Her chin length silver hair gently kissed her strong jaw line. We strolled along the chilly Kosovar street, praying and chatting, with her elegant British voice and my jolting American one joining together before the Father.
Suddenly, her piercing blue eyes, with a lifetime of discernment behind them, found mine. She spoke right to my soul.
“You’re having a hard time, aren’t you?”
I had barely spent an hour with this woman and already she discerned the depths of my heart. She saw through my facade of forced conversation and fake laughter. She saw the secret part of me that had spent the day before crying because I missed home so much.
Feeling suddenly exposed, I prepared to lie to her wonderfully lined face. After all, I barely knew her and this woman was a stranger. Surely she didn’t want to be bothered with my confusing and anxious heart.
I opened my mouth to spout off a definitive “I’m fine” and instead found the words, “Yeah. This trip has been hard” tumbling out of my mouth before I could catch them.
I went on to explain how difficult it was to leave everything and everyone you’ve ever known. How taxing it was to go through team changes and ministry changes every month when you never know where or with whom you best belong. How, even though Jesus is good and changing you and you know for a fact this is where you’re supposed to be, somedays you just want to pack up your few belongings and head back home.
I explained how, more than anything, I felt so much pressure from myself to do everything with excellence, to love every aspect of the Race, and to be an amazing missionary 100% of the time.
“Oh, my dear,” her light British accent washed over me like a warm shower. “You can’t be marvelous all the time. You’re doing a really hard thing. It’s okay to have hard days, you know. It’s okay to not always be marvelous.”
It’s okay to not always be marvelous.
This simple (and so delightfully British) sentence revolutionized my anxious brain.
//
Ninety percent of the time, my brain is an awful knot of anxieties, insecurities, and a constant motivation to be enough and to never be a bother. I like to imagine this anxiety as a giant multicolored tumbleweed of mangled thoughts that sits obtrusively in my gray matter, quietly buzzing and humming, refusing to be unnoticed as I go about my day.
Anxiety may look a number of different ways to different people, but to me, it’s a giant tumbleweed.
Even though Philippians 4:8 encourages us to think about true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, and excellent things, I often find that my anxious tumbleweed makes this impossible.
The tumbleweed obscures the lovely things in my brain. It hides the fact that I am a wonderful, confident woman of God who loves music and art. I forget that I am able to love people deeply, laugh loudly, and can cook a mean plate of pancakes.
For my whole life, the anxious has trumped the lovely.
But today, my new friend draped a banner of grace over my tumbleweed of anxiousness. I don’t have to be anxious, because I don’t have to always be concerned with being marvelous. I don’t have to overanalyze my actions because I’m already doing a really hard thing and I should be proud of that.
Without realizing it, this friend taught me how to dwell on the lovely things. She reminded me that I can give myself some grace. And most importantly, she began to show me how to let my anxious tumbleweed take up less and less space in my brain.
