When people you’ve know for a long time start to become something else in your eyes, is it you or them that has changed?
The World race will take you away from your self built comfort kingdom and drop you head first in the destruction of the broken. Then ask you, what are you going to do about it? “Well shoot dang, the heck if I know! I struggle even helping myself!”
Thinking about the question I already have started hearing, “how have you changed since leaving home?”. My mind goes to moments like that month one shock. When you find yourself forced to face the things of the world no one talks about. The ugly, hurting, needy and broken. Your heart will never be the same. You can’t plead with God every night for answers/ help and not be changed. The seeming cruel way the world works is harsh in an unforgettable way.
My hands seemed truly small in the begining. I was helpless, nothing I prayed about had faith behind it, Because I still didn’t understand why God had called me. So I had no trust in him to show up.
I was being prepared for something. He needed me to see what was wrong with myself perspective before he could change it. Then call me to greater things.
Before I left/ during the start of the race I struggled with so many lies about myself. I was looking back at an old journal and found a page where I had written everything I believed about myself. Poring my heart out on the page. I had things like: ugly, never good enough, talk to much, annoying, no one would want to marry me, and the list goes on and on.
I believed my hands were small and unable to handle anything of value, I believed I was small: heart, body, and soul, thus it was easy to believed that I couldn’t do anything of value.
Oh did papa have something to say about that. I can literally tell you what month he choose to crush which lie I believed about myself. One at a time I got lighter and lighter. My hands were taught to hold more and more. To love more and more.
Looking back I realized my hands felt small in the beginning because i was holding so many things that weren’t doing anything but hurting me. Lie after lie that I held onto, told me that I couldnt love myself, thus how could I love others?, how could I accept love from my community/ family or even God?
I didn’t even know what love was.
I not only found more room to help the broken with newly freed hands but was able to see the people struggling to love themselves the same way I was.
When my squadmate asked the question, “how have you changed?”, we all joke about the physical things but inside something profound had gone unnoticed inside me until this month.
I have seen a huge shift in the way I see myself and what my value is. I have seen what real love in Gods hands can do for people. My freedom from lies is just the gate way. He was preparing the ground, now its time to plant. God has promised only greater things from here.
I am not the same person I was when I started this race 9 months ago.
