I’ve always thought that I was a relatively genuine and real
person. Lately I’ve been finding out rather quickly that that is not
necessarily true. I’m pretty good at putting up a façade. These past couple of
weeks I’ve been struggling with this and working on setting a goal for change.
My goal that I want to be working towards is one of freedom from pretense, the
ability to sit in my brokenness and not feel the need to hide it. What I’ve
found to be incredible is how much grace I can have towards everyone in the
world but myself. I am so ready to forgive everyone and love everyone, but the
minute I fail to be perfect, I beat myself up. As Christians, we are raised to
be our best and that’s what we should be. But we need to be teaching each other
and ourselves what it looks like to have grace for ourselves and for others in
the church. How can we understand God’s grace fully when our ideas of grace are
so flawed? The idea behind this post is the thought that I want to be free to
be broken. But that can’t happen without grace, for myself and from others.
First comes grace, then comes freedom, and then brokenness can be accepted and
acceptable.
You see this has been a rough year for me. It’s been a
really incredible year and I never want to minimize the many blessings that
I’ve received this year. But that’s not what this is about. This is about the
brokenness that this year has brought. I’ve made some bad decisions. My heart
has often and is still often not in the right place. I’ve deeply hurt some
people that I really love and been hurt deeply as well. I’ve lost a best friend
who I miss a lot and it was because of my selfishness that the friendship fell
apart. I left a lot of close friends and family members in Wheaton to move to
Denver. There have been some hard transitions and some growth experiences
brought on by my own decisions. My heart feels a little torn apart at the
moment. And coming to seminary I didn’t let my heart stay that way. I felt the
need to cover up the brokenness, to hide all this crap under the carpet, to
look like I had it all put together. Because if you’re going to seminary, you
do right? It’s funny. My group therapy class (which is pretty much learning
group therapy by being in group therapy) talked last week about the fact that
since we’ve all been at seminary God’s been breaking each of us down like
crazy. One girl said, “It’s like you give all your money to the seminary and
God’s like, ‘Oooh yay! Let’s do this!’” Yet you never see this because everyone
is afraid to show that they are not perfectly living for Christ wholeheartedly
because the church expects these seminarians to be the best Christians
imaginable. And while there is a legitimate conversation to be had about
leadership in the faith, that’s not what this blog is about nor what I feel
needs to be my focus at the moment.
It’s interesting- when I’m struggling tends to be when my
face breaks out pretty bad. So these past couple months I’ve woken up every
morning and put on the cover up because I would hate for people to see the zits
on my face. That’s the picture God used to wake me up my fakeness. One morning
He just said, “Look at the face you put on every morning. Forget it. Just be
real.” I’m tired of being fake. My cry is this: “Oh love that will not let me
go, I rest my weary soul in Thee!” And there I stop because for now that’s as
far as I can get in that song. My soul is weary. So now, in this weariness, I’m
trying to figure out what the heck it means to be real and live vulnerably and
honestly in the brokenness. In my CE classes we talked about it a lot. To quote
one of the wisest men I know, I am living in the tension. I have so much hope
and positivity and I trust that healing will come. But in this moment, I want
to be real while not losing that positivity that is central to me. And I have
absolutely no idea what that means or what that looks like. But I just want you
all to know that I do not have it all put together. I am at seminary and I am
hoping to spend my life doing missions. But that will never mean that I have it
all put together. Because that’s not what life is about. The point is not that
I’ll follow Him perfectly, but that I’ll follow Him no matter what. We have
these high expectations for our pastors and people in ministry. We expect them
to be better than us. But the thing is they are just as human as us. And we
should never ever expect perfection or anything like it from them. Life is
about the journey of growth for everyone. And this journey is not a straight
line, but a cycle. We think we’ve dealt with things, but somewhere down the
road they come back in a new way. Because as long as we live on earth sin and
temptation will never be gone from us. We will never fully overcome them. Even
as pastors and missionaries. But praise the Lord that our hope is not in our
ability to overcome them and to “succeed” in life, but in the fact that Jesus already
overcame and is our salvation and only hope.
So the hope I will cling to until more healing comes is
this: “Here I raise my Ebenezer, hither by Thy help I’ve come. And I hope by
Thy good pleasure safely to arrive at home.” I am clinging to the testimony
that God has brought me this far and has carried me in His love. And I know He
will bring me safely home one day. And until then He is with me always no
matter what storms I walk through. So as I said at the beginning of this
semester:
Jesus draw me ever nearer as I labor through the storm. You
have called me to this passage and I’ll follow though I’m worn. May this
journey bring a blessing, may I rise on wings of faith. And at the end of my
heart’s testing with your likeness let me wake. Jesus, guide me through the
tempest; keep my spirit staid and sure. When the midnight meets the morning, let
me love you even more. May this journey bring a blessing. May I rise on wings
of faith; and at the end of my heart's testing, with your likeness let me wake.
Let the treasures of the trial form within me as I go; and at the end of this
long passage let me leave them at your throne. May this journey bring a
blessing. May I rise on wings of faith; and at the end of my heart's testing, with
your likeness let me wake.
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