The past few weeks have been hard. 3 weeks into the world race God really has been revealing a lot to me.
God really has been healing and working on me with what my identity is. That my identity is in Christ, My identity does not rely on what people say or think, it’s not what people say how I should dress. My beauty comes from Christ it dwells inside me. I am a daughter of His, I am valued, I am loved, I am precious, I’m how God has made me to be and I’m beautiful. I need to stop being so focus on how people think of me but instead to strive to be more like Christ every day and focus on how God thinks of me and truly believe it. I’m looking at myself differently now. I see myself the way God sees me. He has uniquely created me for me for anyone else. Don’t just look on the outside of someone look at their heart and soul to really know that individual. I have struggled with insecurities in my life. It has taken over my life in myself and how I think of others especially girls. Beauty is not what you wear or look like. Makeup does not make you beautiful. Makeup is a mask it hides true beauty that God has created you to be. Know that you are naturally beautiful and that you do not need makeup to be beautiful. Beauty comes from the inside. It’s a huge relief that the enemy doesn’t have ahold of me any longer with this issue. I am confident in the woman that I am today. I am confident in who God has created me to be which is fearfully and wonderfully made.
God has been healing me from past wounds that have been built up for so long. Negative words toward me have hurt me in the past whether they were on accident or on purpose I have held to it for so long and it has consumed me completely and have brought so much insecurity for myself. The way that people have looked at my outer appearance in my past. I know that God thinks I’m beautiful and it really doesn’t matter what others say about me. I need to focus on what God thinks of me and less of what others think of me.
“He is not too busy to listen, so don’t be too busy to talk to Him.”
I have a hard time with opening up to people it may be because people see me as a certain way. People see me as someone more on the quiet side sometimes but really crowds just overwhelm me and I shut down. I’m fine in one on one conversations. Throughout my life I have attempted to be more talkative but that hasn’t really done much for me thus far. I feel like I don’t have anything good to say or anything that anyone would like to listen to. So I just keep to myself and stay quiet so people will see me the same way everyone has seen me. The enemy tends to know how to get at me. He knows how to wreck me but I’m working on changing and opening up to people.
Before leaving my home it was hard for me to grasp that I wont be home to know what people are going there and be there to listen. But really God is showing me that is not something that I always need to do. Not knowing what’s happening at home has been such a relief and I’m really enjoying not being in peoples business, not knowing anything whats happening because I usually want to just fix the issue even though I’m not in that position to do anything about anything but people tend to come to me to vent. I am glad that people can trust me but being here in Albania has really been showing me that it really has been affecting me a lot more that I realized at the moment when someone was venting to me. I no longer feel the need of carrying other people’s baggage on my shoulders because I don’t have enough strength to take everyone’s burdens for them. My shoulders became heavy to the point where it was even hard to stand. Through these past weeks I have given these struggles, worries, hardships, insecurities to God, because they are not of God. I feel so much lighter now that I don’t have the burdens on my shoulders of other people. That is not what my job is, God is the one that will be there no matter what to hear anything we all have to say. He can handle it, I cannot. But it feels good to be thousands of miles away to be living the life that God has planned for me in many more ways than I really anticipated in.
Community has its ups and its downs. It can be very difficult to live in a room with 15 other girls. I don’t feel like we have had much conflict or I just don’t see it since I don’t get all that frustrated about things a lot of the time. It can be very overwhelming for me at times. When there’s a large crowd around me I just breakdown and be quiet. It’s sometimes too overwhelming for me to handle. I’m learning and beginning to break out of my comfort zone to go and just be myself and open up to the people that I’m living life with for the next year. Community is something that has been so crazy to wrap my head around. God has brought my entire squad together with different backgrounds. What we have gone through in our past doesn’t define us who we are now. God has forgiven us all for all the situations we have been through and God has brought into community to all experience some new and life changing. It is crazy for me to wrap my head around that in this specific squad that there are a few ladies who have the same desired and dreams as myself. Desires that have involved starting a safe house or orphanage somewhere. Who knows what God has in store 11 months from now in my life? But just knowing that some dear sisters have the same desires as I do has been an encouragement to me that it is possible and that I’m not too young for this big idea that I would absolutely love to beginning and take a hold of something big. If it’s something that God wants for my life it will happen. No matter how big, how difficult it could be sometimes it would be so worth it and so rewarding.
***my blogs are usually rambled words but hopefully it still makes sense. towards the end of the 11 months I'll be better at writing.
