Have you ever felt like your life was at one point not yours to live yet? Or at least you weren’t sure how to do it? Well I have!
I have found this to be a beautiful process yet frustrating one at sometimes. Let me explain. I was born and raised in a Christian home. I grew up going to church, reading the bible, going to Sunday school, participating in junior high and high school youth groups and the list goes on. Around my Freshman year in high school (2000), if not a little earlier, my Mom (whom I lived with full time because my parents are divorced) became on fire for the Lord in a completely new way. She began learning about the powers of the Holy Spirit, satanic warfare, speaking in tongues, etc. Thankfully, she had the wisdom to pull me under her wing, as mothers typically do, and download and teach me about everything that she was learning so that I could learn it too!
Weekend after weekend after weekend, my mom and I would sit at our favorite coffee shop, Diedrichs, and would sip on our delicious, totally addictive drinks (My moms: Nonfat Latte steamed at 130 degrees…Mine: Vanilla Latte at whatever regular temperature they chose to steam it at haha). Actually, let me be honest. ***SIDE NOTE: My mom is and was addicted to coffee. I wasn’t yet. But, I was determined to enjoy it and did because it allowed me to spend quality time with my mom. So, I quickly went from drinking the really oh-so-sweet-it-runs-right-through-you drinks, like extra caramel frappacinos, to drinking hardcore espresso lattes because well, lets’ face it, coffee is addicting and so is the environment of being in great company!***
Anyway, I was always so grateful to my mom for pouring into me all that she was learning. Those quality times truely have helped make me into the woman that I am today. But, around the time that I went to college (Azusa Pacific University) I began feeling like a mindless Christian/person who was doing things because a person that I respected and admired had told me to or taught me to. I knew that those ways were wise, but I became ancy not feeling like I was the one who fully chose to live and think this way.
So like many college students, I went on a quest to figure out why I believed what I believed and what exactly that was. The silly thing is that I knew I wouldn’t land that far off from where I was because I trust my mom and know that she is a wise woman, but I had to make sure that my life was my own and that I chose it because I believed it.
This process was difficult. I found myself being stubborn and too busy to go to Church. So I stepped back from church for a little while and focused on getting through school and trying to love on my friends. I quickly became very dissolusioned by the church because now that I was on a quest to figure out God for myself, he suddenly made no sense to me at all. I became stubborn to opporating out of the spiritual gifts I knew I had because I didn’t want to seem like an over-the-top Christian. But, while I wasn’t opporating out of those gifts I felt numb and purposeless. I got distracted easily on this pursuit and became very confused about Christianity and it’s purpose. All the while, I still kept trying to figure out what I believed and why.
Long story short, I spent two years at a Christian University, trying to figure out what being a Christian really means. I learned a lot during this time about the value of taking time to make sure that my faith was my own. But, also realized that God put my mom in my life to download a wisdom into me that would have taken me longer to receive had it not been for her. My stubborness and desire to learn more about my own faith was being used and abused by the enemy in the meanwhile to distract me from what God was trying to bring me into.
However, though the enemy tried to divert me away from my beliefs during this searching period, I grew more stubborn to stick to my beliefs because I knew that I knew that I KNEW the Lord was real, mighty and powerful. I just wanted to claim it for myself. So I decided to fight for what I was taught rather than being diverted from it. I learned a lot about balance during this time. The balance of being a believer but also being able to love like a non-believer (I might just expand on that statement in a different blog later because it is very much a loaded statement).
Once I graduated from APU I moved out to Pasadena to start a life of my own and make decisions on my own. And inevitably, I realized that I did believe what it was that my mom taught me to believe. Because it was in the moments that I was opporating out of the spiritual gifts that my mom taught me about that I felt alive and most like myself. In the two years where I took a break, I didn’t feel like myself. Funny enough, I couldn’t figure out why I didn’t feel like myself until I was back to being myself and allowing myself to be used by Christ through spiritual gifts like speaking in tongues, prophecing, speaking words of knowledge (all of which only are done when the Lord does it through me). More than this, I realized that the basic spiritual truths (which I never doubted but wanted to explore more about) were ones of which I really WANTED to put all my trust in, rather than feeling forced to.
I could continue writing so much about this process, but with all this to way, it was a journey for me to test what I had been taught and what I was believing. At the end of it, I realized and decided that I believed it now because I wanted to and truely agreed in what I was taught. So, now I feel that I can say my life is my own, rather than my life being what my mom or anyone else wants my life to be. It just so happens that they have wound up being very similar to each other. But, this was a crucial process for me in maturing and growing into my own authority in Christ as well as an important development for my identity. Once I realized I truely believed these things out of my own heart, I stepped into a whole new freedom and understanding of my faith and why I chose to believe in God.
