The Steadfast 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,

My soul could use a lift this week. I get ahead of myself too often with the to-do’s and the stress and the striving. I set expectations for all of my achievements to feel like they’re significant successes, but what I think it actually simplifies to is just busyness. I have exhausted myself by my own busyness.

In honest reflection, I experience loneliness more than some people might, so I fill the void of it with the things that make me feel like I contribute something into the world. I’m good at staying busy. While I long for community, I settle for taking on tasks in my day-to-day. But I think the side effect of the busyness at times is a fogginess of what is true.

You’d think I’d love social media as a means to connect to a world I feel isolated from. But the reality is, it plays into the envy of what I’m not, what I don’t have, or who I’m not with. Every time I think I’m good to handle scrolling, I’m confronted with the fact I’m not. Because seeing people get to experience the things I long for with the people I’ve been missing stings so bad I couldn’t breathe through my own tears even this week. Social media always tends to shine a light on my own emotional immaturity in exhausting ways.

I’ve learned I have a tendency to withdraw when I hit those emotional plateaus. I withhold information about myself that I freely share when I’m in a healthy space, until I can’t hold it anymore and it spews out sideways. The last two days have been spew days for innocent bystanders caught in my wake. Consider this my public apology to the women in the Central parking lot.

I’ve been feeling a tension coming on as the transition into the fall school year is coming. I fear another isolating winter is ahead of me. I miss so many of my family members, now spread out into multiple states across the country with the inability to make future plans to see them. The boys will have a new schedule for daycare that I can’t help and will put a strain on my ability to work productively, regularly. I’ve taken my son to the doctor for unscheduled visits multiple times in the span of 3 days and my mind can only think in deductibles and money lost from not working. I feel shame that my mind goes to that before it goes to gratitude that he’s healthy.

There are too many bridges I’m trying to cross before I get to them. And what comes out in conversation is that my soul feels strained right now. I feel the stress and also the ridiculousness of it. Fifteen minutes ago I was sighing heavily at spilled milk on every cushion and cover on my armchair. Before that I had a headache from my kids arguing over a toy. An hour ago it was a missing invoice I needed to record for work. It’s laughable at how much I sweat the small stuff. If only I could laugh right now and not take myself so seriously!

So I’m not sure if it’s a matter of my mental busyness taking on too many things at once that adds to what I’m experiencing or a failure to yield to the Holy Spirit more readily. Or both. But I know I’ve steered myself off course and lost hold of the truth instead of clinging to it.

I found encouragement in these words penned by Alicia Britt Chole in her book Anonymous: Jesus’ Hidden Years and Yours:

When tempted in the layer of appetite, Jesus did not deny the existence of his natural longings and feelings. He did, however, intentionally upgrade the authority of his will by empowering it with God’s Word.
Feelings were designed to follow, not lead. So when God’s will and Word take the driver’s seat in our lives, our feelings and desires are free to follow cleanly without regrets in safe boundaries.

Alicia Britt Chole

Perhaps stillness tempers feelings in ways that busyness does not. Maybe my relentless striving actually erodes away at opportunities to be approachable and present in my relationships. To actively listen. To allow my soul to rest. And it’s realizations at times like these that I’m extra grateful Jesus shows us how to do life with people. How to replace busyness with steadfastness.

Take care & take heart,

Often times the way we view ourselves does not reflect the way others see us. Some people prefer it that way, to keep their cards closer to their chest. It’s easier to not expose our whole selves because it’s less of a heartache if trust gets broken. Some people choose to portray a false version of themselves out of fear of rejection of their true self. There are countless versions of ourselves we can offer to the world in an effort to make friends.

In the last few years, I’ve questioned if who I am was truly created for friends and for community. I know what the Bible has to say about it. I know what the mental health studies report. I understand the lie that’s at the root of my thinking. It doesn’t change the ache in my soul that I’ve battled for a significant part of my life.

Part of the wrestling for me is feeling like I consistently overshare myself with friends. What seems wholly authentic and true to me, I share. In the best of times, it draws out meaningful conversation that offers growth. In the disappointing moments, I’m received with silence without an explanation. In typical conversations, there is unbalanced vulnerability.

And if I can just release this frustration here: I am exhausted from hearing about how friends forgot to respond to me. It’s been such a pattern in my life, that I come to expect a 2-week turn around time from hearing back after I reach out. I’ve heard all of the reasoning as to why. I have grace for life that happens. I’ve been in my own darkest hours, I’ve been a new mom, I’ve moved multiple times, I’ve been a working mom with two kids and a husband that works incredibly hard at coaching. I can understand and empathize. But I believe you get around to what’s important to you. And I’ve gotten to a point where my spirit has felt so disheartened for so long that I am giving myself the grace to stop striving so hard to hold onto half-hearted friendships.

Ask me who my best friend is, and the answer will never change. My mom. Ask me who I feel gets me the most and my dad is the automatic response. There was a period of time where I felt like I was defective for this, that I’m supposed to have friends my age, in my own walk of life. But the truth is, I sense more wholeness in these friendships than I do anywhere else on earth. The beautiful thing I’ve also worked out being friends with my parents, the people that unconditionally love me, is that even they can’t fully satisfy my longing for friendship. But Jesus can.

And it’s in their friendship, of showing me that my longing for more is a heavenly thing, that I can lean into Jesus’s presence and trust it. Often times when I find myself writing, it’s because I’ve had a heartache of a week. That’s no less real now. The week has been challenging, exposing, raw, and messy. It’s also been full of opportunity to try again, to get out of my own way, for growth and redemption. I find myself longing for my promised eternity in heaven, without any of this. I’ve been trying to cut through the noise of my own thoughts and reflect on what Jesus is trying to say to me.

What I think he wants me to keep believing is that he is the truest friend. My truest friend. When I feel like I’m too much or never enough, he asks if he can steady my soul. When I want to pack up my feelings and never share them with another human ever again, he asks me to keep unfolding them before him. In my all of my unhealthy and unhelpful thoughts, he shows me what’s not from him. Jesus then replaces my stress with his truth.

Often times I believe the Lord shows me things through my three-year-old. Next to Griffin’s bedside one Sunday night was a crown he had made at church. I asked him to tell me about it, thinking we’d talk about the stickers that covered the rim. Instead he declared, “Jesus is the King! And, and the King is our friend!” I hope I never get over the fact that the King of the entire universe has declared himself my friend. On days when it can seem like I’m the kid that’s picked last for the team, Jesus has chosen me first.

I don’t want to write my life off as a constant disappointment, or that I’ll keep believing I’m the odd man out. That’s a lie from the enemy. But what I do want to proclaim is even if, and even when I don’t experience the reciprocity my heart fully longs for, it won’t rattle me. It won’t change the friend I choose to be to others. My identity won’t get tangled up in the amount of people I can call on when I need the encouragement. I believe Jesus will go before me and provide the community he calls me to be apart of if I put in the work. I’m grateful that I can trust him. I’m indebted to his grace.

The song below has been manna for this season of life. It has vindicated my downcast spirit on countless days and spun the message of truth in my heart that Jesus is the truest friend. Our truest friend.

Take care & take heart,

Names | Elevation Worship & Maverick City Music feat. Tiffany Hudson
[Verse 1]
You are the medicine
The only cure for everything I feel within
Redeeming what was lost and all that could have been
Oh, this is a healing kind of love

[Verse 2]
You are the truest friend
Staying through the night when I was at my end
Comforting my heart till it was light again
Oh, this is a faithful kind of love
Yes, it is

[Chorus]
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace
Immanuel, God with us, You're here with me
Wonderful Counselor
The government is resting on Your shoulders

[Verse 3]
You are the final word
You alone decide when every page will turn
So I will trust Your timing, I will rest secure
Oh, this is a steady kind of love
Oh-oh-oh-oh, You are