Stripped raw.
But swallowed by peace so thick I could drown in it.
This year has pulled away layer after layer after layer of me. There have been times where I felt liberated. Other times where I just felt hurt and jaded.
Either way – it has been really, really hard:
– i’ve faced a shit ton of family wounds (I’ve also used my power to set boundaries)
-Ive almost been in therapy a year and I’m graduating out at the end of this month. (halle-frackin-lujah cuz ya girl needs a break). that alone is monumental.
-then Covid happened (hello collective trauma), and im totally tapped out from that.
-I’ve stopped some major coping behaviors in their tracks and created some new brain pathways. (So good but so draining)
-then I said goodbye to the most stable home I’ve known and where I built some pretty deep friendships.
And now I’m putting all I got left into taking off for a year on the World Race and to be honest, I don’t know how much I got left for it. It’s really hard to be excited some days.
But damn. I’m so thankful. The other night driving home, I danced to st elmo’s fire, and then sobbed to surrendering by Elevation Youth. Sometimes living just feels like too much. If you pulled apart my rib cage you’d see an explosion of color. I’ll feel joy, contentment, thankfulness and excitement. And I’ll feel shame, sadness, heartache and anger. They cohabitate and that’s okay. I’ve never felt joy without deep sorrow in my heart at the same time. Because life is all about living and experiencing – and we do that through our emotions. It’s a beauty that allows us to connect to each other on an organic level.
Life is rich and I want to experience it. To really – really – experience it. To take full advantage of the opportunity I have to know people all over the world. To hear them and to know them for their basic, beautiful creation – but can I do that without first knowing myself?
God knows me honestly. He knows me better than I know myself and it feels like layers of stone – created over years of coping and believing lies – were tapped. He tapped my counterfeit exterior –
And I cracked.
And now in a wild, beautiful release, free birds are flying out of those cracks. Flocking out in droves some days – taking down more stone as they leave. I’m returning to my origins – my genesis. And isn’t that the ultimate purpose of Jesus? To love so honestly that stone identities crack and freedom explodes in the form of balance of the body, mind, soul, and heart in unity with the Creator?
To be one with Him. Or Her. Our first beloved.
To be one with the Creator means living on the surface with people just isn’t possible. He and I – we love rich and meaningful connections. We love to hear people’s joy and their heartache. We want to know them deeply.
I love that the Bible uses the word “know” to describe sex because it insinuates the notion of deep intimacy.
We – Jesus and I – want to know people at their core. We want them to know themselves. Because knowing is life. Knowing is peace. Knowing is freedom. And to know, to truly know, we must strip ourselves bare. And that’s hard. Because it requires taking a good, long look at our hearts and making the decision to finally say “I’ve had enough with this cycle. I want something new”. But that’s the first and the hardest part.
It’s painful to heal. It’s painful to break away layers of stacked, heavy stone on sensitive skin. And it’s even scarier to let someone else break and pull it away. It feels raw and vulnerable. But how sweet it is to have a perfect, loving Creator do it? He’s our one-thing-in-common. How sweet it is to have Him unite us in rich knowing? It’s freedom. It’s pain and joy together. It’s audacious, wild life. It’s connection to people in a realm that transcends this heaven and enters the next.
It’s O.K. to not be okay. It’s ok to feel – you are still safe. It’s ok to feel – you are still loved. It is possible – and normal – to experience a full range of emotion at once and yet still embody thick peace and wild freedom. Because no person on this planet has experienced only joy, freedom and blissful love. Everyone has experienced heartache and abandonment and trouble. And so everyone can know peace and know freedom. It just takes a little admitting to yourself – “i’m not ok. But i will be.”
