripped out, and to accept the healing that comes only from our precious Lord. This is what life is about, all of it. All of the joy, all of the pain, all of the hard decisions and miraculous moments; life wouldn’t be the same without every little bit of it, big and small, easy and difficult. And it’s not our choice to opt of out it. Sure, we didn’t exactly sign on. But here we are, and it’s not going to change for us. All we can do is be thankful to have a God who knows what He is doing and who is fully good at the very center of His being. He won’t give us stones. He’ll never give us stones.

Healing as Reversal

In thinking of how God is continuing to teach me who I am this semester (and making me more ok with that every day!) I thought of something I posted on Facebook a few months ago that I thought was appropriate to re-post here. It was after I got a letter to myself from my missions retreat last Spring. Here's a quote from the letter:


"Every one of [your team members], with their individual laughs and smiles and hugs are gifts to you... I think by now you'll have seen the impact God chose them to have on your life. Already, they have shown me (or are beginning to show me) the okay-ness and rightness of my own laughter. They are showing me the okay-ness in my own voice, my own prayer, my own body, and hands, and my own way of having fun. I haven't felt like a child in a long time, but I feel like one now... You know, when you were told you can't play, it was a lie. When you were told you can't act, it was a lie. When you were told you can't dance, it was a lie. [God] loves to see you laugh. He loves your voice. He loves your quietness. He just loves." 

Not only did I read this right after a conversation with my mom about being able to be a child while I'm at home (woah!) but it immediately made me think of a prayer that I wrote in Darjeeling, a prayer I believe was not possible until this trip with those 9 wonderful friends: 

Precious Lord, 
You are a reminder of my non-invisibility. 
You show me how right and ok it is to be loved. 
You are the One whose mark of love I wish to be upon me 
And whose love I trust will never leave. 
You teach me the right kind of laughter, 
the kind that doesn't necessarily turn into tears. 
You are the hand that holds me above my enemies 
And you lock my gaze so that I do not see their faces any longer. 
You are my fortress! 
And the company that I keep there. 
You are full of good conversations and hilarious jokes. 
You are the light that beckons me thru the darkness. 
I don't see the darkness any longer, because 
You are my healer. 
No other healer would I rather have than You, 
For You are my God. 
You are the overarching and all-encompassing sky that I look into, and cannot see the end of. 
You have made me with skillful hands 
And You have made a universe to hold us. 
You are holding us. 
You are reaching to us. 
And you are among us, 
The love that knits us together. 
Amen. 
(6-10-10) 

Maybe when God heals us, it is a process of making us children again. Maybe when He saves us, it is the process of remembering our first love, the love that all of us had as little children, when our eyes weren't clouded with pain and disappointment and lies. God is making me remember who I knew Him to be as a child, because He is making me into a child again. Praise God for friends that we can be children with. I am so amazed at His healing hand.


I have a feeling that from here on out I'll be free to get excited about my life, and what I want to do with it. Like I could run up to God and get really excited about my new plans, like I did to my parents when I was little and decided I wanted to write a book, or go to India and feed hungry children, or be a famous singer. I really really hope that's true. I know I still have a long way to go, but I am so encouraged to see how FAR He has brought me in His freedom and love!! Praise the Lord. :)

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.