I absolutely love squad leading. I LOVE the ways God has been using me to speak truth into the hearts of others and the way He’s taught me to SEE them on a deeper level. I LOVE that I get to watch my peers come alive as they discover passions they never knew existed. I LOVE watching us discover how we are made to function as a body and as a result, allow the Holy Spirit to move in unprecedented ways.
But some days it’s just hard.
I was commenting to a friend the other day that I wish I could have even one day of being able to physically step outside of myself. It’s so easy for me to see others. It’s not so easy for me to see myself. I’ve grown so much in self-awareness over the past two years, but some days it’s still extremely frustrating.
Today, I woke up in a funk. Do you ever have those days? On our way to church, I said, “Okay…I’m feeling heavy. Who wants to pray for me?”
It got slightly better with some prayer, coffee, and a few good laughs. However, the heaviness didn’t fully subside.
After church, I had the privilege of grabbing lunch with two of the team members of Z’Maan. They began to ask me questions about my life, as normal friends do. It was such a great conversation, one of me being poured into instead of me pouring out. At one point, one of them said something to me that I thought profound. She said,
“What’s interesting about you is that the places in life that are actually safe (your relationships) are unsafe to you. It’s the things that are unsafe (like traveling the world, for instance!) that you find safe. But here’s the deal. When you decide to open yourself up to others, you create one of the safest places I’ve ever known.”
Wow.
The assignment I was given at the beginning of squad leading was to fail. Yep, that’s right: to fail. The thing is, I’ve lived under a fear of failing for pretty much the entirety of my life, and the only way that can be broken from my life is to fail miserably (or not even so miserably!) and let the ones that love me unconditionally pick me up again.
I’m not going to try and “package” this up for you. My natural tendency in life is to do as such, but I’m learning to live in the middle of the mess and be okay with it.
When visiting the beach in Northern Ireland this past week, I kept feeling the urge to take photos of my feet. It felt sort of strange to have such an urge to do so. Now I understand why. God is giving me a prophetic symbol for this season of my life, and it is this:
Time to walk by faith.
Cheers.
