Silence.
Silence wrapped around me with a suffocating grip and as I stared down, it felt like all my worst nightmares coming true. This was the moment when I wanted most to pour out my heart and be heard and understood. The moment when seven pairs of eyes were on me, waiting for me to speak, and nothing was going to shift the spotlight off of me. The moment when there were a thousand things racing through my mind and not a single word to express it, and my lips and tongue were paralyzed.
The moment when my façade of strength shattered and I sat shell-shocked, exposed, and completely raw as my heart lay pulsing franticly on the table.
Photo credit: http://reformbama.wordpress.com/page/10/
During the last couple weeks of our time in Romania, God had orchestrated circumstances in the environment around me in such a way that I was hit hard in the most tender and raw places of my heart. I had not anticipated this. The beginning of the month had been an incredible season of seeing Him using me, speaking through me, calling me into new places of confidence and servanthood. I felt strong. Then suddenly, from what seemed like nowhere, the inner battle began. I was forced to come face to face with two of my greatest insecurities.
The first was my insecurity in relationships with guys. Over the past three months, God has been doing a work in my heart that feels miraculous because it is above and beyond what I could ever have imagined or hoped for. I have always longed to be close to my brothers, to enter into authentic relationships that are founded on true love and trust and not false motives, mind games, and a self-seeking attitude. I was plagued with my own inability to truly love them and not to let fear enter into those friendships and keep me from being real, from being me, and from letting my heart engage. Yet I have failed countless times. What the Lord has shown me is that it is because of my own struggle with my value, my failure to see how much worth I have in Him, and my refusal to receive His love as the complete and ultimate satisfaction and fulfillment of my heart’s desire. I have felt insecure in the knowledge that I have never been in a relationship, and wondered when and how that would happen, and what the lack of “romance” in my life says about my worth. I have put up defenses by claiming at times that I have no desire to get married, and my first instinct was to deny, hide, or negate my feelings whenever I did have a crush on a guy. So, in relationships with my brothers, my heart was responding from a place of fear and doubt.
My issues go even deeper than that, though (yup, I’m gonna be completely real right now!). An even greater cage I have felt trapped in is something that I really don’t want to give a label to, but for understanding and explanation’s sake, I’m going to call it social anxiety. I have spent my entire life in fear of large groups of people, feeling like a failure time and again in social settings. Feeling like I was always a little less fun, a little less attractive, a little less cool, a little less entertaining than the next guy. There is a familiar fear that I have grown to know so well and I can’t tell you how badly I wish I could take a knife to it and chop into bloody bits once and for all. That is the feeling of being unseen and alone when surrounded by people. Of being awkwardly present, yet silent. Some would describe it as feeling like a “wallflower”. Yet on the same hand, with my fear of being unseen is an equally great fear of being seen. The spotlight is a terrifying place to land and I find myself avoiding it as if it were a matter of life and death. I can’t fully explain this weird paradox or why it has so much suffocating power over me. All I know is that it sucks and hurts like heck and makes me want to run away and hide and just quit trying sometimes. I also know that the answer again comes back to knowing who I am in Christ, and grabbing onto my worth in Him. To know that I am worth being seen, I am worth being heard, I have a voice that holds value and will never be ignored and trampled in His presence.
As God pressed those things heavy on my heart, I was brought me to a place of personal vulnerability. One afternoon it hit me so hard all at once that I wanted to run for my life from everyone around me and hide. Instead, I found myself face down on a blanket in the sunny lawn with four girls around me. I was sobbing in their arms, broken and in a place of feeling completely overwhelmed and like a scared little girl. Dani, Jen, Katie and Robin poured out love onto me in that moment, praying for me, holding me, and simply being with me in that place of brokenness. In that moment, Katie spoke prophetically into my life in a way that I will never forget. God had given her the words “social butterfly” for me. When she read that to me, along with other words of life, I burst into uncontrollable sobs. Those words epitomize what I feel will forever elude my grasp, what I can NEVER attain or become or embody because I have been so deeply entrenched in this place of fear and doubt.
Photo credit: Robin Brooks (http://seerobinfly.tumblr.com/)
Out of this place, I knew that I had to share with my team what God was stirring in my heart. I wanted them to know me in my strength and in my weakness. I felt an urgency to blow my cover and let them see the true Jill in all my brokenness and need for their love, and even more for the Lord’s. I had not yet shared my testimony with them, so I took that as the opportunity to pour out everything.
And that is where I found myself. In silence. Face to face with what felt like my worst nightmare. Trying to speak and left speechless. In the spotlight with nothing to say. In the gaze of the people before whom I most desired to bare my heart, and left feeling like a failure even in my ability to do that.
Somehow I pushed through and got it all out. During the week that followed (this last week), I sat in the rawness of that night. I found myself fighting the desire to hide from them, run from them, pull the shell back up around my heart, because I felt so exposed before them and in my mind, they would never see me the same again. The words I had spoken about my feelings and fears still had power, and I was sucked into the belief that they now saw me as I portrayed myself from that place of fear and doubt. The Lord was trying to speak, whispering truth to me, but my wounded heart struggled to receive it. One morning as I walked back from work with Alys, He gave me a picture of what was happening.
I saw an open can of worms. The lid comes off, and out wiggle the slimy, ugly, gross creatures, crawling down the side of the can, onto the table, in plain view for all to see. Everything in me wants to grab those worms, stuff them back in the jar, and clamp the lid back on tight. Nothing seems worse than for my team to sit around the table with me and watch the worms crawl out… maybe I can let them out later when no one is around. But God says no! He says, “Jill, there is only one way for those worms to be gone. Don’t put them back in the can – you don’t want them in the can anymore! No, instead you must sit on your hands and restrain yourself as they slowly wiggle out… and then slowly, so painfully slowly, crawl away.”
The Lord is asking me to sit in it, the reality of the worms and the reality that there was nothing concealing those worms from the view of my team and even my squad, until every last one is gone.
I don’t know how long it will take. I don’t know if I’ll ever be totally free of the nerves that flare up when I know I’m going into a new social setting, an overwhelmingly large group of people, or the spotlight, be it in front of a thousand pairs of watching eyes or only a half dozen. But I do know that in my Savior’s love there is a freedom that I have gotten a taste of and it is the most addictive substance I have ever experienced. The freedom comes in stepping into the light. I am out of hiding!
During this week of debrief, my team responded and shattered my fears in the aftermath of opening that can of worms. They spoke life into me that blew my mind and blessed me into a place of speechlessness completely devoid of fear. They spoke even greater worth and love and gratitude than ever before when I expected disappointment and a lessening of their regard for me.
My amazing teammate, sister, and friend, Jo Linda 🙂
As I sit here on our train, having said goodbyes for the month to the rest of our squad, I am now surrounded only by these six people that God has given me as family. My team will be spending this month on the far-east border of Ukraine, hundreds of miles from the rest of our squad and thousands of miles from you all at home. Yet in this moment and this place, I feel safe. I feel known. I feel exposed before these six people and the negativity of that has faded into something beautiful. Even more than that, I am exposed before God. There is nothing hidden from Him! I am choosing to have nothing to hide, because I am hiding nothing. Before His throne in this moment, I have reached a new place of freedom. To have everything exposed – everything – and then to be embraced and held! This is incomparable, this is what every human heart longs and thirsts for – the place of intimacy with our Creator! He is inviting us back to the nakedness of the garden, the place where shame does not exist and perfect love covers every fear. It is too good to be true! But it is real.
