SUPER STINKIN’ HYPED TO BE NINETEEN!!!!
Eighteen got off to a pretty bumpy start – I had a pretty severe concussion for the first five months of it, and felt a lot of frustration and sadness. The next seven months were spent traveling the world and sharing hope, which is pretty stinkin’ crazy!! The Lord has broken my heart a lot, opened my eyes a lot, and renewed my heart with a lot with His strength and joy this past year! I wouldn’t take any of it back, and it’s been so beautiful to step into a newer, deeper freedom that only the Lord brings!! I am so deeply thankful for all that eighteen was!!!
But with that… On to 19!!! Started off this week with a beautiful black sand beach, and will get to end it hiking up a volcano and roasting marshmallows over it!! What is life amiright?!
My squad leader Casey has been with our team the past few weeks, and she’s been reading us a book called “The Cure” (I highly recommend it)!! It talks a lot about a girl walking down the path of life, who first goes to the good intentions room. It’s a place where everyone wears a mask, where everyone has it all together, and where there’s a lot of incredible intentions. It’s also a place of exhaustion and restlessness, as trying to keep everything perfect in life so easily wears her down.
She then stumbles upon the grace room, a place where no one has it together, but no one has to. It’s a place of no shame, of deep love, and of satisfaction. It’s a place where our humanness is real and where a God full of love and grace is even more real.
I am learning I so easily fall into the good intentions room – of making a religion or a book of rules for myself to follow, of constantly trying to do things on my own, of putting up the mask of being great when I’m not. I so easily forget that there’s absolutely nothing that I can do, and nothing I can bring.
Each time I step into the grace room, I stay a little longer, but I so easily run away. It’s hard to stay when I have such a stubbornness to try and do things on my own or prove myself. It’s so difficult for me to wrap my mind around at times, because it’s against everything this world tells me!
The reality is, there is nothing I can ever do to make the Father love me more or less. His love is abundant and never changing, and I don’t have to put on any masks when I live in His grace! WOW, it is such a beautiful, freeing feeling to live in this grace room!!
And so, as nineteen begins, I am going to begin in the grace room, and not only begin, but stay! I am tearing off every mask, and stepping into a new season of actually accepting all of the Lord’s grace for me, and not having it all together. I will believe the Lord loves me, and leave my pride at the door as He whispers that I don’t have to bring a thing to Him. It’s going to be a year of celebration, of abundance, and of going further up and further in to the Lord’s new grace for me every single morning! And WOW, I am so excited!!!
