This past week I pored over the book Resilient: Restoring Your Weary Soul in These Turbulent Times by John Eldredge. I journaled pages of notes and have been savoring his words of encouragement in the days following turning the very last page. The truth he writes about what Comfort Culture and the pandemic have done to us, the written prayers, the permission to process every emotion before God, and the prompting to ultimately turn all of who I am and what I long for over to him has put some wind back into my tired sails.

In Eldredge’s honesty and humble confession he shares how during the last few years he has been eager to fix things and that he longs for things to be good again. Me too. He shares that part of the road to resilience requires that we process what we’ve been through in order to build our reserves back up. In order to recover before replenishing our reserves, he encourages us to reflect on what we’ve both experienced and are currently experiencing. We must name those things.

I’ve been all too fixated on what I’m currently experiencing, which can be easily summarized as a desperate need to control. To fix things. To make things whole again. One thing I noticed today was that I’m in a tug-of-war with what I think and what I fear people will think. It’s not fair to generalize, but in a few instances here is what I haven’t been able to wrap my head around: when I withhold my frustrations about situations from people, my internal world suffers. I all but collapse in on myself. When I express my frustrations to people, when I externally process an unfinished thought, or when I say what I mean exactly how I mean: I regret it. Because I can see how I frustrate people, how I confuse them, how much I’m misunderstood. I’m at a loss for how much I can’t control what people think. Or what I assume they think.

Days like these feel like my trust erodes because the longing to not feel so nonsensical or too complex is so high. It’s probably not fair, but maybe I’ve wrongly associated being understood with feeling like I can trust someone. I’m working at understanding that better because I sense on a spiritual level, Jesus wants to help me operate out of a healthier mindset.

And still I fixate on what I can control. I ruminate on what I cannot. Last week, my son lost an outfit at school during the chaos of drying off from the splash pad. An easy thing to misplace, a high likelihood of happening when there’s countless preschoolers. I couldn’t get past it. I woke up multiple times in the night thinking about that red Nike shirt and black shorts. I was just shy of making “Lost! $ Reward if Found!” flyers. My brain fought to have control over a situation that wasn’t within my power to fix, while my body paid the price. It’s embarrassing to admit this and I’ve played it cooler than I’ve felt. But something so small took over my thoughts for the past week. This unbearable feeling that I lost something.

I felt the Lord prompt me to pay attention to why the missing shirt and shorts (M.I.A. 6 days now) has weighed so disproportionately on me. Days have gone by with nothing other than my absurd need to find control in every corner and crevice of my daily life. But as I was driving in silence between errands, I heard Him whisper to my heart,

“You haven’t let me hold what you’ve lost. You haven’t grieved who you’ve lost.”

While I am good at processing what I presently experience, I haven’t been good at surrendering what I’ve previously experienced, as Eldredge urges. I can externalize what’s currently happening in my world, but I have a lot of growing to do in releasing what has been. What I can’t go back and fix. What I can’t rewrite. Somewhere along the way I stop surrendering it to Jesus and started forming a grudge.

It’s been hard to see the kind of grief I’ve subconsciously been carrying because the people I’ve lost are still living. And the loss among them looks different. I’ve lost both someone I never pictured my life without and someone I never even really had a chance to know. I’ve lost dreams and I’ve lost plans. Friends have gotten lost to both distance and lack of reciprocity. I’ve lost hope at times. I’ve had to grieve drawing boundaries in relationships that need them. I’ve lost trust this year and I’ve lost proximity to people I love. And in all of my searching, not even Amazon Prime can sell me a manual on how to cope with this kind of loss.

John Eldredge writes that the way into mental and emotional resilience is to practice benevolent detachment. I understand that to mean the gentle, yet urgent need to release control of both the things I’ve been entrusted to and the things that were never mine in the first place. In the second year of the pandemic, I was out walking with my dad and yearning for his wisdom. I had asked him how he was able to cope with a particular loss. While he was still in process, my dad pointed me to the story of Abraham and Isaac. You see, Isaac, though Abraham’s son, was never truly in the eternal sense, his. Isaac was the Lord’s. Abraham only physically lay his son on the altar once, but I suspect after that day, the spiritual surrender became daily.

It’s becoming evident as I reflect that in order to grow into a person of resilience, I must take on the same daily practice. It’s a rhythmic abidance, to give all of who I am to gain all of what Jesus has to offer. Rest from striving. Recovery from what I’ve walked through. Restoration of what’s been lost. Resilience to be able to face the hard things again. Reconciliation of my heart, my soul, my longing, to Him.

Jesus, you are the Keeper of the Lost Things. You are the Ultimate Reconciler. You have the power to redeem and restore all things. You know when my soul gets lost. And still, I’m never lost to You. Help me to relinquish what I’ve held too tight of a grip on. Help me to lay all of my relationships on the altar before You. Any favor or time I have with people comes from You. You are the Source I draw from for my needs.
Relieve me of my need to control what I’m not in charge of and show me how to trust you in all of the small things, even what my child loses at school. You care about the details, so I can have confidence that you care about the complexities within me. Teach me how to keep believing the best in people because you created them to reflect You. And when I can’t find what I’m looking for, remind me that in You all my joy is found. Amen.

Take care & take heart,

Do you ever get the sense that the more you try to explain yourself, the more confusion you cause? I feel like I’ve created a lot of chaos lately. Funny enough, I thought I was leading myself through my relationships with the best of intentions. But perspective is humbling. Time brings understanding. Failure has something to say; something to teach.

The most perplexing thing for me now that I’m on the other side of these conversations is that so much prayer went into them. How could it all have gone so wrong? I thought I heard from God. I thought I laid it all on the altar. And maybe I did, and He’s allowing me feel exposed as a failure anyway. Maybe He knows how badly I need to sit at Jesus’s feet.

For that, I’m grateful. For quite some time, I’ve sensed I’ve needed recalibrated. But I fight being still. I feel more productive striving for perfection. There are small payoffs I can find in that. Validation, in any capacity from authority or familiar faces. It never lasts, but it is a scorecard for how I’m doing. Until I score poorly with people, like I’m conscious of now.

So if this is the Lord humbling me like I think He is, then I want to sit close to the throne of mercy. I know it will cost me my own immediate comfort. What I’m noticing is that when I get still, I find myself anxious. When I let myself get to resting heart rate, to really feel the freedom to be myself, I find reason to try harder. I think I’ve trained people how to value me by the way I rely so heavily on people’s approval. I feed off of people’s responses and their opinions of me and I navigate my way in the world from there. That results in vacillating between being too much and never enough. This isn’t new research I’m reporting on myself, but I think the urgency to surrender this to the King is greater.

So my takeaway question from feeling raw after conversations and experiencing the fallout from my decisions is: where am I placing my value? Where am I lacking inner peace and the ability to let Jesus overwrite my identity into His will?

The easy places to start identifying my overcompensation are at home and with my work. The people that love me have pointed out that I try way too hard. But when I stop trying, people outside of that circle have feedback for me to try harder. It’s a painful place to surrender my perceived need to be understood and valued for what I internally experience. It’s absolutely crushing on tough days like today.

And yet I’m grateful tonight to be poor in spirit. I feel a richness in the truth that when I am weak, Jesus lights a grace-filled path to fortitude. When I come up short in my marriage, motherhood, or my job, I can find His sufficiency at the end of every desperate prayer. He’s never abandoned me when I have a heart to build character. He shows up when I want to get better and not stay bitter. And that’s a generous starting point for underserving me.

There’s so much of me that wants to make my world smaller; to tighten up on the circle of trust that I keep. So I’m praying that the Lord will provide me with the accountability to use my life how He sees fit. To share the parts of my world with others if it means investing in His Kingdom. I want to live like James in the Bible who shared that we can count it all joy: every trial, all of the pain that’s part of the process.

I want to live a life that’s held steadfast by his love. A life held by His truth, to carry me through to the other side of what I need to learn through this. I’ve been listening to TAYA’s new album that came out this past week. Her voice has brought so many Hillsong soundtracks into churches and mainstream music. This new offering has not disappointed. One of the tracks I keep coming back to today is called “Jesus > Everything” and it’s been manna for me.

She sings,

Everything I have
Everything I’ve made
If it’s not Your will
Then strip it all away
Bind me to your heart
A tether that won’t break
And lead me to the cross
Where all else fades away
And it’s Jesus
Jesus over everything

Performed by TAYA, Written by Benjamin Hastings, Jason Ingram, Taya Gaukrodger, Produced by Jon Guerra, Jason Ingram

I want what she sings. Jesus over everything in my life. Praying that I will surrender myself over to Him again and again. Praying that for you, too.

Take care & take heart,

I recurrently have tension living inside of me. I hold two extremes in either hand and feel caught between them. There’s a big part of me that wants to share everything I’ve walked through the last several months and at the same time, I don’t want to shed light on even a single detail of my year. It’s the choice of being authentic about my experience and withholding what is still unfinished within me.

It’s the tension of loving my life or wishing it looked like something else. The contradiction of longing for my kids to get just a little older; to gain just a little more independence and at the same time being overcome with Peter Pan syndrome, wanting to freeze time with them. The longing to have a full-time career and the blessing it is to have flexibility as I work from home. There’s the battle between wanting to let the Lord refine every part of me and struggling to release all of the ugly sides of me I fight to control, what I desperately try to keep hidden.

Ultimately, what all of my striving has led me to was my doctor’s office. Last October, after months of headaches, loss of appetite, blurry vision, spontaneous body tremors that kept me being able to drive my car confidently, and feeling like I had the weight of the world on my shoulders at all times, I went to see my doctor. And while I didn’t walk out with a script, what I was diagnosed with was work burnout and mom guilt. My relationship with food had shifted, beginning in June. Not out of intention, but the stress I had built up caused my body to not be interested. I’d make food for my family and go pour myself a bowl of Cheerios after several failed attempts to find something that sounded good. The joy in food was lost, although I knew I had to keep eating if I wanted the tremors to stop.

What was clear through my doctor’s compassionate eyes was that I needed to talk to someone. For the last several years of my life, I wished I could talk to a licensed professional, but never thought I had enough going on to merit the need. Humility came knocking when I realized my doctor was right, and I actually had real issues that needed the space to be worked through. That was all of the permission I needed to start therapy.

For the last 4 months, I’ve seen a therapist every week thanks to tele-counseling. I’m seeing so many of the ways I take on stress through my responsibilities as a coach’s wife, a mom, and a remote employee. It’s revealed years of mental and emotional strain that snowballed from pressure in my life. And just like much of the tension I hold, I’m trying to learn how to have healthy ambition in my job and have contentment in the fact that I don’t work full-time right now. There’s so much I need to pay attention to when it comes to listening my husband’s needs and then being able to share mine with him without keeping score of who’s outdoing the other in love. I’m flawed in so many ways, but I’m gaining insight into how my value exceeds my human condition because of the 33 years Jesus spent on Earth.

Being a mom to two boys under the age of three has produced some of the most testing moments of my life. The smallest occurrence at home can reveal both the state of my heart and the fragility of my mind. If you could’ve seen my undoing at a library book ripping in several directions due to a brotherly battle for my attention one Friday morning, you would be embarrassed for me. There’s a guilt that comes from raising littles and having your own identity and responsibilities outside of motherhood. And so many days, I’m desperate for my kids to understand I’m doing my best. But they’re only kids and I take on the guilt of putting the pressure I’m trying to relieve within myself on them.

I’ve grown self-conscious around others about how much stress I carry, especially when it’s the same stress that just repeats itself in all of my efforts to release it for good. A bell will go off in my brain after I share with someone about how taxing it is to work from home with small kids, to not share about that again for an adequate amount of time. I tell myself to try not to talk about how stressful finances feel to me. I’ve made an idol out of them too often — I know this. Still, it causes me to worry when I don’t need to and panic in the uncertainty of my hourly pay that depends heavily on me needing to take care of my kids first. There’s not a day that I don’t battle envy. Yes, with materialism, but primarily with believing everyone is more content with their lives than I am. That they have something inside of them that I just don’t have. I’m working through the shame of my complexity while working towards a spirit of gratitude and wholeness.

I’m learning how to live in the tension of so many things that are both within and out of my control. So often, I wish I could articulate all of the frustrations, the stress, and the weight I profoundly feel to the people in my life in a way I could be assured they understand me. That’s a gift I seldom experience and an expectation too high to put on people I love. But I’m grateful for Jesus. I’m wrecked by His empathy. I’ll never get over the fact that I’m not too much for Him. That the stress I find myself both carrying and creating for myself is not out of reach for His compassion. That He’s a refuge in the countless times I’m troubled.

I am a walking contradiction living with the tension of being bought at a price by Jesus’s ultimate sacrifice of love, and not yet being Home in heaven just yet. Therapy has provided me the space to work through the broken things within me and still see the good He’s redeeming every day. To still see that I hold value, even when my work feels like I don’t contribute to anything that can be measured and seen as a success. That I’m worth investing in myself even as I feel guilty about spending my time away from my work or my family. It’s a marathon and not a sprint. I feel as thought I’ve just begun establishing a training regimen and I’m a long way from arriving at the finish line, but there’s something sanctifying about the refinement process.

Not long ago, I was questioning why God designed me the way that he did, with so many feelings and strong emotions. What I was really after was finding an answer for the meaning of it all. My life. My purpose. Why I wrestle with so many things other people don’t. Or appear not to, at surface level. There was a moment of pivot, when my mind shifted to a different question. What if God wants to work all of the mess going on within my heart, the chaos of my mind, the stress of home here on Earth so that I can serve a greater purpose in eternity?

What if I get to heaven some day and all of the refinement that I allowed Him to do through me and all of the rubble I sat in before being ready to rebuild was for a heavenly purpose? What if Heaven is richer because I’ve known stress and I’ve lived through tension? What if my ability to communicate through what I feel contributes to grander worship to Him and deeper joy for His presence? Is this what it means to store up for ourselves treasures in Heaven? Is there eternal value in giving Jesus agency to refine every part, every hidden side of me?

I have to believe in the yes of all of this. One day, when I stand before Jesus, I’d like to think that in his perfect timing, He will reveal all of the details of my life to me I’m desperate to know now. Until then, I’m grateful for what He’s teaching me between the now and the not yet. How to hold the tension well and give space for processing it. The headaches still come on every time there’s a hint of stress. My loss of appetite is still something I deal with from time to time. None of this can be microwaved into a success story. But I trust that the process of giving my life over to Him will continue to bring on the reward of knowing Him better and the joy of being fully known and understood by Him.

Praying you experience that where you’re at, too.

Take care & take heart,