My account of the last year could easily be lost in the millions that could be told. There are books to be filled on the events that rocked the world in 2020 and beyond. I don’t claim to signify that my experience holds any weight by comparison to the year we can’t forget. What I do know is I was under a dark, dismal cloud for months that took more out of my soul than I should’ve allowed. It caused a restlessness inside of me that I couldn’t get under control and a defensive spirit to follow my every thought like a shadow. Until grace weaved its way into my story six months ago.

As I had hoped for the holidays to return us to normalcy, the world around me started to shut down again as case counts rose. Thanksgiving for my family was spent in an aunt’s garage with masks and heated blankets. Given the circumstances, it couldn’t have been sweeter, but I missed the familiarity of being with our immediate family. I longed for closeness with my friends that felt on days as if it would never come. And while not every day felt heavy, changing holiday plans was the catalyst for the deviating disappointments that created a negative narrative in my mind.

The recurring messages that slowly crept into my thoughts during the long winter months were that I was always somewhere between too much or never enough for people. That I had made decisions in my life that were actually mistakes and that’s how I got myself into each mess I found myself in. That I wasn’t worth getting to know or people that did get to know me would get tired of me, it’d only be a matter of time. That reciprocity didn’t exist in relationships. That I had lost my creativity, my value, and my significance and that’s why it seemed like I was failing in my parenting, my job, my marriage, my friendships – you name it, I had the reverse of a Midas touch on it.

Through the hard moments of clinging to my 11 month old in the emergency room with his blood staining my crewneck one Sunday morning, to going 12 days without hot water during the coldest temperatures of the winter, to nights when I went to bed wondering if I had what it took to be a bearable wife that stretched to anxious mornings of fearing I was the worst parent no matter what happened that day. I ran on little sleep and on most days, even smaller faith. Life reached an incredible low when I truly believed that I had nothing to look forward to because something was bound to go wrong no matter what I did.

In light of all of my wariness, the amazing thing I can’t get over is that I made it through every single day of those six months, solely on the grace of God. There were people and moments that carried me through what I felt were some of the darkest months of my entire life. He gave me favor with people during that time that provided the hope I was desperate for. Family traveled hours just to step into our chaotic world on all the right weekends. Meals were brought when I couldn’t think past the next 5 minutes, let alone what to make for dinner. Showers were provided for us when we didn’t have warm enough water. A friend would call me to give a pep talk or to make me laugh when she knew I needed the levity. A neighbor would help me finish shoveling the driveway. These minor moments then have major meaning to me now.

It took months for me to see that my circumstances didn’t stop Jesus from wading into my worry, my shame, my hurt, and all of my striving for control. It took several walks around the block and hours of tearful conversation one Wednesday night in April with my parents for me to recognize the gravity of what my thoughts had done to my life. All of my internal wrestling took on external despair in my world and I had finally collapsed under the weight of my own undoing. What the Holy Spirit started to impress on me was that I had let the enemy reign in my mind and he was vying to destroy my heart. For the first time since before I could even remember, breakthrough was happening at the core of who I was becoming.

From that weekend home and for the next several weeks, I began to experience redemption in relationships that had nothing to do with any of my own efforts. Gratitude came as easy as breathing. The amount of encouragement that came my way felt unwarranted. The thoughtfulness of people astounded me and uplifted me higher than I thought I could go. The best way I know how to describe the immense amount of joy I was experiencing was as if I was thirsty and was drinking from a fire hydrant of absolute grace. It was as if I couldn’t keep up trying to reciprocate the goodwill I was receiving. In quiet moments as I collected thoughts for myself on paper, it occurred to me that this was the closest I have ever experienced to wholeness in my entire life. This was the nearest I have ever been to feeling fully known and fully understood in all of my life, not just by people on earth, but by my Father in heaven.

As I realized this, emotion crashed over me because I was convinced that I would never experience what it felt to be whole on this side of heaven. I didn’t believe I was favored by God enough to feel fully seen for who I am, flaws and all and to believe I’m accepted during my lifetime. And for 3 weeks, he let me experience his fullness. His grace. His truth. I wasn’t sinless, but I was finding out what it meant to be made new. To have exposure to full on transformation and not just minor tweaking in my life. How amazing it was that he showed his character to me when I least expected it and certainly had not earned it.

Like I had expected, the elation that came easy eventually dwindled. In a matter of weeks, several of my dearest family members announced they would be moving across several states by summer, all in different directions. Both of my little boys started to act out more strongly than they had been. I fell behind with work again and found myself frustrated with communication gaps. The favor I had held with several friends faded. Things I tried to accomplish started to go sideways. And so quickly, I found myself wrapping my identity back up in all of the things I tried to hold so tightly together. On the outside, while I have been trying to control my image in the eyes of the small audience that watches my life unfold, I realize that all of my efforts are meaningless without inviting Jesus into my introspection.

Because the truth is, his desire for my life is to be whole. I just misunderstood wholeness for what it really is: Jesus’s grace working its way through my thoughts, actions, and identity to where I joyfully surrender the lie that life is up to me. When I live out of the grace of what the cross meant for my life, wholeness is possible. Unity with the Holy Spirit can be my reality and gratitude starts leaping off the pages of my story!

There’s no real way to summarize the work progress that I’m in, but what I can say is that I am listening on a deeper level when the Lord says to take every thought captive. I am singing with greater grit and conviction when the song says that I will be content in every circumstance because He’s always enough. I have a longing to fully know Jesus in the way I experienced him wholly knowing the intricacies of me.

Tomorrow when I wake up, I may have to fight the anxiety of not knowing if the world wants to know me. I may have to fight the lie that I’m a bad parent because my child keeps repeating the same behavior. I may have to grow character by applying myself to a task I don’t feel like doing.

The unknown will always be there. The dark days may threaten to steal my joy again. But like they say, doubt is easy. It’s the faith that takes effort. And I’ll be ready to put in my very best work.

Take care & take heart,

You’ll never lose by
digging deep, staying true, not giving up,
building character in the crucible of challenge, breathing in, hanging on, & becoming
more weighty below the surface
than you are impressive above it.

Louie Giglio

Have you ever thought about how you want to be remembered? What do you want your friends or your kids to think about when they think about you? It’s a giant question I’ve been asking myself lately.

It’s been a tough year. I’m not sure anyone could have planned for 2020 like this and it’s caused us all to wrestle with uncomfortable what-if questions. What if this doesn’t get improve? What if I get sick and don’t see improvement? What if this goes on for months and months? What if more of what I looked forward to this summer or this fall gets cancelled? The hardest part of this season is that every variable is unknown and we’re not in control.

And man, does it feel like Groundhog Day. I’ve lost count, but it certainly feels like I’ve lived the same day over dozens and dozens of times. We have one of those giant desk calendars I like to put on our fridge because of how big the squares are for each day of the week. I started the year thinking this would be great for fitting our schedules into, until we got to April and now May, and the days are still left blank. The size of each empty space seems to taunt me every time I wander for a snack (which, if we’re being honest is at 30-minute intervals at this point in quarantine).

Compelled to experience a different start to my day this past week, I went for a walk at 6:30 in the morning. 27 degrees is one way to really wake up, in case you’re wondering. But as I walked, I kept coming back to the question I didn’t want to answer. How do I want to be remembered? I’m not promised anything in this life and as painful as it is to reflect on my own mortality, it’s a true reality I’ll face someday. The sun began creeping up as I walked in silence to the sound of my own footsteps and empty thoughts. I couldn’t think of anything. Not one thing.

Until this idea came. “I want to be remembered for being patient.” I literally laughed out loud. What? That’s what came out of my heartfelt search for what mattered to me? I couldn’t think of a word that describes me less than the adjective patient. But as I kept walking and the sun continued to rise, it occurred to me that if this is really true, I am a long way off from modeling the life I want to be remembered for.

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If I were to carry a spirit of patience, a domino effect of other attributes would follow. A patient person stands close to humility. With a patient heart, over and over you see compassion, too. When patience is present, so is peace. I’m not sure how often people around me experience these characteristics being lived out of my every day interaction with them. In fact, as of lately, I know this hasn’t been true of me most of the time. Most of the time, I’m more concerned about what practicing patience will cost me.

Patience requires self-control, endurance, and equanimity which are three things that have always felt unachievable to me. Controlling my emotions and tempering my attitude has so often seemed like I was giving up my authentic self-expression. Pressing on in light of feeling misrepresented, misunderstood, or minimized by not trying to correct someone’s opinion of me is my biggest relational struggle.

When I’m not self-aware of this, I interrupt conversations to push my own opinion through before other ideas can override mine. I live life in absolute haste. I compete with the clock to get things done exactly the way I want things done. And worst of all, I don’t slow down enough to love on my people the way they need to be loved: intentionally and unhurried.

For me, living a life of patience, of gentleness — it costs me. It costs me to surrender my selfish plans. It requires me to take ownership of being wrong. I have to come to terms with the reality that feeling misunderstood doesn’t mean I’m not seen. If anything, I’m being given another opportunity to be refined.

Even now as I continue to wrestle with my pride, I realize I’ve been focused on the wrong side of the sacrifice. Jesus, in all of his patience and perfection, counted the cost for me. He added up my selfish, habitual behavior, my resistance, my conceit. He carried the weight of my unkept promises to try harder when all he wanted was the realness and rawness of my heart. Jesus knew every bit of what my vacillation would cost him. And yet, he allowed my flaws to hold him to the cross, to take his last breath. The price he paid for me took his very life.

But — in all his sovereignty, my mess wasn’t greater than his love for me. I’m not bigger than his mercy and I’m not above grace. So when I struggle with not wanting to suffer in my small, self-centered world, I have this hope: I have what it takes to be patient because Jesus is ever-patient with me. I have been extended the gentleness and endurance it requires to love beyond conditions. By spending my years trying to live out of this kind of steadfast perseverance, I hope what people ultimately remember when they think of me is this one thing:

Loving people so intentionally is worth the cost of surrending ourselves over to Jesus. He turns our feelings of hiddenness into the ultimate hiding place where we can truly know his peace and be his peace to those we are called to love.

Take care & take heart,

How completely satisfying to turn from our limitations to a God who has none.

A.W. Tozer

When I was in college, it was a big trend on campus to wear MudLove bracelets. If you didn’t attend a small Christian college in the Midwest like I did, think popular–like the W.W.J.D. bracelets, but with elasticity and a word or phrase instead of an acronym. Last week in need of encouragement, I dug out two of many MudLove bracelets that read:

I’d been searching for a mantra to carry with me through COVID-19 and was reminded of the word of the year I had chosen for 2020. It was thrive. There was a part of me that thought two words or phrases would be overdoing it. I thought about just picking one bracelet to wear. But no, I needed–I need–both messages. So without overthinking, I’ve been wearing both bracelets, just like this.

While everyone has something they’re dealing with or going through, I have been learning to break up with myself. This isolation period has made me realize that I’m not exempt from selfishness or comparison or pride just because life looks a little different. I am fully responsible for my attitiude, my joy, and my effort in light of my circumstances.

Quite honestly, everything in me wants to push back and argue reasons why my life isn’t fair. I was supposed to get an uninterrupted maternity leave. My mom was supposed to be able to come help with the baby. In my perfect world, my husband wasn’t going to get the flu during all of this, nor was he going to walk through other health challenges we’ve never experienced to this degree before. My firstborn son was still going to be in daycare twice a week so that I could have more breathing room. Work wasn’t going to need me for 8 weeks at least, and I definitely, definitely wasn’t going to spend my Spring like I spent all winter: kept inside.

As I’m saying this, I’m sure you you have your own list of how life hasn’t been fair to you over the last six weeks. You had expectations for how March, April, and beyond was all going to go and you had to cancel just about all of it. We all have validated reasoning for experiencing the grief we are walking through and I for one, know that I am not alone in what seems like the seven stages of this. So I don’t want to pretend like I’m on my own island or that so. many. people are going through severely worse trials.

And while that is a valuable conversation for another time, somehow Jesus has continued to meet me in all of my selfishness. I have found him at the end of every egocentric thought. I have come back to his voice after every outspoken, misplaced frustration I’ve put on my family. Jesus never fails to remind me of his truth when I’m fighting back feelings of sadness, fatigue, and unmet expectations.

For the first half of Sheltering in Place, I’d like to think I was doing alright in terms of my attitude and how I dealt with the disappointment of “life” being cancelled indefinitely. I’d like to think that I rose to a lot of my challenges: caring for my kids in the midst of unstructured days, walking alongside my husband in the unknown as best as I could, and stewarding my mind and body well after delivering Nolan. But let me tell you, that has not been true lately.

I, so often, have truly felt like I’m losing my mind. If I could use a personal day to have time away from being a wife or being a mom, or seriously, living with myself–oh, I would. Because don’t we all just need a reset sometimes? But in the rare stillness I feel in our apartment this week, it was like Jesus whispered a thought to me: keep giving your very best.

My very best. My very best? “I tried that, God. It hasn’t paid off. Anxiety, frustration, exhaustion still blanket the atmosphere of my home. I have nothing left to give,” I answered back with tears. Within seconds, a forgotten movie scene came to mind. My fingers scrambled to YouTube and soon I found the movie clip of a scene I was searching for.

In Facing the Giants, Coach Taylor has the ultimate task of motivating a careless football team after continuous losing seasons. During practice, he calls out Brock, one of his most influential players for being an apathetic, discouraging leader on the team. He challenges Brock to do the dreaded death crawl across the field with his teammate on his back. While Brock asks his coach if he wants him to get to the 30 yard line, Coach Taylor declares he thinks Brock can make it to the 50. Before getting down on the turf, Coach looks into Brock’s eyes and says, “Just promise me you’ll give me your very best.”

What unfolds in the moments to follow seems inixplicable of the human will. As a blindfolded Brock struggles to crawl with his teammate on his back, ready to quit, Coach Taylor drops to all fours alongside his player. He reminds Brock that he promised to give his very best. With each stride, Coach exclaims that Brock can give him more, that he can keep going–that he can give his very best.

“Don’t quit!
I know it hurts.
You keep going!
It’s all heart from here.
You promised me your best!
Keep going!
You can!
You can!”

I don’t know if you have felt like me this week:
Ready to throw in the towel with the circumstances surrounding you.
At the end of your rope, after a long day of trying to figure out your new-for-now-normal. You may be working through devestating news about your job or your future. Maybe a relationship you have is going sideways and you don’t know where to go from here. Or maybe it’s incredibly exhausting raising kids who don’t know how to wrestle with being home all of the time. And news flash, neither do you, really. I have no idea what your day-to-day looks like right now, but I’m praying that you will sense Jesus whispering the same thing to you:

Don’t lose heart. Keep going.

Our challenges may not get less challenging. I know for a fact that when I wake up tomorrow, my toddler is still going to be a toddler who doesn’t like being told no to anything. I will probably find the cleanliness status of my apartment disheartening and my stress levels fluctating every hour. But I’m still accountable for how I steward my thoughts and feelings and I am the only person responsible for how I respond to the matters of my day. Jesus knows it’s hard, but he also knows that when we walk with him, we always have more to give. So don’t quit. Thrive. And let’s ask Jesus to help us give our very best.

Take care & take heart,