As a writer, many times i feel like I write things that are untrue, simply because i am a very good writer. I know how to get the kind of attention of the reader that instantly transforms the one who skims into the one who contemplates. Perhaps in the same way as a cook will make extravagant dishes that he does not even like, but because he is very good at cooking and he knows that someone out there will be fed by what he made. I like to think my way with words is a gift, but so often do i wonder if i use it to make people believe things about me that are false because I know how to get the things I am supposedly thinking across in a beautiful way. I can string words together to make masterpieces and I like to think that unless you really knew me, you would assume it all must have come from the deepest parts of my heart and being. So I want this time to be a little different. It seems all poetry is by its own nature a little over-exaggerated so for the sake of a writer with an identity crisis, can we all take a second and toast to a little truth?
I took a day. As in, I didn’t go to ministry. I sit silently at 6 am and type this sitting on a friends bed and the music is up not quite all the way and the house is quiet. It’s the most at peace I have felt since I arrived. This is a happy place for me.
I came here to change. But not everything. I’m an INFP meaning that everything the world considers to be idealistic, I have a tendency of making a little too realistic. I’m a dreamer and a thinker. I romanticize the idea of change and doing new things is a highly attractive thought. I love to learn and often I get temporarily obsessed with things. I will take these things and dissect them and search them and become passionate about all their pieces individually and eventually overcome with awe for the idea as a whole. Inevitably, I get bored. Really really really bored. So I choose something new.
This idea of the Race for me was one that initially screamed change and this girl is always up for some adventure. I wanted to take a dip in the river and come out unrecognizable. I had already experienced this extensive kind of change in my life already when in two years, I became physically a completely new person. For lack of better words, from not pretty to…pretty. Judging by popularity growth, so called ‘change’ was a really really good thing. But after being on the Race for a couple of months, just as boredom was kicking it, I realized I had changed, but not necessarily in the way I was trying to. “You can change in a bad way on the WORLD RACE?????” I know. I know. Please don’t sue them.
I think I had this idea that if I was going to go after God, I couldn’t be who I was because that person had already messed up too much so I had to create this new person. I made her from scratch and to be honest, she wasn’t all that bad. I mean, she was likeable and pretty funny honestly. She even got a cool (but let’s be fair, pretty ghetto) nickname. #LoLo4ever. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t fake. I just wasn’t real. I’d read about ‘false self’s but never thought that it applied to me. It was such a cliche that it never seemed even remotely possible that real people struggled with that. Okay, so maybe they did. But like…definitely not me…
I didn’t see how there could be room for God in the life I had already. For someone who sees themselves as being the most self-aware person on this green earth, I never would have guessed I would have trouble finding identity.
My name is Lauren Taylor, but my papaw is the only one who still calls me the whole four syllables. My favorite book is the Thesaurus, but in second place is all literature written. ever. Probably in third place would be poetry but I haven’t really decided yet so don’t quote me on that. The English language seduces me and if I never find a man, I will marry a metaphor. If you don’t think dark chocolate and peanut butter is the best combination, we can still be friends but I will forever question your judgment. If something crazy happened to the planet and chocolate milk was the only drink left for humans, that would be pretty much 100% fine with me. Also. Coffee with 1/3 milk and no sugar. Period. I taught myself how to play piano when I was 10 and belting the Les Miserable favorites on those keys when no one else is home is easily one of my happiest places. I am a writer, but I would almost always rather type. I can be a servant and one time a quiz told me that serving was my spiritual gift, but I am careful of making sure that I am not just trying to get attention from those around me because that is a struggle in my life. I am determined to have the world’s best love story by no standards but my own. I love quiet, winter mornings. I will never not own a solid white comfortable v-neck. I enjoy taking pictures, but I am careful to show my true point of view and not merely what I want other people to think that I see, even if i have to sacrifice aesthetics (which really does pain me sometimes). I hate anything surrounding the idea of exploitation as a whole except for the victims and the people that fight for them. I attach music to certain people and times in my life and the future me always hates that.
I have since being here heard that when you go into the presence of God, you should always come out looking different. For the first two months, I only heard “come out different”. I don’t know why it is that I have such a hard time accepting the fact that God wants still to be with me as the person I am. I am learning that I don’t have to give up the things that I love and the person that I am to become closer to Him.
There is a part of me trying to reconcile that I can still be the thinker and writer that I want to be. A part of me trying to stop myself from seeing God as someone who controls my thoughts and holds me captive from my imagination, but rather as an artist Himself who created for me the gift of passion for all kinds of things in this world. I want to believe that He really does want to just watch us do the thing and live life alongside us. The over-analytical girl in me wonders how to balance the two and what exactly is ‘the thing’ anyways? I think maybe He’s out there just wanting to grow with me at the pace I’m at. Maybe He enjoys that I’m diving in so hard, but maybe also He doesn’t want to be the next temporary thing I am obsessed with. Maybe He changes life completely and I will never be bored again or hungry again or thirsty again. Maybe He is an all consuming fire who is less concerned with how fast I can learn everything about Him and more concerned with just giving Him the space to work. Maybe I am simply asomatous in His presence because I have put on so many layers that they have done that complete opposite of what I intended and made me more unreachable than visible. Perhaps I have limited His ability to do any work at all because I have denied the person that I am and Holiness can’t mold clay made by flesh.
Maybe the intense romantic world that I see through the rearranging of words to make beautiful stories can only be made more beautiful with Him in it, not instead of it.
I have either overlooked the simplicity of it all or everything is way more complicated than I thought. I hate this desire within me that makes me want to forget my life and just start over. My life is full of broken and toxic people and where is there any place for growth in a life like that? Except for one. He was not toxic and he was seemingly not broken. I wanted to keep him around, just for a little longer. I wanted him to watch me become the person he always knew I could be even though I struggled through believing I could be that person. I want to stop trying to make myself believe that he gave up and let myself instead settle into the truth that Something bigger than both of us intervened in order to show us that together, neither of us could become the people that He knew we could be. I wanted to come on the Race to change for myself and know that I wasn’t only doing it to make sure I wasn’t changing to come home to him theoretically still sitting on the shelf I had mentally placed him on until I returned home.
“It almost feels like at some point life whacks you on top of the head and hands you a list of all the things you can keep. The list is surprisingly long. You can keep letters. You can keep trying. You can keep secrets and you can try your hardest to keep promises. You can keep your eyes on the road. You can keep his sweatshirt, the one he left on the living room floor. You can keep photos and you can keep the memories. But you cannot keep people. People are not things – you cannot keep them.” – Hannah Brencher
I can’t keep him. But I can keep going.
I’ve always been afraid to be one of those people that took God and molded Him to fit their situation or morals such as falling in love with something or someone and rationalizing that He must be okay with it.
I’m learning that it is still possible to be personal with a God that is just. I’m learning that I’m not crazy, but there are real people who struggle with real, scary, life-altering, exhausting thoughts. Our mind gets ahead of us and some days it gets a hold of us. But I think those things are big journey-shaping things.
“The church rarely talks about it. I’ve stumbled through conversations with people who have told me that God could heal me in an instant if I would just let Him. They talk as if I am holding doubt by the neck, refusing to let it go. I believe God is a big-time healer. I believe His breath is the first and last one. However, I also know my faith is mighty. My faith is not small. And so, while I believe that God can heal me, the fact that I have not been healed is not a sign that my faith is weak or my expectations are low. It means we are partnered. It means God thinks I am strong enough to keep walking this road and asking my questions.” – Hannah Brencher
(In case you didn’t know already, hb is my GIRL when it comes to this real stuff. She is strength and she is raw and she rarely has the answers but she always has the search going.)
I’m a person of raw thought and much thought and returning to that is not the illusion of turning back that I had always seen it as. I think it is instead realizing that she was made for greatness. she was made for building kingdoms and conquering battles and moving mountains.
Since training camp, God has been showing me Romans 8. It continues to follow me through texts from friends, church bulletins, billboards, blimps… okay maybe not the billboards and blimps but you feel me, right? “The solution is life on God’s terms” and I think that titles such as those are rarely coincidental.
While it used to be disheartening to read that He knows me better than I know myself, it is now encouraging to read on that because of this, He can string everything together for my own good. I will never be bored because resurrection life is not timid, but adventurously expectant. He wants to take up residence, not control. He makes prayer out of our speechlessness at the evil in the world and our loss of words from the awe of the creation in it. He makes conversation out of our groans from discontentment and our cries of pain. He walks alongside. He jumps square into the middle of our mess and turns it into poetry. Carving beauty out of brokenness. I’m not for sure if we always end up with understanding, but I know He’s always working. He brings rest on Wednesday mornings when you wake up contemplating your existence and other outlandish things. He brings people who pay for your coffee even when they don’t speak your language because kindness is universal.
He brings peace in a world where time ticks without our permission and hearts break into millions of pieces. For the sake of vulnerability, finding beauty and rediscovering the originality in myself, I choose to let you in. I choose to not devalue the roller coaster that is this journey.
Love, Lauren.
