An entry from the personal journal of Kendall Faith Covington.
Friday, November 3, 2017
It’s fitting that I start a new journal as a new transformation comes over me; a conviction, a promise, and a goal. The more symbolic and symmetrical side of me (the writer side of me) wishes I had started this journal when the World Race began, that it wasn’t so randomly placed in the wibbly wobbly passage of time. But I think it’s fitting, because we are all growing all the time. There’s never a clean start and end to growth. Growing is always a messy, haphazard, awkward thing, isn’t it?
When I first really, truly realized and accepted Jesus into my heart, I was so excited to become a new person in Him. For so long, I had hated who I was: my forgetfulness, my personality and shyness that made friends an almost impossibility, my sadness and flat emotion, and my seeming inability to keep the friends I did have. I was bursting for change, ready to become new, better! More like my sister Kate, the one person I looked up to and wanted to be like more than anyone, who was responsible and likeable and had a bunch of friends.
But…nothing happened. So I just kept waiting, and waiting…and waiting.
I was still the same irresponsible, absent-minded, sad, unlikeable me. Kendall.
I actually felt sort of crushed, really. I had been so desperately hoping for change, and Jesus didn’t deliver. And I think inside, I felt like I was too much, too difficult, too broken to be changed and transformed.
But I kept on hoping, waiting for that change to occur every time I experienced a new revelation in my relationship with God. And every time, I was heartbroken to see the same, ugly me remain. And I think every time I hoped, and fell, a little part of me died each time. Until it came to a point where I was too afraid of falling to ever again hope for transformation into something beautiful.
I was resigned. Resigned to the fact that I would always be depressed, always cause strife in my family, never be the likeable or sought presence in the group, and never be able to keep the few friends I would somehow manage to make.
Stuck. I would be forever stuck in the body, the person, the identity I hated. I became resigned to my shackles, the chains binding me to who I was told I was, and the only way I thought I would ever be.
I don’t know what caused me to withdraw last night. Perhaps it was my introversion demanding quiet, demanding a retreat. Maybe it was my fear of soon leaving the friends I had made in Nepal, and the fearful knowledge that most likely, I would fall out of touch and lose them forever, just like the friends I’d made in the past, which caused my solemn and scared retreat. Or maybe it was another reason altogether, the identity of which I fail to tease from my mind.
But as our final night in Pokhara wore on and multiple people reminded and suggested to me to participate and be present with them, all that ran through my mind were uncomfortable memories of my childhood, my mother saying and asking the same questions. The heartrending moment when my soul shattered as I sobbed into my pillow and asked myself, “Why can’t I just fix myself?”
I never knew the answer to that question, one that I asked myself constantly throughout the entirety of my life. Why couldn’t I change myself? I even had Jesus, so why? Why? Why?!?
The only possible answer that seemed to be true was that I just couldn’t. I was too broken. Deficient. Stuck.
And when things came to a head last night, when I felt the disappointed, hurt, and confused gazes of my teammates, I felt my greatest fear awaken. That I was going to lose them too. I would lose the best friends I’d ever had in my life, to my own brokenness.
Feedback hit me like a truck. I was always so afraid that the reason I kept losing the friends I made was actually because I didn’t care enough to make the effort to keep them, and I feared it was that apathy that made me so broken and wrong. I was so afraid… that I was unfixable.
Broken beyond repair.
I wanted to scream, “I do care! I care so much it hurts me, incapacitates me to know I caused you so much pain!” Not only to convince my team, but to desperately convince myself I wasn’t lost yet. But the words stuck in my throat, and silence my only response.
Feedback ended, and I was drowning. Water lapped around my ears and I was stuck. I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. Stuck, stuck, stuck. Trapped in the room, in the same haunted situation, in my hated self and ugly identity.
I managed to stumble back to my room, when Taylor pulled me aside and asked if we could talk. I remember choking out a “sure, no problem,” before letting the both of us into the room.
She asked if I wanted to talk about it. I was drowning in thoughts, memories, words, so I told her what I’d been thinking, my tangled feelings I had been sifting through trying to figure out why I was acting the way I had been, hoping it would expel some of the water from my lungs, give me even the slightest breath of air.
I don’t fully remember the conversation, I was so lost in the storm of my uncontrollable thoughts and fears. But she told me truth about thinking I wasn’t liked, or that people didn’t enjoy my presence. That I was beautiful, and a daughter of Christ, and that the past didn’t matter. I was only eighteen, I was still growing in my walk with Him, so it’s okay to stumble.
But the enemy had my head underwater and an iron grip around my chest. I was gasping, sobbing, tears streaming down my face.
I opened my mouth, but words refused to come. I choked, gulped, choked again.
Finally, a whisper came. An admission of my defeat, my greatest sorrow.
“I’m so afraid to hope.”
To hope to be changed, to grow in my relationship with Him, grow out of the person I used to be into the person He created me to be. I had fallen so many times I didn’t want to climb the mountain just to fall again. How could I hope when all it had gotten me was hurt and fear?
Taylor was silent. Her hand stretched out, rubbed my shoulder, and she murmured quietly, “Wait here, I’ll be back in just a second.” The door clicked shut, and I was alone, stuck sitting on the side of the bed, tears tracking worn paths down my face, and the silence filling only with my labored breathing.
Stuck, stuck, stuck.
But then she was there. My head was lowered in shame and hurt, but her hand stretched into my field of view, and within it laid a key. And on the key were the letters inscribed, “HOPE.”
God reached into my heart, pulled away the claws keeping it locked away in fear, and whispered deep into my soul through Taylor’s voice.
“Don’t be afraid to hope.”
My tears burst forth renewed at the lovely message God had given me, and Taylor held me as long as it took until my shaking subsided.
I wiped my face, and slipped the key onto my chain with my own key. They hung there, side by side.
“NO FEAR” and “HOPE.”
A light bulb flickered on in my head.
Ever since I’d received my key at Launch, I’d wondered what God was trying to tell me. Was He telling me not to be afraid of sharing His name? Or was He saying to trust in Him, and not be afraid of any physical circumstances? What did He not want me to be afraid of?
“Don’t be afraid to hope.”
Together, the keys formed a crystal clear picture. God wasn’t telling me either of the situations I’d envisioned. Instead, He’d been telling me not to be afraid of hoping in Him, hoping for Him, and hoping for myself, the transformation He promised me and promised to give to me.
God works in the most amazing ways. Long before I’d even recognized my fear, He’d taken steps to erase it and fill its place with His bright hope.
This is my hope now. My new hope, in him. And as my race continues, this is the hope I will hold onto, the hope for growth and for the promise of transformation.
Don’t be afraid to hope.
