The single tap of the key carried in the room. My focus was on the photos sliding across the computer screen, my soul was elsewhere. I picked and unpicked pictures; surveying the many faces expressing all the emotions encapsulating the once in a lifetime day. The hours passed. The clicking continued. I careened my neck left and then right assessing the moment captured on film. It was then the door opened and she walked in. My finger stopped the tapping. I looked up and gave a pitiful attempt of a smile. Her soul looked for mine. And in her quest, she unraveled the mangled mess within me with a single question.
Leaning against the wall, she began with simple questions of how things are going and what was new. And as her ears took in my answers, her heart registered the tension within. The questions became inward-focused, and I began to lose the comfortableness of keeping her at arms length. Fear within me was being faced by boldness within her. A bold voice she had battled to find over many years.
She walked into the little office room with an awareness that my past few days had been rough. She was aware that emotions lurked beyond the surface. She was unafraid. She was bold. She chose to venture with me into the unknown waters of my stormy soul.
She asked question after question, in a slow melodious way without putting me off. Each one like a precise, experienced surgeon's incision. The Holy Spirit guided her, allowing the words from her mouth to work with wisdom, exposing tumors I had never seen before. Tears began to pool in the back of my eyes. She saw them. Her eye contact scared the insecurity within me, but her boldness invited love to fill my heart conquering. The Bibles says, "perfect love casts out fear". See at that moment of registering the tears and the weight behind them, she had a choice. She could stay on safe ground and skirt around it ignoring the emotions, or she could venture forward with me into the messiness. She pressed forward.
Another question came. With it, tears cascaded. Time was ticking away as normal, but these moments were monumental. My heart was beating fast. I begin to feel clammy all over. The signs of being uncomfortable. Why be uncomfortable in the presence of a friend? Because. Fears and doubts unspoken, unheard, and untouched were being laid bare in the space between us... spoken, heard, touched. Leaving the space of ignorance, was leaving known territory. What would I become if I spoke these fears and doubts? Where could I hide if another heard these fears and doubts? And how could I leave untouched if I spoke and she heard?
I couldn't. So I didn't.
In faith, she asked me to speak, she asked to listen, and we asked the Spirit to touch. The pressure of the emotions splintered the dam built in my heart. Slowly, the splinters turned to cracks, and the cracks yielded to complete ruins.
Until our conversation, I had never noticed the suffocation of these fears and doubts. I had simply adjusted to living on less air.
Life was being compromised.
For 24 years, I had lived a life by the law. A law I made to protect myself, to deliver strong results and to ultimately be who I "thought" God wanted me to be. What I "thought" God wanted from me was a life lived in control, full of self-awareness, and joyfulness, always joyfulness. He wanted to see me be strong, not weak. He wanted to see me not doubt or fear but live in faith and conquer!
How devastating to look in the eye of a trusted friend and wade through the law, the misconception of myself as a daughter of a God who dearly, dearly loves me. To speak to her my own questions on what my faith amounts to if I'm not strong. To let her hear my fear of disappointing anyone I care about, most importantly God. And to register that I live within a law of bondage because these doubts and fears have taken the freedom I'm meant to run in.
But as love extended me grace to speak and expose, darkness faced the dawn of light.
Walking forward, I'm not sure how. It's unkown, it's unchartered. I don't know what it looks like to take a step without my self-constructed law. I don't know how to not fix myself when I've been action-oriented for so long. And she gracefully points out, it's okay, sit in it, invite Him in it, and just BE in it... like you are tonight.
Despite being afraid of the darkness or unsure of the unkown, I walked with my God. He used her questions asking for openness and honesty laced with true humility to guide me to the face of the wall. To stand before it's threatening presence in my life. To accept weakness instead of strength because within it comes true self-awareness. My mind and heart had screamed NO!
STOP talking.
STOP sharing.
STOP crying.
You should be strong. Be strong. But the strength I thought I needed was absent. That was false strength built by human hands. I don't want human strength. I want God's strength. "because God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength" (1 Cor. 1:25). God's strength is most potent in human weakness.
This is where my story continues: where weakness and brokenness begins and healing will come. For when I am weak, then I will be strong. (2 Corinthians 12:9-10) God did not come to save the sure but the lost. (Luke 19:10)
God cares to redeem and restore. He does not want me to be fully capable of carrying my own weight or strong enough to withstand the troubles or temptations of this world. Rather, He wants a relationship with me. He wants me to bring my broken, weak, incapable self into His divine, healing, fully-capable presence. He wants weakness, confusion, doubt, fear, worry, sin. He wants me, human, me. THAT is the girl He sent His Son to die and be raised again for! He wants to sit with me... In my ugliness. In my sin. In my fear of disappointment. In my inability to grasp his love- that I cannot earn it. In my desire to fix myself up first before coming to him. In my lifestyle of constructing and following my own law. In my fear of His ability to actually be who He says He is through His word. In my absolute, uncontrollable, chaotic, disappointing and beautiful brokenness. There is where He chooses to sit with me. Just like my friend did that late night in her little office space; amid the muck.
Why?
Because that is the most attractive I've ever been to Him... completely incapable, unable, dependent, needy, waiting for His Healing touch to come and save my life by doing what I've never been able to do myself... Restore me.
Thank you Anj <3
xoxo a huge fan
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