Putting my ego aside & being vulnerable with everyone who reads my blog is something I want to accomplish in the next 3 months. It’s so easy for me to say everything’s going well & I’m loving life, which I am but I don’t want anyone to think it’s sunshine & rainbows 24/7. It is emotionally & spiritually challenging. My team has experienced spiritual warfare from the get go. Someone stole my leaders wallet right out of her backpack. This meant she wouldn’t be able to board the plane with us & would have to go through a process of getting her passport & other important documents to be able to meet up with us at a later point. Thankfully they returned it with everything inside & she was able to travel with us the last leg. My team has experienced sickness like you wouldn’t believe. It seemed like everyday the past week a new person has woken up feeling under the weather. I’ve been just fine though. The enemy has tried to tear us down emotionally as well. Instilling fear inside of us. Fear of vulnerability, fear of letting go of things going on at home, guilt, shame & many other emotions not from the Lord. Myself included, I’ve experienced shame, guilt, & fear at several points in the last week. Particularly from decisions I made during the last few months. Most were out of character for who I’ve been growing up. I’m having to realize I’m not the same girl I was in high school & it’s awesome actually. But I catch myself comparing high school me & current me. I like current me more. I’ve walked through more in the past 2 years than I ever did in high school. It’s been some of the best growth I think a girl my age can walk through.
One thing I’ve really had to come to terms with lately is that it’s okay to be emotional. In fact, it’s healthy. It’s healthy to cry, to be upset & to talk about it too. It’s okay to miss people I should & probably shouldn’t miss. There are certain people I feel who don’t deserve to have an intimate piece of my heart but then Jesus calls us to love our neighbors & love our friends. I find that challenging at times but it reminds me to look in my heart.
“For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of” (Luke 6:45)
“Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it” (Proverbs 4:23).
These 2 verses have hit home during my journey so far. I have had some walls up. It’s hard to be completely vulnerable with 14 other girls who are realistically strangers. Although, they are becoming less & less of strangers there are still things I find difficult to let them in on. So in some moments I have caught myself being impatient, short tempered, & sarcastic. Straight from the enemy & not of Jesus. It’s something I’m working on because before I left, none of these were as big of a piece of my personality as they are now because they weren’t really in my heart. Actually, maybe the sarcasm haha.
Now! What’s of Jesus? The light switch that has taken place in my heart the past 2 or 3 days. I mentioned in my past blog about the Lord’s tangible love through Angel. His love is becoming more & more obvious to me through tangibility, through relationship with a few girls on the team that I feel like I’ve connected with. It’s in the little moments I feel Him, the relational conversations versus the surface level ones. I am still taken back by how He really, genuinely knows how I need to be loved. He knows me more than I know myself. He knows what’s important to me. He knows what weighs heavy on my heart. The Lord knows.
I feel like this blog was a little all over the place. But that’s kinda where I’m at emotionally right now, scattered. Haha love you all
