“The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps.” Proverbs 16:9
For those of you who do not already know, last month I stepped down as a team leader, and I wanted to share with you how it came about, the personal struggles that have come with this transition, and what God has taught me through all of it.
How It Got Started
During all squad month, God brought me to a book called Redeeming Love, by Francine Rivers. I was hooked immediately and read it within only a few days. If you haven’t read it, I would encourage you to. It is based off the book of Hosea in the bible, and it taught me so much about God’s unconditional and redemptive love.
I cannot express to you how much I related to the girl character, Angel, in this book. Failed by her earthly fathers. Watching her mothers pain. During childhood having her love and innocence taken and tainted by the world. Feeling like a mistake, not wanting to live. The walls that surrounded her heart, the coldness she felt towards life, towards God, and towards men. The feelings of shame, unworthiness, and not deserving anything good in her life. Feeling like she didn’t deserve to be loved, and not knowing how to love someone back. Running away from every emotion. Realizing that even when a man did love her, he could never fully heal her, that God had to.
After I got done reading it, God impressed on my heart for me to write down my testimony, every dirty and painful detail. It was extremely emotionally draining to revisit my entire life. When it was done, I asked God what He wanted me to do with it, and He said, “Nothing for now. I just wanted you to re-process it all through writing.” With that being said, there were a few things in my testimony that I realized I had never really verbalized, and it wasn’t that I hadn’t processed through these things, but I felt like they were things the enemy still had a hold on because they were things I was still keeping in the dark. I was terrified of how people would react, how they would view me. The things in my life that happened to me and I had no control over were easier for me to talk about than the things I chose to do, because those were my choices and fell on me and me alone.
That’s when God let me to 1 John 1:5-7 which says, “… God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.”
Choosing To Walk in the Light
I wanted to walk fully in the light, and I felt like God was impressing on me to confront my squad mentor about it, I felt Him saying that the final step to my freedom was to say it out loud. I had to choose to bring it into the light, no matter what response or reprocussions came from it. So I did. I kind of already knew going into it what would happen, but I had to make that choice, of stepping up and obeying what God was asking me to do despite my fear of potentially being asked to step down.
Too much of my life was spent living in the dark and playing games, and I had made God a vow to be completely real and honest, no games, no walls, no false self, only the raw truth, because I desire growth and learning, I desire intimacy with God, and because thats how Jesus lead, with the truth.
Leadership and I decided to take some time to pray on it… and God brought me to this very deep realization:
Walking in the light doesn’t mean I don’t live with the consequences from the choices I have made. He is my father and I am his daughter, and sometimes He has to discipline us out of His love for us, in order for us to learn and grow. I know the person that God is calling me to be, and He is stepping me into that person more and more every single day. I also know that He has called me to lead, and I have already wasted too much of my life running from that calling. As far as leadership goes, do I want it? Yes, but I want God’s will more. He knows and sees the bigger picture. I know that He is the one who gives things and takes them away, so I also know that whatever happens, it is in His will, in His plan, and I am willing to follow where He leads, despite if I understand it or not.
So leadership felt that God was telling them that He wanted my full attention for this next season, to have time to dive further into my relationship with Him without the distractions that can sometimes come with leadership, so I stepped down.
The Lies
I think it comes at no surprise that the enemy seized this opportunity to throw at me every possible lie… That I was a failure, that I was being punished, that my mistakes disqualified me as a leader…
The enemy whispered…
This is what happens when you chose vulnerability, you better put those walls back up.
They don’t have your best interest in mind, you can’t trust them.
If only you had kept your mouth shut.
You believe in an organization that no longer believes in you.
Christianity claims that your sins are forgiven at the cross, but remember why you turned away from it in the first place, its not about grace and love, its about hypocrisy and judgment.
Even though you made those mistakes five years ago it still disqualifies you now.
I felt my mind being pulled in many different directions. I recognized the lies, and verbally expressed them, but I wanted to let you into what was being thrown around in my head.
The Process
While processing through it all, I asked God what He was trying to teach me in this, and He made it very clear that this situation needed to happen in order for me to recognize that I still struggled with feelings of failure. I knew that He was presenting me with a choice, to put my walls back up or to dive deeper, so I pressed into the pain. I decided to trust His will, and trust that He put my team and my leaders into my life, and to trust the goodness of their hearts and the fact they they hear God, and that they do love me and care about my growth. I whole heartily believe in what the world race stands for and what they do, and I decided that the devil must really hate this organization to try and drive a wedge into how I felt about it. I decided that he must really hate how much freedom I am walking in and how much I am growing for him to try so hard to tear me down.
About a week into the change, I came home to my tent and things flooded with toilet water, and I just broke down… it wasn’t about the water at all, it was just everything hitting me at once, and my team had no idea the extent of what I was feeling. So I told them what I was struggling with, and that I felt like I was distancing myself in order to be strong, but what I really needed was to be vulnerable and to be not okay right now.
A few days after that I sat them down and told them the part of my testimony that I had left out, and what God had been teaching me through it all, and what He was still walking me through, and that I refused to live in the dark. You know what? They didn’t judge me, they said it only made them love and respect me even more.
Me and the new team leader sat down and put all our cards on the table, giving each other insight into our struggles involving the leadership transition. I told her I had been struggling with finding the line between helping her, but not overstepping my boundaries. God made me realize that I wasn’t the only one struggling, that He had brought her into this position to grow her in other areas as well, to bring to the surface things she was struggling with. So one day I devoted my time and resources to her, giving her all the material that AIM had given me, every note, online test, training, etc., and told her I was here to answer any questions she may have but she was the leader now, and it was up to her to step up.
The Results
Yes, it was a difficult month for our team, but God has made several things abundantly clear to me in the past few days, and spoken to me through several people on my squad:
– I need to take things to God first and foremost, always, before going to others.
– In order to be a good leader, you have to be a good follower, you have to be willing to follow God and respect the people he puts in authority.
– Change starts with me, if I can’t have love and grace for myself I won’t be able to have love and grace for others.
– There is a difference between knowing and believing, and well I know that God loves me and that I am worthy, I have to believe it with every fiber of my being.
– I can uproot the weeds in my life, the lies all day long, but if I am just leaving it there, if I am not planting a different seed in its place, that weed will just continue to grow back.
I know that I am not the only world racer to go through a difficult leadership transition, so I just wanted to encourage you that while every transition may look a little different, God is always ultimately in control. Leadership changes happen, team changes happen, squad leaders are about to be raised up, route changes happen… things happen… which is why you have to abandon all expectations of what you think your race may look like and be willing to follow where God leads, because if you make your race about a title, about the politics, you are going to miss the entire point.
This race is about bringing the Kingdom, it’s about depending on God, it’s about learning and growing in who you are in Christ, it’s about fighting for your teammates when things get hard, it’s about loving them and having grace for them even when you may not like them because God loves us and has grace for us. It’s about letting God fill you with His words and His love to the point that it over pours onto everyone you come into contact with. Its about pushing yourself out of your comfort zone, stepping out in faith. It’s about choosing who you are going to be in the face of adversity.
You may not always understand why He calls you to do certain things, but if you come to Him with a willing heart, trusting that He knows what you need better than you do, He will lead you to exactly where you need to be.
“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” Jeremiah 29:11
Sometimes you need to be willing to step down in order to step up. I challenge you to ask yourself, is there something that is still keeping you down in the dark and from walking fully in the light?
