The Steadfast Heart

One of the things that has pressed heavy on my heart and mind has been to ask deeper and better questions on how to lead. In high school and college, I believed that I was merely practicing how to be a leader for the day I was put in charge of something.  I’ve realized more than ever this year that leadership in all of its complexities works its absolute best when I choose to lead myself first.  

Bill Hybels once said, “You are the most difficult person you will ever lead.”  For me, that’s one of those statements you hear and can’t move past until it is given the proper thought it demands.  His words have walked with me for years, but this year especially, they have served as an anthem for me as a learning leader.

Do you ever feel like you have voices stuck in your head?  I hear my parents’ voices in my head as an adult every single day—things that they would say to me again and again growing up.  Maybe it was because I was a difficult child to parent.  Maybe I needed to hear things multiple times.  Or maybe they knew that someday I’d be on my own and would need those little reminders to come across the ticker of my mind. Either way, the voices I heard growing up have never left my head ever after I moved out of their home.  And I’m so glad they’re still here.

Today was one of those challenging days as a leader.  It was one of those days where you just want to go to bed and sleep through your alarm in the morning.  I wish I could say I was an awesome leader today.  But today, most of all, I failed to lead myself.  I didn’t set the tone for the people around me.  In fact, I set gossip traps and tried to get as many people on board my train called Natalie’s Self Pity Party Express.  As I was driving home defeated from the day, I heard my dad’s voice come across my mind saying, “Natalie, you are a leader whether you believe it or not; whether you want to be one or you don’t.  You are a leader and it’s your job to steward that gift.” 

I think the most testing part about leadership is when I fail to lead myself first before trying to lead others.  Sometimes I thrive on using my authority flippantly because I like to be in the business of getting things done, instead of recognizing that holding authority requires discernment and humble stewardship.  In the movie Fireproof, Kirk Cameron’s character is told by his good friend and co-worker that he has to “lead his heart” and not be deceived by his emotions.  How true that is for a tender heart like mine.  I have a tendency to feel things so deeply and to believe things so strongly, that I have a challenging time not acting directly out of those two things. 

You may not be in charge of anyone.  You may have a lot of people in charge of you.  But regardless, you and I are the same.  We have to lead ourselves.  We have to make decisions for ourselves every day.  I find that my responses to leadership opportunities immediately reflect what my heart has been dwelling on, in, or around.  Sometimes my answer is Hallmark movies, especially this time of year. Other answers may include my Spotify playlist, the podcast I just finished, the book I’m currently reading. It could be the sermon from Sunday or just the opposite: my lack of spending time soaking in what Jesus has to say about leadership and treating others, all which can be found in the Bible next to my bed.  

What has your heart been dwelling on in this season of your life?  If you think really about it, do any of your responses to the people you lead (which may simply be yourself), reflect the current state of your heart? This may be shocking, but I have both of my hands straight up in the air right now! 

One of my favorite things about growing up in Cherry Hills family is the overall sense that we are in this together.  I cherish the fact that we are all learning how to love and be loved.  Often times the phrases we would say together at Cherry Hills are like voices in my head now that I live in Wisconsin.  The banner over my heart looks a lot like what you see hanging on the walls of the worship center: I am fighting my tendency to drift towards shallow Christianity.  I truly want to lead myself and others how Jesus led.  I love that he drew people in to him by living a life of equal grace and truth.  He led by humbly serving others (even his enemies) in a culture that pressured him to serve himself first.

More than ever, I want to stay in tune to leading my heart well.  If this was a sermon, this would be the “yes, but how?” section in my message notes.  And with my dad’s voice declaring this verse over me, here is what I would fill in the blanks with: Trust in the Lord with all of your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.  In all your ways, acknowledge him and he will direct your paths (Proverbs 3:5-6).

One thing I’ve always seen proven true is when I acknowledge Jesus and lean on him for direction, is my leadership and communication with other people gets better.  It creates a “rising tide lifts all boats” mentality among the team that I’m apart of and best of all, I become a winsome person that my boss can enjoy working with.  

In the words of Louie Giglio, my footing of faith is directly proportional to the way that I care about people and execute my job in my organization.  On leading yourself, Louie says this, “You may not have control over every decision that gets made, but you do have 100% control of your attitude, your joy, and your effort.”  

In 2017, I have gravitated towards leadership books because I know I have so much to learn and they’re one resource I have that can help me grow.  

Some of the books that I have read or listened to on Audible that have been incredibly helpful for me are:

• How to Lead When You’re Not in Charge by Clay Scroggins 
• Seven Practices of Effective Ministry by Andy Stanley
• The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John C. Maxwell
• The Hiding Place by Corie Ten Boom
• Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin
• The Dream Manager by Matthew Kelly

A few podcasts I’ve found encouraging: 

• Don’t Waste Your Work by Louie Giglio from the Passion City Church Podcast (Posted on January 29, 2017)
• The Ken Coleman Show
• The Glorious in the Mundane Podcast with Christy Nockels (one of the best recommendations I’ve ever received—thank you, Jenny!!!) 

As I finish processing through my leadership immaturity from today, I want to take ownership of the fact that there was never not a time throughout my grumbling today that I was not in charge of my attitude, my joy, or my effort.  Tomorrow I am going to have to walk into my workplace and apologize to the people that had to Clorox wipe themselves off from all of my spew. I am always accountable for me. If you saw the movie “Wonder” you may recognize the precept, “Your deeds are your monuments.”  Yep–nailed it!  

So if you are anything like me or find living out Christianity in the workplace or even at home to be a struggle, know this: we are going to fail in front of people. The bigger failure is not choosing to let those failures develop character within us and we do that by owning up to the things we did wrong and the people we may have hurt.  I will be the first person to tell you that this is not fun and unfortunately (and also fortunately) I’ve had a lot of practice building character.  But you are a leader whether you believe it or not; whether you want to be one or you don’t.  You are a leader and it’s your job to steward that gift.

After I close this laptop tonight, I am going to dwell in Proverbs 3:5-6 and the absolute grace of tomorrow.  With all of our hearts, I hope we can both know tonight that we can trust Jesus with the things that bring us joy and the situations that bring us grief.  We can choose to acknowledge Him when things don’t go our way or when we don’t understand.  

And if we do, He says that He will be with us.  I love that. This Christmas season as I picture the manger scene, I find myself in tears each time I whisper to Jesus, “You came!” He came into my mess by choice and for that I can walk in the power of “with”—that Jesus is Emmanuel.  He’s withme. 

Take care & take heart,

Natalie 

Originally written December 17, 2017

Have you ever asked yourself the question, “What am I doing with my life?” After a season of doing life a certain way, have you ever been stopped by a pressing feeling that your life is calling for a change? Whether you’re aware of what that change might be or what it may mean for you, you can’t deny those small stirrings. Those small stirrings are what lead to the bigger questions. Those questions eventually find their answers and those answers are what produce the change. 

Eighteen months ago, the small stirrings in my heart were to take my career in a different direction. After seven years of life in the cosmetology industry, my dreams were halted by state licensure regulations. To transfer your license to the state of Wisconsin, you must have 1,800 hours of cosmetology school under your belt or five years of experience behind the chair. Most states, including Illinois where I completed my education only require 1,500 hours, which is what I had completed, combined with only six months of behind the chair experience. 

Hunter had been commuting an hour one way to his college campus in order to complete his final year of college during our first six months of marriage while I worked at the salon. For me to go back to cosmetology school for three months would have eliminated our income as well as the fact that we only had five weeks of turnaround time from when Hunter accepted the teaching position in Wisconsin, to when we moved across the state line. 

But I truly believe that God was working out His bigger plan for me in the months prior to our move that exceeded my small ambitions. In 2015, I completed the twelve-month cosmetology program in just over eight months, all while planning a wedding and working at the salon in my spare time. When I finally got behind the chair, I was exhausted.  The amount of pressure I had placed on myself to make a living, to be an all-star newlywed wife, and to have my adulthood all together at twenty-two was crushing. 

I begged our salon management to allow me to take on three different roles in order to make rent and pay for gas, all while living for my giant dream of being a knockout hair stylist. But in the process, I lowered the quality of life for me and my new husband. I came home multiple nights after 8:30, missing the time to make dinner (not that I was good at it or even enjoyed botching yet another Pinterest recipe) or to have enough focus to hear about his day.  I was failing at the things I thought a wife was supposed to be able to execute flawlessly. As a result, I lived my life out of an intense stress and after months into this new routine, my soul began to crave something different.

The most excruciating part about walking away from life at the salon was the reality that my plans had failed. I feared I was using this move as a cop-out. I feared that when the rubber hit the road, I really didn’t have what it took to do hair. I spent years watching some of the best people in the business own their craft and I was tapping out after six short months. Sometimes I replied to the shocked question of, “You’re not going to do hair anymore?! You just finished all of that schooling!” with a prideful story about how I was burnt out (which was true) and how I thought a life in business was a better choice anyway.

I went from defending my decision to choose a life in cosmetology to practically disowning it. I tried winning back the respect all of the people I lost when I didn’t go into business after college.  The truth was, for the first time in my life, I was forced to build my identity around something other than a career. And as the music faded on my dreams and I began questioning my decisions and the God that allowed me to dream really big dreams, I realized that my plans weren’t bullet proof. My plans had just failed. 

And in the weeks leading up to our move, my plans continued to fail. I applied to thirty-one places in Wisconsin, some even as far as an hour commute out of absolute desperation. I tried submitting multiple resumes, job sites, and career paths. I applied for sales positions, secretary postings, and reached out to companies in fields I had never even heard of. I spent weeks grasping at straws and most times, I never received so much as a rejection letter. Just silence. 

I was sitting in a puddle of my own questions and doubts. Was it a mistake to go into hair after college? Was is a mistake not to network my way into a life in business in my hometown? If I would have gone into administration or management like the piece of paper I have framed says, would I have gotten a job quicker in Wisconsin? Why am I so ready to hang up my apron and move on from hair after I dreamed of this for so long? 

The pressure to land a job only increased after realizing upon moving in June, our rent would literally double, we would now be in charge of paying for our own insurance, cell phone plan, and all things adult-like our parents had waived while we were only living on my income, and the minor detail that Hunter’s first paycheck wouldn’t be wired into our checking account until after school started in September. This was just the tiny price we were going to have to pay for wanting to have time to get acclimated in our new town a few months before the school year began.

Days before we were to be packing up the Uhaul, I was at the salon after close packing up my bag of tools after another shift, when my phone buzzed a couple of times.  Chick-fil-A had just opened up a few months prior in our city and the Owner/Operator had quickly become a treasured favorite in our family.  I remember reading her text, crying, and then driving home trying to process what this might mean.

She told me that her former co-worker at Chick-fil-A when she worked in Raleigh was now an Operator in Wisconsin. I’d probably have a commute, but he was interested in interviewing me to come on his team once we had moved. 

“I might be a team member at Chick-fil-A,” I thought as I pictured life in a red polo and coming home smelling like poultry. The tears came from realizing that this was not a life I had ever planned, even when I was looking for jobs at sixteen. Then the tears continued to stream down my face on my drive home as I sighed in huge relief that finally, I had a lead on a job. There was hope, even if working at Chick-fil-A for a few months meant it’d buy me time to look elsewhere. 

Through thirty-one job applications, I had arrived at such a place of humility in a short amount of time. I don’t mean that in a good way. I mean that God literally had to run over my pride with a dump truck, back it up, and do it a couple more times before I arrived at Humble Village, and even then I sat at that table with my arms crossed. The reality was, I was refusing to eat the humble pie God was serving. I cried.  I played the victim.  I degraded myself and my prior career decisions that at one point in time I had believed were Jesus-led.  

But once I truly got over myself, I began to see the truth that a different story was being written for me. See, I had thought that maybe after the salon chapter in my life closed, God was just forgetting to turn the page on what was next for me.  But He wasn’t forgetting anything.  I was just reading the wrong book. 

I hope you’ll keep following His story for me in the blog posts to follow.  My hope is that you might identify somewhere between paragraphs with the truth that when your plans fall apart and my plans fail, we are being held safely in His grip–even when we may not believe it, feel it, or see it. 

Take care & take heart,

Natalie

Originally written November 2017

I have a distinct memory of my dad relaying to adolescent me that I didn’t like change. At thirteen, I was surprised that someone else could tell me something about myself that I didn’t already know. The obvious response for a middle school girl like me was to deny the outrageous concept that my father could have any insight about my strong-willed personality, the indistinguishable personality that was knitted from his very DNA. But that didn’t mean that I didn’t think about what he had said. 

Not liking change and being resistant to it was a trait that to me, was drenched in all things negativity and in return, I resisted the fact that I was resistant to change.  That alone proved my dad absolutely right. Thankfully, it was never about scorekeeping for my parents; it was about coaching up my character.  What became helpful for me to learn was yes, I do not like change. But that also allowed me to learn that sometimes change is necessary. Sometimes change is good. Sometimes change is inevitable. And sometimes change isn’t meant to be understood. 

The coping mechanism for a change-resistor like myself is to give change a better name, so I have arrived at the word: seasons. Growing up in the Midwest, the changing seasons are engrained in the calendar of my spirit. Come September, I welcome fall-colored flannels and pumpkin spice lattes like my long-lost friends. By December I pray for all things snow covered and white.  March always seems like a long time coming and I love the break in the cold air it brings.  Come June, I am psychologically programmed to crave the sunshine and my sweet iced tea. 

Oh, how I wish I could welcome changing relationships like I do the seasons.  For most of my life, I have felt like I am either one step ahead of most friendships (perhaps the more realistic description is way out in left field of an idealistic relationship) or three steps behind.  What I’ve found myself whispering in my prayers since my childhood is the deep desire for the effort and care I place in my friendships to be reciprocated. 

But most times, they’re not.  Or the favor I hold with people changes with the seasons.  Other times I may hit strides with certain friends that I come to realize later were merely circumstantial.  

In college, I can remember laying awake at night hoping that someday when I was married, I’d never forget what it was like to be single. I feared that married years would blur the memory of what it was like to be single or to date and the possibility that it may diminish my relatability with the friends who hadn’t arrived at that stage just yet. 

In the first year of our marriage, Hunter and I looked at each other so many times and promised each other to never forget what it was like to be married and not have kids.  To us, everyone had kids and the not having them part was a total prevention of connecting with other adults. Everyone, and I literally mean that, told us that we would make more friends our age once we started having kids and joined that season of life. What a frustrating reality.  A reality that we were just beginning to adjust and adapt to, by the way, until my positive pregnancy test had other plans. 

While I’m being honest, the season I’m currently walking through has been quiet and at times desolate. Making friends can be tough, especially when you move.  I want to applaud and award all of the adults who move and make friends like it’s nothing. If I’m describing you, you are to be highly commended on such novel and riveting accomplishment. But if you are like me, putting yourself out there can be challenging.  I attend everything I am invited to in our little town these days, but the second I reach out to try to plan something on my own, I can’t get any takers.  So for all of you recent Uhaul users with new friends, please write a “How to Make Friends for Dummies” book with me in mind.

One thing I’ve learned about myself is that I feel things on an incredibly deep level that transparently speaking, can freak some people out.  As an external processor, I can get on to topics and tangents that come across intense and overwhelming.  Sometimes talking about the weather seems way too surface level to entertain me because I have a profound soul craving to dig deeper into the human heart and mind.  While most choose thinking simply, I naturally choose analytical complexity. 

I wish knowing this about myself would be able to solve what I believe is my social ineptness.  Occasionally I have those reality check moments when the way I perceive a friendship as incredibly special, like “best friend” special is exposed for not being as true for the other person. And of course, nothing brings this to light better than when a friend gets engaged or enters into a season that you’re just not in at the moment. 

I can look back on my adolescent years and find so much pain from friendships that fell apart and fell apart hard.  My first real experience in middle school of having a group of girl friends that seemed to accept me turned into a season of immense isolation by the time I got into high school.  Their “Monica & Rachel” friendship lived on long after I came across a journal entry stating they wished Natalie Nelsen had never been born or been accepted into their group. 

I’ve experienced betrayal of the cruelest kind by best friends and boyfriends, college roommates changing their mind on how they felt about me and letting everyone know, being third string, left out, stood up, and enough at-home-alone-and-uninvited-on-a-Friday-night situations to leave me on a therapist’s couch for the rest of my life. 

So you can imagine, I know every Taylor Swift lyric that has ever been written and I can recognize the seasons changing better than the weatherman.  But in a very backwards and upside down way, I am grateful to have experienced those friendships and to have known heartache and devastation on such a powerful level.  Time has allowed me to see all of the ways that I too contributed to those situations and every single ounce of those experiences have been engrained into my character and my perception of the changing seasons. 

I ask myself, “Where do I go from here?” recurrently.  So here it is: I have accepted that the relationships I had last year look very different this year.  The friendships I am so blessed to even have right now may not be standing by the time I take my last breath.  Any friendship or favor I have with people is such a gift, even if they may stand for only a season.  The surface level conversations I have with others even when I desire to go so much deeper—even those exchanges fall under God’s favor on me.  

There are so many times I have failed to recognize that I am sinking in an ocean of His grace.  Isn’t it crazy how we can get in the way of ourselves so often?  I am so rich in my relationships with Hunter and our parents. Blessed beyond measure is not a heavy enough of statement to truly express how grateful I am for a husband who sees me and listens to my heart and for parents and in-laws who invest so much time into my life even when I may reciprocate the same attentiveness. 

And with that, I have come to recognize that I am truly wired to always crave deep friendships.  It’s taken me an incredible amount of time to understand that the void I tend to habitually feel is only meant to be filled by Jesus.  That may sound insane, but I believe it.  Ever thought, “There’s gotta be more to life than this?”.  Stacie Orrico said it best in 2003, but she’s absolutely right.  And there is more to life than this.  The gap I sense in relationships is supposed to be there. I am supposed to long for more. More is Jesus.  More is the friendship and the relationship that only He can give.  

The seasons may change with the people placed in my life, but my security can always be found in the person of Jesus Christ, who knows both true friendship and isolation irrefutably well.  That is the hope we can cling to in this life!  

If you are familiar with the Enneagram assessment, it’s probably blatantly obvious to you that I am a true four.  Fours love to be unique individualists that hold significance while at the same time wrestling with their uniqueness, causing them to feel lonely and yearning to be understood. 

And just like my dad knew the heart of thirteen-year-old me, I am so grateful to know and trust a heavenly Father who understands me for all my uniqueness. Who meets me in my loneliness moments. Who understands my disappointment when friendships don’t feel reciprocated.  Who validates my significance.  Who is the creator of every season.  And who remains the same when everything changes. 

I may never understand change, but I love the fact that the Author of Change fully understands and deeply loves me. 

Take care & take heart, 

Natalie

For more on the Enneagram assessment of a four or to hear my personality described to a T: https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/type-4/

Originally written November 6, 2017