Welp. It’s been a while. Life has been crazy.

Shortly after making my last post, my church held a women’s conference. Being staff, I was working it. But I also got to sit and attend most of it too. Crazy what God does. One of my biggest take aways was so relevant to my last post. The lion that prowls around. Waiting for a spot of weakness. A speaker asked what lies we have begin to believe and then she pointed out that we are so quick to speak truth over others yet we are so slow to do it for ourselves. In full transparency, mine is this weird push and pull that

1. I will never be enough.
2. I am only safe if I am in control.
3. I am only worth what I can give.

I’m not sure if you caught this, but 1 and 3 are in DIRECT conflict with one another. It’s literally a vicious loop of exhaustion and unreachable expectations. I started to wonder how I got to this place. I know Jesus. I know He is good. I know He calls me loved and chosen. I know I can’t earn His love or loose it. Yet here I am, subtly struggling to find my worth and identity. It wasn’t an obvious struggle, but it comes out in my patterns and habits. Truthfully, I felt like I was failing at home. Dishes get done in 2-3 business days, Mt. Clean Laundry sits for weeks, my kids were driving me nuts and they were responding to the stress with loud opinions and mounds of requests, my husband was drowning in overtime, my body was failing… I felt like I was sinking. I buckled down harder in my work. I started asking for help less. I felt “not enough”. I would nod and say I was good and I think I actually believed it too. I mean, I am incredibly blessed and have more help and love and support than most.

The lies we begin to believe start as little half truths and they grow into something bigger. I was doing better about “peace in the circumstance” but when things went wrong, it felt like my fault. Just do better. Just work harder. Just keep going. You don’t have a choice. My response was to then buckle down in to what countered that. I was just spinning and spinning and I couldn’t see my own destruction.

I got the gentle whisper from the Lord and I just cried a bit. I’m a sensitive gilrlie and I wear my heart on my sleeve. I knew I didn’t want that anymore. I prayed. Nothing changed over night but I keep getting gentle reminders of God’s grace when I’ve wandered.

I want to stop and say that I don’t believe I am enough and that is by design. I AM called and equipped for where I am AS LONG AS I am chasing God. He is enough to sustain where I fall short. That’s not a dig on me, it’s reverence for my King and recognition that if I was enough, I wouldn’t need Jesus. BUT I am enough for His love. He chooses me as I am and then loves me enough to not leave me that way. It would be easy enough for me to retreat and starting beating myself up, but there is no shame or condemnation in Jesus. Only loving conviction.

I almost didn’t open back up my laptop to type today. I was frustrated at myself for waiting so long to just start typing. If you read my about page, I told you this would probably happen. But instead of letting shame get me, I’m choosing grace. When we mess up or fall short, what we do with it matters.

I don’t find it coincidental that I struggle with this. Life is heavy, my partner and I are struggling to find time to even talk, and I’m preparing to share my testimony. My testimony is littered with story after story of people telling me I am not worth it. I’ve literally been thrown in a trash can (and that’s a gentle story). These lies haven’t held my thoughts or headspace in years and yet, here they are. Whispering reminders of a time I believed I was never going to amount to anything.

I keep having to stop and pray over these stories every time I tell them. I remind myself that the enemy can’t rob me at a house I no longer live in. What we speak over ourselves matters. Read “You reap what you sow“, But what we believe about our mistakes, shortcomings, hard seasons matter just as much. Scripture tells us that when we fall down seven times, a righteous man will get up eight. That’s in Proverbs by the way.

We experience set backs. We get frustrated that we believe the lies we thought we no longer believed. We get bogged down by the trials. We look up and realize we’ve drifted.

It’s resilience over perfection. Falling doesn’t mean defeated. It’s recognizing that God’s grace and strength are enough.

So this post is shorter than most. I’m choosing to get back up.

He wants us to keep coming back to Him. It’s not about where we are, it’s about where we are going while…

Under the Sun.