currently in the middle of an identity crisis. not a bad thing though, actually really thankful for this season that the lord has me in, but also walking through it has been anything but easy and at some points i definitely wonder what i’m doing and what is actually going on in my head and heart. allow me to explain.
i’m not the best at feelings. something happened in my middle school years that twisted my perception of emotions and i began to believe i couldn’t feel the “negative” ones. i was a christian, so i couldn’t be angry. i was a really joyful person, so i could never be upset. because of the things my friends were walking through, i created a space for myself to not have any problems. i tucked away the “negative” emotions really deep inside because i was the happy one, and i began to find my identity in that; in being joyful, in having people comment on how i was always happy, how things didn’t affect me, etc.
in the midst of this, i began this thing where i would laugh. feeling emotions made me feel extremely awkward, so i would laugh to cover it up. because of hurt i experienced my senior year, i think i became numb to pain, to the point where i literally could not cry. there were times i knew i needed to cry, but i physically could not, so instead i would laugh because i didn’t know what other emotion to feel. i’ve even found myself in the past eight months laughing when i share my testimony or some of the deepest parts of me because i truly did not know how to feel emotions for how they should be.
since month four, i have been praying for the lord to break my heart for what breaks his. he broke me for the women stuck in sex trafficking and the buddhists so caught up with karma that they don’t realize they have a loving Father who doesn’t care about works. he broke me for the children in myanmar who live in children’s homes because they have better opportunity there than living with their family. he broke me for the hiv and aids epidemic, for the children suffering repercussions of their parents oblivion. he broke me for the 600,000 living in extreme poverty in swaziland, for the kids who get one meal a day and take it home to their families, and for the kids who so desperately want love because they’ve never experienced that before. and even then, it wasn’t until the past two weeks that i’ve actually allowed myself to feel the weight of these things.
my prayer had been for the lord to break my heart for what breaks his, lord, absolutely wreck me, but i was still pushing away any emotion he was giving me. if it wasn’t joy, peace, hope, i didn’t want it. so i found myself being broken over these things but not having a way to express it because i couldn’t feel the weight, i just knew it.
for the past two weeks, my prayer has been for the lord to give me emotions to feel and that i would feel them. the good, the bad, and the ugly, i want all those emotions. i want to feel what He feels. i want to know how badly His heart aches for us. i want just a glimpse. and in the past two weeks, i’ve found myself sobbing in my bed over the places i’ve been, things i’ve seen, the kids i’ve met. i’ve found myself feeling the weight of sex trafficking, feeling the weight of poverty and desperation for hope. in feeling these emotions, i’ve lost the identity i put in the joy i had and the things i placed on myself, so i’ve been walking through who i really am without putting on a face to please others and myself, while feeling the emotions of that too.
currently trying to find the fine line of feeling the weight of these things but not allowing that to be a burden on me. a very fine line. but also like the coolest thing ever that the lord allows us to see through his eyes and get a glimpse of his heart, but also doesn’t want us to carry that by ourselves. because it’s some really heavy stuff, but like he literally carries that for us.
kind of getting a picture right now of a little kid carrying something really heavy. like a water jug, let’s say. and you know kids at like four years old, they think they’re super strong and are carrying the whole thing by themselves but if you saw the whole picture you’d see that the dad is actually carrying all the weight of the water jug, just allowing the kid to hold a bit so he seems like he’s doing all the work. kind of like us. we think we’re doing a lot, but really the lord is carrying all this for us. also, if the dad ever let go of that water jug, the kid would fall. he wouldn’t be able to lift it by himself. if the lord ever let us carry these things on our own, because you know we’re stubborn and try to do everything by ourselves, wow would we stumble. kind of the coolest thing ever if you ask me.
