obstacles and opportunities.

My mom was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer two years ago. There have been many uncertainties during this time, but only one thing has stayed consistent--my mom is alive. Despite everything, despite the statistics, the questioning, the status of her health--she is still with us. Still breathing, still encouraging. Still fighting for her life.

None of us have the answers. We don't know what's ahead of us, what there is to come. But my mom has hope. She has faith. She has not given up, not thrown her hands in the air in despair. She has accepted the challenge in front of her and resolved herself to surviving, and because of this, she is alive.

I've been thinking a lot about obstacles and opportunities, what it means to step up to the plate and take responsibility for what's been placed before us. Our time on earth can be so daunting, and at times it takes everything we have to uncover our eyes and ears to see and feel all the pieces of life--full of chaos and frenzied brilliance. I often find myself running away from the weight of all that is mine to carry, mine to fulfill. For some reason I thought that most people ran towards the option  of more--more power, more control, more recognition. But as I look back on my nearly 28 years, I have found that at every chance I had, I hid.

We tend to look at people in leadership positions and think that they always wanted to be there. That they fought for that promotion, carefully planned out their rise to success. Recently, one of my bosses reminded me that in history, God rarely chose men and women who wanted to be leaders--more often than not, those chosen resisted a great deal. They were too weak or too old or too disabled or too poor, they pleaded with God to pick anyone else. Now, I always knew that God chose the humble, the least likely to succeed. He chose those from whom his power could be displayed, and the idea was that their shortcomings demonstrated his grace and mercy, his ability to change the game from hopeless to eternally hopeful. And this was true--Moses had a stutter, Abraham and Sarah were old, many of his disciples were fishermen. Jesus loved the lowly.

But.

The lowly were not always excited to be chosen. They didn't want the perks that came with leadership, because the risk was too great, because they were afraid they would fail. Because it hurt, to carry people along with them, it hurt caring for the cause of the oppressed, for those stuck in slavery. It was uncomfortable and inconvenient and uncertain and couldn't God just find someone else?

He could.

But he chose them.

So.

I'm trying to stop fighting against who God is calling me to be. And while I may not know how or when or where I do know who. And the responsibility is heavy. But as much as I may feel it, I'm not carrying it alone.

I'm not walking alone.

Though there may be times I look ahead and behind and see nothing but desert and emptiness--

I have not been abandoned.

And  I take great comfort in this. I take comfort that though there will be times I am physically by myself, that impossible decisions have to be made, decisions that involve lives that hang in the balance--I am still not alone.

God is with me.

In one of his sermons, Tim Keller talks about how the hero of a story never wants to own up to the responsibility of his destiny--the kingship, the rescuer, whatever. As a whole, we are afraid.

And he goes on to say, Jesus himself was afraid. He begged God to let him skip out on the cross. He sweat blood, real actual, stress induced blood. The responsibility of what was ahead of him caused him to be under such extreme duress that his physical body reacted.

But he went.

And we too, must go.

We must remember that though the weight is heavy and the risk is high, our call remains the same. 

Stand up a little straighter.

Look up a little farther.

And see the promise of heaven shining on the other side.

The promise of hope.

You may have to cross the desert.

But you will never walk alone.

Because:

"The one who has called you is faithful,
and he himself will do it."

1 Thessalonians 5:24

the companion of pain.

Pain has a way of repeating itself, though the circumstances often change. I had a good friend once tell me that I gravitate towards depression, that I enjoy it in some way. At the time I was offended, confused even. Why would someone choose to be depressed? Why would I want to feel this way? 

As I got older, I came to understand what he meant. The depression wasn't willfully brought on, but I certainly felt a natural pull towards it, a need for it its familiar borders. My life has been sorrow after sorrow, grief upon grief. It's been the constant of my soul, this settling into pain. Like an old companion that comes up to greet me, all the politeness faded away from years of friendship. And I welcome it in, with little fanfare and no surprise, because I have always known suffering as intimately as I know myself. 

I think this openness to pain has been helpful in my field. Hurting people are everywhere, and mostly they want the affliction to stop. I find it interesting that so often, our suffering is a reflection of the state of our being, of the core of who we are. This is not to say that we are our suffering, just that it serves as a mirror for what lies beneath the surface. And because of this, we often suffer the same thing twice, though it may look different from the outside.

Suffering, then, is rather circular. 

I am learning that so much of the pain I have experienced in life goes back to the same source--back to my fear of abandonment, back to my feelings of shame and vulnerability. The people may change, the setting may evolve, but the suffering stays the same.

None of us are free from ourselves, as much as we may try to deny it. We are our own prisons, and we keep the lock and key just out of reach because avoidance is so much easier. Because trying to fix it from the outside is so much easier, because we want to believe that it is not us who are broken.

But I am broken.

And this attraction towards pain, this tug towards the well-traveled path of desolation? Well.

Maybe it's just a call for healing. 

So often, I look outside of myself to fix what is wrong.

I ask myself questions that reflect my powerlessness, because the truth is I have given my power away. I have let myself fall into patterns of depression and worry and fear because these things are familiar to me. They make sense, they let me know how to survive. 

They tell me what I want to hear--about myself, about what to expect from others. 

What a defeating game we play, this circular suffering. It can feel like we are moving backwards, or like we haven't moved at all. It spins us around and confuses us, it leaves us in the dark.

And sometimes, we convince ourselves that we have just enough light to see. 

But.

Suffering can only steal what we let it. 

And the pain of life is the promise of hope waiting to happen.

I want to live out of the promise. 

These wounds, these scars that keep opening back up over and over again are just a sign that I haven't cleaned the wound out properly. They are telling me that there's something I'm missing, that there's a place I'm avoiding and covering up. And I don't want to circle around to this place again anymore--I don't want to live haunted by the sorrow of a shadowed life.

Suffering, then, is just the pathway to peace. 

When I turn around to look into the face of that which I have been so careful evading, I am forced to come to an understanding of myself--I am made to tenderly examine my hurting places, I am allowed to be broken and that brokenness is allowed to heal.  

I spend so much time convincing myself that depression is a part of life, but comfort is not. 

That I don't deserve the healing, but that I am deserving of the pain.

Life hurts.

But I do not need to hurt myself to go on living. 

My suffering does not have to be circular. It can be linear, growing and changing as I learn to accept and care for myself. As I learn to speak softly to my broken pieces, as I learn to let others love me well.

Do you believe it? 

Can you perceive it? 

That you are worthy of healing, of compassion and grace? 

You have permission to be broken.

And you have permission to heal. 

So let yourself go.

The freedom that was bought for you was made for such a time as this. 

Soak it in. 

Let it fill you up.

Pain will always be apart of life. 

But so will grace.

So will love.

And I want my sorrow to reflect the great hope that swells within me--

rippling ou, bringing the dead to life once again. 

Resolutions and rubber bands.

"The dark does not destroy the light; it defines it. It's our fear of the dark that casts our joy into the shadows" Brene Brown

2016 stole more from me that I intended it to--in little ways at first, and then all at once. It was a year of loss, a year of struggle, and a year of troubled chaos. I was in crisis for most of it, sometimes as a result of circumstances, and sometimes, as a result of me.

Every year has the potential to bring us down. I can think of a handful of ways I almost let life destroy me this year. I stumbled through it, stricken and blinded by the confusion, desperately seeking a way out. At times, I didn't think I would make it. I learned that when I am hit hard, I don't hit back. I crumble. I start to disappear, and I get sucked under. 

Have you ever felt your brain slipping away from you? It's an unsettling experience, drifting farther and farther from your own soul. You try to grasp hold of anything, everything. But your hands just miss the strands of wholeness that would ground you to yourself, and you watch in horror as it all floats away. 

You turn up empty handed, when you were trying to hold on to so much. 

What I am finding is that life, yours and everyone else's, is like a rubber band. You are stretched and stretched and stretched, and as you expand you're just trying to hold everything in. But the thing about elastic is that once it's stretched, it never goes back to it's original shape, and you are bound to lose some things in the process.

You think you are going to snap, being stretched like that. And you think all the important things are going to fall out, fall away forever and ever, and never come back. So you keep shoving more things in, trying to fill the space but also trying to hold yourself together. 

And this is life:

Stretching and filling.

Fearing and falling. 

The thing about rubber bands is that if you stretch them too far, they pop.

And if you don't fill them enough, everything falls out.

So you have to find a balance, and you have to be wise about it. 

This year, I let way too many things in that filled space in an unhealthy manner.

Stress. Worry. Chaos.

Fear.

And I let too many things drop out that would have kept me together.

Love. Hope. Joy.

Grace. 

My rubber band teetered between popping an collapsing,

and I was not better for it.

Because I was not careful enough about what I let in.

So.

In the spirit of the new year, I am not going to make new years resolutions in the traditional sense.

I'm not going to decide what I'm going to do.

I'm going to decide what I'm not going to do.

Because this year, I made a mess out what was already messy.

I made everything more confusing, more stressful, more toxic. 

I want to let go of the things that drove me into darkness. 

You see, I didn't have much control this year over the things that happened to me, and sometimes they felt like a cruel, cosmic joke. But. I did have control over how I reacted to them, how I chose to acknowledge and clean up the mess, how I decided to move forward.

Over what I decided to add and what I decided to take away.

I don't want to walk into a storm and stir the waters.

I want to calm the sea. 

I want peace. 

I want my rubber band to expand in great expectation, and to hold what's good and right and pure.

Because once my rubber band is stretched, I get to choose what to let go of, and what to keep. 

I get to decide what I'm going to let push me, 

and what gets pushed out.

So.

Rubber band your life. Let yourself  be stretched and pulled and pushed towards growth.

But don't fill the space with what doesn't need to be there.

And when you are ready, get rid of what's heavy.

What may cause you to pop.

Because when there's enough space for more, it might as well be what's going to fill you up.

What's going to light you up, from the inside out.

What's going to make you whole. 

Stretch, grow.

Let things fall out. 

And then do it all again.

Except, this time, differently.

This time, with unwavering peace.

We already know you can make it. 

So this year, make it good.