Adventures WorldRace SethBarnes Sponsorship Giving

| by archiveworldraceblogs

i have always been a relatively insecure person.  especially after meeting jesus and becoming a part of different church bodies i always felt like i wasn’t good enough.  coming from a background of abuse and dysfunction i always found myself walking into groups of people who just seemed to have it together.  i always felt like the odd one out.  this of course led to more insecurity, and questions arose about why God would allow those things to happen to me.  everyone else had nice picturesque lives and would probably end up with the picket fence and two kids.  in the meantime i always felt like i had to scramble to get it together; to make what people would see as a beautiful masterpiece out of what was seemingly nothing but broken pieces of garbage.

if the world race has only done one thing for me it has given me an avenue to own the broken pieces of garbage, admit them and, to some extent, embrace them.  and in the midst of just being who i am, brokenness and all, the lord has come in with gentleness and care and begun to form a beautiful masterpiece out of my mess.

the wonderful thing is that the lord is doing this with every person on my squad.  he finally got us to places of brokenness and abandonment and now he is showing us what grace and redemption look like in the middle of a restoration process.  and the lord has very strategically placed specific people on this race into my life to help me heal, to help me find freedom and grace. to learn from and to grow with.  to be there when i needed to cry and when i needed to scream.  he has given me people who love me for me and understand the garbled mess i really am because they are dealing with their own trash pile, too.  and the lord has graciously allowed us to walk alongside of each other for such a time as this.
 
 
last night one of my sisters, my bosom buddy if you will, peeled off another layer of her own stuff. 

it was just one of the most beautiful nights of my life.

it was messy and not well put together.  there was no plan or formula.  i didn’t always have words to say.  most of the time i didn’t know what to do.  we just needed jesus.  we tried to pray and it seemed volatile but i knew the lord was in this thing.  she sat there and cried.  she groaned in a desperate kind of way.  she recounted to me the hurt and pain people in her past have caused; the decisions she made out of despair and hopelessness.  and i knew she was going to find freedom one way or another.   

after awhile another one of the girls came and joined us.  thank god for this mighty woman who walks in love and authority but displays more kingdom freedom than anyone else i know.  she came and she just sat with us.  and as we sat there she spoke life and truth over my hurting sister in the most real and genuine way i have ever seen.  it wasn’t nice scriptures and futile attempts at finding the right words.  it was messy, raw and real.  it was brokenness at its finest.  but jesus was smack dab in the middle of the whole thing.  and he might have thrown out an f-bomb here or there, too.  because when we hurt he hurts.  and he is more concerned about meeting us exactly where we are at than putting a band-aid of biblical to-do’s over our wounded hearts.  he comes in and uses the messy salve of grace to ease our pain.

 

so we sat there and we listened and wept with the one who was weeping.  we allowed our sister to be messy and broken and we didn’t care what it looked like.  it looked like staring out of the window for an hour.  it looked like sipping a beer.  it looked like jumping into the pool fully clothed at eleven o’clock at night.  because light always defeats the dark and joy is bigger than depression even on the bleakest of days. 

we did church last night.  it was messy church, to be sure.
 
but it was the most beautiful picture of what grace, redemption and freedom should look like.  there was no judgment.  and there was no condemnation.  there were tears and laughs and a deep resolve that it will all really be okay.  there was a certain recognition of the pain we are all still carrying or the wounds that still hurt.  there were love and hugs and cannon balls into the pool.  there was staying up until 4:30 am to minister to the off-color guy next to us.  there was hope and life and truth and jesus.  

it was a this is it kind of moment for me.  this is the kind of thing my heart has yearned for the thing i always hoped was real.  this is community.  and this is church.  and i found more of jesus standing in a roof-top pool alongside other hurting sisters than i have in years of trying to find him behind stained glass windows and ironed-out answers.