Author: Natalie Price

your very best.

Natalie Price

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,

at the present moment.

Natalie Price

Time is a funny thing. Right now in our world, there is a pandemic wrecking our bodies, our economy, our mental well-being, our daily schedules, our expectations and much more. With the global outbreak of the Coronavirus, I’ve had countless time to reflect on endless nothings that rabbit trail into all sorts of thoughts. But the main thing I keep coming back to is the concept of time when it comes to my life.

Three weeks ago, I came home from the hospital with our second son. We named him Nolan Graham after longingly expecting his grand arrival. He is perfect to us in every way and I love the joy that newborns bring. Getting to watch each stretch or yawn or infant snore stirs up the best of my emotions. And then when I think about the fact that he joined our family less than a month ago, my mind can’t wrap my head around the right orientation to time.

How can it feel like I’ve never known a life without him and yet I’m just beginning to learn about this little bundle? I then look at my firstborn, Griffin, and find it so hard to recall our lives before he came into the world. But there was a life before. There was just the two of us, Hunter and me. Once before, we were newlyweds starting life together in a world of exciting and yet nervous unknowns.

When I step back to reflect on a short 27 years of life, all at once I can picture myself in the corner of Mrs. Qadeem’s 4th grade class working on a writing assignment and at the same time, I’m a mom of two under two sitting at a desk in the corner our Wisconsin apartment. Time seems to stand still and fly all in the same breath. If I could just hang on to it long enough to really lean in to every moment, I wonder how much more fulfilled my soul would feel. I wrestle with being so many things to so many people while also longing to still be that eleven-year-old girl who was easily invigorated by elementary school writing assignments.

How do you hold the tension well of being present in your life right now and honoring the truest parts of you that have always been intrinsically wired within you? I’m a wife, a mother, an employee, but I’m also creative and find my best self in my writing and other arts. I find value in contributing my distinctive work to the world through creating, leading, and collaborating on ideas. And yet, to name just a few, I am the diaper changer, bath time supervisor, financial investor, and crying calmer to two small humans. My world’s don’t always intersect in a way that confidently assures me that I am valued, or crushing the parenting gig, or producing meaningful matter that ignites people, even if it’s just meant to inspire me.

One of the phrases I hear myself say all too often is, “Before I became a mom..” and I realize I’ve separated my life into their own time-periods based on titles I carry. Before getting married, after having Kid #1 or Kid #2, when I was still working at the salon as a hair stylist, after I became an Executive Coordinator at my job, before I became a work-from-home-mom: all of these are seasons of my life I have subconsciously categorized my experiences in. It’s compelling to me that this is how I would organize my life story, when I so deeply desire to be known by people for who I am instead.

Furthermore, the very thing I want to be known by: my creativity, my thoughts or ideas, my true heart does not get hardly any of my focus. I am not convinced that this is intentional, as so much of my time naturally gets directed toward my marriage, my tiny, tiny children and maintaining order within my home. I’m not looking to be the next best-selling author or inspirational Instagrammer, but I am questioning how to allow myself to be all that I feel called to be while I spend my days cleaning cottage cheese curds off of a high chair tray and scrubbing jumbo crayon scribbles off of my walls.

How do I stop longing to know the girl that was inspired to write about majestic mountains at Sandburg Elementary after gazing at scenic calendar photo on the wall and start becoming that same imaginative girl as I mother a curious toddler? The best qualities of who I was can still be part of who I am if I intentionally hang on to that girl with every new hoop in life I jump through. While I am so grateful for growing in my character and wisdom as a result of my experiences, my hope is to build upon what makes me, distinctively and originally me.

I don’t have all of the answers, but I do have the ambition to keep diving into the depth of my questions and to live in the now. Maybe my wondering will reveal the shadow side of my soul I’ve been hiding away. Perhaps I’ll learn new things about my wiring that will spark more authentic creativity out of me. Maybe I’ll discover what it looks like to appreciate each orientation to time in their own fullness.

The best part about the faith I carry in Jesus is that I follow a God that was with me at my deepest and darkest and present for every moment of my highlight reel. He sits with me, ever intentional and present, even in my investigating and struggle to reason well. He’s already on the other side of my pilgrimage to becoming. So maybe, maybe what I’ll find in trying to discover all of the best characteristics and qualities of me in the midst of my responsibilities and seasons of life, what I’ll really find is more of Him.

Take care & take heart,

The Thief of Joy

Natalie Price

Comparison is the thief of joy.

Theodore Roosevelt; 2 Corinthians 10:12

To be honest with you, this is the last place I want to be right now. I don’t consider myself to be especially great at externally processing, but I do find it healing. Words mostly come out as fragmented ideas and unfinished thoughts…that I will later come to realize may not be quite accurate. Thinking out loud is the only real way I know how to get started on my honest thoughts and it allows me to try and try again until what I communicate authentically matches what I feel.

I find it sad just how many of my thoughts are ugly. Even now, they’re not polished or mature, but they’re at the very least sincere. Lately, I am really struggling with comparison, specifically in my work. The hard part with that is this: I know comparison is not a healthy thing, but I wish people could acknowledge with me that it’s a real thing. I have several Bob the Builders in my circle. “Can we fix her? Yes, we can!” When really, if I don’t dig deeper into the shadow side of comparison, I’ll lose out on the opportunity to grow. And to do that, I have to sit in the rubble of my mess for moments longer than what feels comfortable.

If I could simply sit here with you for the next few moments, because sometimes it’s just helpful to know there’s someone here with skin on, I think I can try to get this comparison trap I’m in into words. The problem with comparison is that it’s always a fight to have control of something: control of people’s opinions or ideas about you or control of how you view yourself, whether it be positive or negative. I have a tendency to believe that how people view me is mutually exclusive to how they view other people and it’s simply not true.

Somewhere along the line, I have adopted comparison and control as a defense mechanism to hold onto the favor I have with other people. If I’m more interesting to talk to, produce better work and faster results, am funnier, it feels like I can live to survive another day. If not, my soul feels crushed and I scramble to control more projects, to think of wittier jokes, to have more fascinating content to present in a fight to stay relevant. I’ve never seen a therapist (and probably should), but in the meantime, I like to ask myself questions I think one might ask me if I was sitting in their chaise longue.

If I had to find the root of this, how long would it take me to dig through past hurt? At what point did I believe again and again that who I am at face value isn’t enough? So much of my growing up years were shaped by moments of doubt that even now as an adult, I still battle and I battle with shame. At 26, shouldn’t I know better? And not just know better, but believe and live better? It’s so disheartening to me to wake up and find that I face this kind of thing in the mirror and I have to be convinced that heaven for me will be met with freedom from the “not enough.”

Can I share a story? A story I’m not proud to carry? In middle school, I was the shortest in my class which made school dances awkward, I wore blue, wire-rimmed glasses and hand-me-downs and had a hard time figuring out what lunch table I was welcomed at. Until I found a group of girls a year in that seemed to really get me, I had never fully trusted that I belonged.

Eventually, my tight knit group fell apart. Of the three friends, one made it entirely clear they wanted nothing to do with me, one avoided me and stopped acknowledging when I came in the room, which left me one friend. But only when she was by herself. The Christmas before I lost their favor, I had turned a journal into homemade scrapbook and had gifted it to her and I was so proud of it. Upon accident months later, I read an unexpected entry where she had emotionally journaled, “I wish Natalie had never happened. She ruined everything!”

Years later we came to a place of reconciliation where I was able to get closure from her, but the seed of rejection was planted and took root. I never could feel safe with her again and will never know why I lost my other friends the way I did. Through college, I had two different roommates request not to live with me, one who only made it a semester before requesting a transfer. To me, they weren’t just roommates those years, they were friends I tried to care for. I had invested time into getting to know about their lives and exhausted my energy trying to give what I thought they needed from me. The bottom line turned out to be that I just wasn’t their cup of tea, especially compared to who else they could room with.

And if I can get really raw for one more moment, I have a brother who I miss so incredibly much that I haven’t had more than a bare minimum relationship with in four years and I wonder through the silence if that’s still my fault.

I have come to believe that the full me, to most people, is not worth knowing. Either because I tend to taint what I touch or bring an emotional intensity to the table that brings more weight than what people desire to carry.

And in recent years, comparison has brought somewhat of a comfort to me in such a backwards and self-righteous way, to know that I’m somewhat okay; I’m somewhat wanted. At least I still hold the favor of my boss, when my co-workers don’t seem to care. At least I don’t have that exact financial struggle they do. At least one person agreed with me on the group text on that discussion. I can gauge where I’m at with others when I base it on the unhealthy habit of comparison.

Until I can’t.

Sooner or later I struggle to believe
I still hold the favor I desire so badly
or that I have anything in my life together, let alone one thing
or someone disagrees with me and then it feels like them against me.

And it’s when I’m left feeling so small, that I reach for my white flag.

Because not knowing the true joy means I can’t fully know Jesus and what he hopes for my life. Feeling threatened by someone else’s existence diminishes experiencing His fullness. I have a lot of fear that I’ll be phased out of my job because I can’t control the favor I hold with others. There’s always someone who’s wiser, wittier, or a better fit.

It’s incredibly shallow to be saddened by the way the attention gets shifted from me to someone else and that has probably been the hardest thing to rally from out of everything. To lose attention at times feels like I’m not worth being known or not as distinctive or exceptional. But I know that there is more for me than this kind of emptiness and feeling like I’m filled with shortcomings.

The message series I’ve been listening to is called, “Poured Out” based on the book of Psalm. Why is it easier sometimes to admit failures and backwards thinking to people than the One who wrote my very own manual? Why does it take so much and so long to finally surrender?

I’m praying that after I leave here I can keep pouring this out to Him, that I’ll find more comfort and fulfillment in His presence than I do my own feelings and what I think I can control. Will you pray that I can do that? So often what I know doesn’t connect with what I do in the ways my own heart needs it to.

If comparison is the thief of joy,
may you and I cling to the King who put all fear to death
by conquering the grave
so that we may believe His truth
that we are enough
and that we are wanted at His table.
He’s even saved us our very own seats.

Take care & take heart,
Natalie