This is blog number 1 of an unknown number about the things God has done in my heart while squad leading as well as stories from the field.
The past five months have been filled with so much and time has been going by so fast. It has taken me awhile to figure out how to put all the things into words because so much of it is still in process. But God gives us stories for a reason and they are meant to be shared – so this my attempt at being vulnerable as I share my experience while leading Gap Year.
It is messy and it is hard, but God is right in the middle of it.
During month 1 of the race my co-leader and I went to a little cabin in the jungle to visit our all guys team. Our home was a 15 minute bike ride from the beach so we were really suffering for Jesus out there.
One day we were praying with the team and asking the Lord to show us anything in ourselves that could be getting in the way of us having more intimacy with Him. Immediately as I started praying the Lord said, “You are addicted to the approval of others.”
I was caught off guard and honestly kind of offended.
“WHAT?! ME?! No way.
…okay okay, so maybe I want people to like me
…and maybe I want them to tell me I’m doing a good job
…BUT there is NO WAY that I’m addicted. We don’t have to be sooooo dramatic about it.”
But I wasn’t fooling anyone, especially not Him. Then He told me I needed to tell the team. I don’t remember what I said but I mumbled through an act of vulnerability that felt like I was exposing everything inside of me. There was something so deep and so embedded into my life that I didn’t even know about it.
I realized that I had spent a lot of my life convincing myself that I didn’t care what other people thought, but it was lie. It was a cover up for who I truly was.
I was a girl who knew the love of the Father, but settled for the love of other people.
God not only revealed this to me, but told me to buckle up and hang on because He was about to take me through a series of events that would solidify the release of my need for approval.
The details will be spared, but the next two weeks were some of the hardest so far on the race. It pushed me to a place where I felt like the Lord was ripping things out of me that weren’t pleasing to Him. It wasn’t gentle and at times I fought it, but it was exactly what I needed.
Ultimately, it led me to sitting alone in back hallway, crying my eyes out and begging the Lord to just send someone who would tell me it would all be okay.
“Please Lord. I don’t need them all to understand or get it, but just one! Just one!”
“No.”
“But don’t you see me here? I’m literally broken. I don’t even know how to get up from here.”
“I see you.”
“Then send someone!”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because I am here and that’s enough. You are obeying me and that’s enough. I am going to teach you that abiding in me is enough.”
I sat there and cried for another hour or so and no one came.
There were many moments in the next couple of weeks where I told the Lord to stop – that I couldn’t handle it anymore. I told Him I understood, lesson learned, no need to drag it out further.
Then He brought me to Hebrews 12.
“Consider Him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted. In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.
It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participlted, then you are illegitimate children and not sons.
For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.
Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight the paths of your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather be healed.”
Not long after that I listened to a sermon from Matt Chandlar. He told a story about holding his daughter down at the hospital so a doctor could clean out an infection. She was crying and fighting, and he was crying because she was hurting. But he continued to hold her down because he knew it was worth it. If the infection stayed, it could have spread and gotten much worse.
A loving father would hold his daughter down through the pain so that things can be cut out her that are harmful to her.
The Lord held me down for a long time. I kicked and screamed, but He didn’t let up. He knew that me being released from addiction to approval was worth the pain. He knew that I would be able to do His work and glorify Him more on the other side of it all.
He didn’t let me sit in my mess. He pulled me out. He was treating me as His daughter and along the way He was reminding me that what I was enduring was nothing compared to the shedding of His blood on the cross.
If you ask my leadership team, they would tell you that I am not the same person I was back in Costa Rica. Because of what I have gained from the Lord, I would go through the pain all over again.
What is the Lord trying to cut out of you to make you look more like Him? Are you resisting or letting Him have His way?
Lean in and endure it. It’s worth it.
