Hi all my family and friends and family and friends to be!
You’re here reading my blog because my guess is that you would like to know more about me and my crazy idea of living 11 months out of a backpack and pop-up tent on a global missions trek. Hopefully if you’re reading this you’ve already read my support letter explaining the details around my new adventure to come. Fret not the support letter is the next blog if you haven’t!
So you’re next question might be, who would decide to put aside a full-time graphic design position with a church staff that has become family, a log cabin home with five best friends, family, pets, car, coffee shops, small groups, weddings, along with many faces including your own? This girl. This trip didn’t timely pop up on google search when I decided I was bored in a routine lifestyle. This trip wasn’t a spur of the moment, “Oh hey, I’m going to disappear for 11 months.” It has developed over this past year and undergone lots of prayer and wise counseling. I am amazed at such an opportunity opened and clearly directed by God.
This trip and the preparation for it has been teaching me more about a freedom we are all called to live in and experience. Not a freedom to make a choice or in this case a decision to leave but something deeper than an internal response.
Ok, allow me to catch everyone up to speed, here is my quick paragraph-long life history lesson. As a child, I grew up in a loving and safe city house in upstate Rochester, New York. Homeschooled with two older brothers that taught me how burp on command and two younger sisters I dragged through countless dress-up fashion photoshoots. I was the middle, in-between drama queen, peacemaker, the cream to your oreo, child. In-between and confused about my identity. Struggling to fit-in with the “cool” crowd entering into a private high school, I chose to do what I was told or what I thought would make me blend-in. “Do what you have to do and you won’t be rejected,” a terrifying but mental statement I pondered with for years following. At age 18, I decided to moved to the big New York City to pursue a career as an art director. For three years, “Do what you have to do and you won’t be rejected,” got me into some bad situations and emotionally abusive relationships. Who was I becoming? What freedom was I chasing after? I was consistently and unconsciously wrapping myself up in all of these fake imaginations about myself, consumed and suffocating with fear, anxiety and self doubt. I locked myself up. Caged. Imprisoned by choice.
Why then was this girl selected and hired to work at one of the largest churches in the north eastern part of the country? Remember that freedom I talked about? Well, when you’re living in it you realize all your faults and limitations no longer inhibit your potential. When you’re living in it, the impossible happens and you’re used to change the world around you. Over the past two years, I have grown, mentored, discipled, led, taught, created, designed, dreamed, conceptualized, visualized, built, painted, instructed, critiqued, accepted and loved everything and everyone I’ve encountered while volunteering and working with TFHNY (The Father’s House). Who knew that this girl’s untapped potential included visually communicating the Gospel to the world through online church broadcasts, leading and witnessing a high school revival of hundreds and training up a creative graphic team.
Let’s go back and answer that initial question, why am I leaving? My life as it is perfect. I am doing everything right. I’m in love with Jesus, I’m volunteering and serving at church, I’m giving my time, attention and finances to the church and others. Isn’t life about the balance of enjoying the good things? I am beginning to realize that the busyness of even a good life doesn’t make the internal cage disappear. Freedom and satisfaction are not the exchange for balancing good, having a healthy weight, taking vacations, furthering educations, promotions, and raises. Externally I told myself I am free. I’m living, I’m choosing and making healthy life goals, isn’t that enough? But the question isn’t the conflict. Deep down the internal conflict that seems to be loudly commanding to stay the path, stay away from the edge, don’t leave, you don’t have it in you. Whispering limitations of God, limitations of my full potential. But the self imprisonment isn’t entirely successful. I still know. I know that my spirit is stitched together with threads of courage and breathed into with infinite breath that yearns for more, the impossible. I know that I’m meant to experience life outside of the box, the box that continually speaks, “you’re not that great, you’re not meant to leave.” The truth is that God is alive and He is speaking, “I am great and I have called you to go.” The key to this freedom is already in my hands. I am a world influencer regardless of my past and my fears, I am sent alive and willing to go into all nations to preach the Gospel and love the lost and broken. That is why I am going and not leaving.
This girl is going.
Barricade the road that goes Nowhere;
grace me with your clear revelation.
I choose the true road to Somewhere,
I post your road signs at every curve and corner.
I grasp and cling to whatever you tell me;
God, don’t let me down!
I’ll run the course you lay out for me
if you’ll just show me how.
P S A L M 1 1 9 : 2 9 – 3 2 (MSG)
