You are Good Enough

Humility...

It makes me quake a little to even broach this subject. It is a topic written about, pondered on and emulated throughout all ages. Many have written about it, displayed it in their lives, seen it in others--its a multi-faceted subject that I do not have all the puzzle parts to.

But I want to try...

And that above statement is exactly where I am with humility right now. Humility, not properly seen in my life (and mixed with many other lies and misinformation), used to make me shrink back and let others take places I could have filled but...didn't choose to. Humility used to mean, 'let others do what they're better at anyway. They deserve to be seen and praised. You do what is safe, what is comfortable for you.'

This false humility caused me to miss out on a lot of growth.

Because being seen, as you truly are, is terrifying. Showing forth what you have created from the depths of your being, whether its a bit of writing, a song or just some words of wisdom that need to be spoken out; puts you in a place of vulnerability. Once it's out there: once you have spoken as a leader on a subject that may not be taken well by a group or performed your piece or sang your song...once it's out, it's out. It can never be taken back and now others can prod at it and make judgements and draw their own conclusions about you and what you bring to the table.

It's easier to be hidden. Stay safe. Don't share your gifts and don't let on how you really feel.

It's also a lot more selfish.

God has been dealing with and showing me just how selfish I am the last few months. It's astonishing and a bit terrifying really. I am glad God deals with us as we are able to take it, because (whew) it's just not pretty sometimes.

I was scared, shared and was vulnerable yesterday. I have been fighting fear of man as it comes to my worship leading--specifically, the freakin' guitar! Love/hate relationship strong there. Love my guitar, I hate how I am not a rockstar yet (see the word 'yet'...I do have hope for myself). But I can get so stuck in my head, so aware (stinking' inner voice) of just how unqualified I am that I can't even perform. I cut myself right out of the race before I ever get there. I was terrible when I started (yay for being left handed and playing a right handed guitar) but it has been years and though I am no...whatever guitar players name you want to put in that space! I can still do it.

And I need to. I shared exactly how I was feeling with my (thankfully) supportive staff and students...yay for crying! They prayed and fought for me and I went on to lead worship that day...and it was good.

It was good.

False humility has me backstabbing myself all the time and keeping me from going forward. Plain ol' humility sees me as I am with my limitations and knows...that is good. By no means perfect, but good. I offered what I had, all of it, and it was good that I took on the part I was supposed to play in that moment fully so that others could benefit.

You are good enough for what is in front of you.

Battle with Insignificance

 Whenever you’re starting out somewhere new, a piece of you—the one that’s still trying to prove itself and doesn’t quite understand grace—will be trying to show, desperately, just how good you are and how fit for the job. For all of us struggling procrastinators and oldest children with perfectionist tendencies, this can be the (figuratively) the death of us! We struggle so hard to be liked and to please and have such a hard time accepting the compliments and well wishes that come our way that we can swamp out all the good with our self doubt.

I write from where I am: a new place where my old ‘striving’ and ‘trying to prove myself’ tendencies have kept me on my toes in my mind for far too long. Despite multiple assurances of my place here and how valued I am, I can’t get through my head that I’m doing well. I must strive, I must forge ahead, I must do things in a new way and see results and…this is exhausting and has no fruit.

As I recall, there’s a Hebrew word for this…the word literally means to walk about in a circle. When we are stuck trying to prove ourselves, we get nowhere. And as we get nowhere, because we have refused to simply be His children and move as He calls, we get really frustrated. So we try even harder…and the circle in the dirt gets deeper but…it’s still a circle in the dirt.

In this last season, I’ve found that the real battle is with the lie the enemy has tried to put on me: insignificant. It has coloured all my perceptions and my thoughts; it has created barriers between me and those I could love in this new environment because I am constantly on the look out for their assessment of my performance.

Dwelling under insignificance, like fear (which I have battled through working under), makes for terrible working conditions to say the least. It will keep you from your full potential, if left unchecked. It becomes the net by which you are ensnared and there, caught in your own imperfect assessments as well as the cruelly (by you) interpreted assessments of those around you…you find…a cage…a prison…the white walls…are you understanding me?

You are trapped in bondage, that which you were never meant to endure has become your prison sentence.

Every word, thought, deed is filtered through this mask that keeps you from seeing life as it truly is. And you can’t escape it: your mind goes with you wherever you go, overanalyzing, trying to justify and reading into everything…it really becomes a bore.

The first step in reclaiming your life from insignificance is acknowledging it. As ‘we’ (all those books and workshops whose focus is to bring inner healing) have learned through the years, the first step toward solving a problem is noticing the problem is there. Well done you.

Second, confession. This is basic…but it works. There’s no formula: it’s just simply letting God and any person who you feel needs to know that your life is feeling pretty ratty. Acknowledging that, as well as what a lie it is, can be really freeing.

Confession also frees you in that there is power in speaking out the things you struggle with, particularly to God. Once you acknowledge your sin (in this case a false mindset) it says He is faithful and just to forgive us and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. So it’s pretty simple: you, bring Him your mess. He takes care of it. I like this…

Third: be yourself, even if sometimes in your own estimation you seem like too much or have too much to say or do things you think other people will think are weird. God created you as you: He must have had a reason. I think you are a pretty big deal in His world: and you are in ours too. Please offer yourself with all your tweaks and quirks, I promise you, you will find people who love your authentic self. (Trust me, I’ve done it!) Authenticity coupled with vulnerability will create strong beautiful relationships in your life—and those are worth having. Relationships, after all, will carry over into the next life, though they will be changed. Build them, don’t let anything, especially insignificance, bar you from them.

Now when I say, “be as you are”; I hope you realize I’m not giving a licence for sin. If you have things you need to be working through…work through them with the Lord before the people He has put as accountability partners in your life. Don’t be a mess just to be a mess: you were made to be a blessing. But DO let God heal the parts of who you are that may have been repressed or rejected. If someone told you you have big teeth and it’s made you afraid to smile anymore…please bring that to God and ask Him to show you how beautiful you are. If you can’t wear swimsuits anymore because someone made a comment that your butt is too big, forget them! Ask God to show you who you are. It may take a while to sift through it all (sometimes we have a lifetime behind us full of junk) but God is willing and faithful and will bring things up as you can deal with them. He’s good like that. Always be replacing lies people have put onto you with the truth as God shows it to you. Remember, He don’t make junk.

I think that’s it: be authentic, be real, be loved…keep working past ANY lies that keep you in the dark. The Father of lights does give good gifts—I pray you’ll be on the lookout for them and receive them from Him. He is so good…and He does such good work in you, as you allow Him.

Walking with the Lord…

Passion for Identity to be Found...in a Pub

This is just me processing, so please take it all with a grain of salt and remember grace. I don’t pretend to understand all I see fully, but I seek to do the best I can with the insight I am given.

I’ve been living in Ireland for about a month and a half and yesterday was my first pub day. It’s just generally not a normal thing for me to go to pubs and the only thing that pulls me there is the possibility of hearing live traditional Irish music. I have loved Irish music since my first exposure to it—something just lights up in my soul when I hear those melodies.

So, it was a little Kansas girl’s birthday and we ventured into the scene…and it was a scene, not pretty. I just couldn’t get comfortable—and partly it was that none of my silly expectations were met. We trekked to several pubs, none of them had live music going and then we finally stayed at one pub, but when the music came on at nearly 11 o’clock, it was all just rock and roll covers. I’m watching Irish students trying to be American singers and everything in me realizes how wrong this is: I just know that this nation is one which has a beautiful soul, hidden underneath a lot of despair and regret and things lost. And when I see them just copying someone else (and my culture at that) and not being true to the creativity, joy and hope which is central to this nation, it makes me go a little crazy inside. I know there’s more. I know you were made for ore. I know that joy and deep hope can burn in you—if you’ll just move forward into knowing who you are and what you are made for.

When we finally left, I went winging out, kicking my legs in the air and just ranting about passion that draws people in and identity and…it was overwhelming, this rising up in me. I just love my city and I hate to see them living half-hearted lives when so much life is available and offered to them. And I don’t hate pubs, I might end up playing at one of them in the future: I just hate seeing people be inauthentic. We were each made unique with beautiful gifts and talents which, when handed over to the Lord, will become beautiful glimpses of all that He is in all His creativity and joy and diversity. I want people to become completely themselves, aware of their identity and redeemed to go victoriously out to become all that He made them to be.

That’s all I want.

That’s it really.

That’s all I want.

This school has been incredible. And the girls want to get out and do life where others can see, not just be in our building. So we are going to go out and do some ‘busking’ (street performing) next Saturday, the 5^th. Please be praying for us as we go, that the atmosphere of the city would be changed, and life would come as people stop and ask, what is this?

There is a deep hunger in people, that they can’t recognize or access on one level because they’ve never been exposed to anything which causes the hunger to arise.

Pray for hunger in Sligo city. Pray against ritual and legalism and that people will have encounters with the living God.

Choosing the Selah in Life

Discipleship.

It’s a word that keeps becoming clearer even as it gets fuzzier. It involves being deeply involved in lives, realizing their struggles and calling them deeper, while at the same time having to look yourself in the face: “Can I ask this of them when I know at times it hasn’t been true of myself?”

It’s seeing a whole life: it’s fears and triumphs, moments of surprise and victory, celebration, defeat, and saying, “My life is worth that. I will see them through whatever life throws at them, simply because they are worth it.”

It requires love.

It requires faith.

It requires letting go of yourself, all the while trying to analyze yourself: “Am I doing this right? Am I doing a good job? Am I…?”

I was given the word “selah” at the beginning of this school. The word that is so confusing to all Biblical scholars and others trying to interpret the Bible that they just call it a “pause” and link it to other terms (often relating to music) that they know.

That word though, in all of its confusion, makes sense for this season in my life. There is so much I need to figure out—that I truly can’t on my own. I am wading into the deep, unknown territory—doing and being asked to do things that I have no clear bearing on—all the while so aware of my faults and fears, all that makes up the very imperfect me.

And yet: Selah.

Pause.

Meditate.

Realize that some things just aren’t about figuring out…that some things are meant to just make you take pause, breath in again and remember who is God.

Selah.

Let go of trying to figure out your own life and remember His.

Selah.

You’re life is out of your control, out of your understanding…and that’s a very good thing.

I am doing my best to enjoy this ‘selah’ part of life, this place where I pause, meditate and pray. I am proud to know (as He reveals Himself) who God is at this point in my life and come to trust in Him deeper as He calls me to deeper things. In the tasks and appointments and life-goings on where I am without answers, I wait, pause and pray.

Selah.

My God is with me.

Selah.

He promises peace.

Selah.

He will perfect that which concerneth me…Selah

Nothing Profound...Just Trying to Process

I’m listening to a song called “Quiet Peace” by Justin Byrne as I sit in a café by the Garavogue River, trying to process my beautiful life. I'm just a simple, everyday girl who keeps following God and is amazed at the spaces she finds herself in. Sunny in Ireland? In Ireland? Reinstated to her calling when she thought it was all over? Who is this God I serve? I will never reach the end...

Do you ever have those moments when you realize, ‘This is too beautiful for me?’ And then you stop…and you realize that it is not up to you to determine what is or isn’t good enough for you. It was never your job (as our speaker last week made us repeat over and over “He’s Almighty God and He’s not taking applications”) to determine how much you were worth or where you should serve or how it should all play out. It was (and is) my job to draw ever closer to my Creator and follow as He leads. The brokenness I and my friends have experienced in the last years is not due to any fault of God: there were human beings with human choices involved.

Each one was listening to or deliberately disobeying God, choosing to disregard words and direction they had given them or even just forgetting to ask. There’s a whole spectrum. We all make choices, for good or ill; and even slightly misdirected humans can cause catastrophic damage. Of this the last few years of my life have convinced me. So my determination is to lean in, as far as I can, with all my human failings on board, and get to know Him.

The leading brings me to this spring-like day, amidst a group of silly, beautiful young women, each with grace and beauty that they hold, so many gifts in them already, each learning, just as I am, how to submit these gifts and graces to Him so that He may fill them fully with Himself.

Himself.

I’m learning that that’s all I want. That’s all I need, that’s where I find myself and how I even find myself here. Here, the place He asked me to go…

I honestly shouldn’t be here. I didn’t have the funds until I started to move. I bought the tickets on faith, with little to no idea that I would get to go (and even less faith). There was nothing that I saw in me that made me qualified. I knew that. But I also knew how He was already working in me, so I kept my eyes and heart open, following the leading that He gave me.

And now: restoration has become my lot. The verse that I was given in Isaiah 40 a few months ago becomes more true day by day, as restoration and comfort become mine:

Comfort, O comfort my people,

    says your God.

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,

    and cry to her

that she has served her term,

    that her penalty is paid,

that she has received from the Lord’s hand

    double for all her sins.

I have been paid double for all my brokenness. I stand restored, in favor, because of His work in my life.

Even this week, I was honest and open with our speaker. I knew Isaiah 61 was for me and that part of being able to offer all that the Lord promises in those verses comes from going through those things. Well, call me the brokenhearted one who has been bound up!

The truth is, and will always be, that grace is sufficient. Not unmerited grace, like they like to call it, but actually being able to live out your life for Him because you have been given His life. Resurrection and His power now stand in all the places I was so broken before.

My whole life is about pursuing Him. That means, for now, living in Ireland, cooking and living with and speaking words of life to a precious group of girls. It may mean that I work with refugees in the future or find myself teaching again, or in an orphanage or any where! I am not the determiner of my fate. But this I do know: Jesus lives in me and my pursuit is after Him. He has blessed me beyond measure and I don’t see it stopping. I love being His…that the world may know. That the world may know. That may sound trite and simple, but Jesus is not an idea or someone I talk with every now and then anymore…it’s more. He’s life and I know that as I move with Him through this world, atmospheres have to change. Not because of any power of my own, but because He’s moving. How else do you explain a summer’s day on October 1^st in Ireland?

My life is made beautiful for me.

Back to Childhood Dreams: Be Free Again!

I find that as you delve back into that which really makes you you, you will be surprised at the results. For example, I have loved Ireland since I was a little girl. It was the one country I wanted to visit (even as others dissuaded me, "It's so green because it rains so much there": true, true). I couldn't give a reasonable explanation or even an idea of why it was in me, it just seemed a part of my soul, the motherland, the place of my origins and the place where I had always dreamed of being.

The desire never went away, but as you get older, of course, things start to crowd out what once was so sure and definite. It takes courage and fortitude to stick to your guns and your imaginings, to know that what you dreamed of as a child could be true of you as an adult. So many linger, pausing over the dreams in their souls and then move on, taken away into what could have been...and forgetting that what could be, should be and...

What is happening now...

It's a crazy, significant, wonderful thing when what was embedded in your childhood or perhaps even deeper, into what makes you, you, is allowed to come to life, to grow and live and become more than you could ever imagine, even after you have become an adult. It may happen that the dream even has to die and go through various stages of perfection--or perhaps in my case, the dream stays hidden for a long time and then comes to life and is alive when it is time...Whatever it may look like, whatever process you go through, in the end, this is all good because it means you have allowed that piece of you which no one else could know of and which, at times, you weren't even sure of, to live...

That's a miracle of God.

I write all this to say that we all need to unearth the dreams the Lord has placed in us, to bring them back to where they were allowed to live and breath and move freely. There is a reason and a time and a place for all the childhood dreams He’s placed in you, whether that’s to have a family or disciple a nation. That which you may not have even had the words to express as a child, just an inkling in your soul, is that deepest part of you, who you were made to be, reaching out. And I don’t mean or believe that eveyr impulse of the heart is pure and of the Lord—even as little kids, we were sinful. I can remember growing in my walk with the Lord and looking back on my childhood with sorrow for how I had treated my mom at times.) Not all of your ‘deepest desires’ were good. But that pure, innocent idea or ideal that you were aware of in your soul when you were small—what you were drawn to, what you thought was so cool, what you could spend hours thinking abiut or that simple though, like mine, for Ireland or another nation—bring those back to the Lord. Those may have the inklings of your destiny on them and as you present them to Him, asking Him to refine and take hold of them again, He may hand them back to you, with a big smile on His face and just the beginnings of a plan in your head, and say, “Go.”

And then, by all means, go.