These past eight months have been anything but perfect. They have been hard, they have been exciting, they have been uncomfortable. But I can say that exact same thing about my past 20 years on this earth. And it makes sense because these past eight months have just been living life- yes in new and different places- but all the same, my life. I have realized my desire of wanting to come off as I have everything put together. It’s okay if I’m struggling as long as it looks like I’m handling it well. But what good is that doing for anyone? If I am not allowing the people that I am doing life with to see the raw, un-filtered, un-censored parts of my life then I am missing out on a key part of community.
There is a Graham Cook quote that has been kind of my mantra this past year. It says:
“The Lord says there is nothing you can do that would make Him love you more. There is also nothing you can do that would make Him love you less…. He won’t love you any better when you become better. He loves you 100% right now…. Because that’s the way that He is. That is His nature. He loves all the way all the time.”
Something that sticks out to me from this is when it says. “He won’t love you any better when you become better.” This is so key because it is how I want to live my life. I don’t want to just love people when they are at their best, I want to love them when they are struggling, when they are hurting, when they are excited, confused, scared. I want to love people with all I have all the time. When I can see people in my life at different places in their lives it allows the Lord to use me in different ways. As I have sat and processed what it looks like to come off as a nice, put together human I have realized that I am taking the opportunity for people to love me through my pain away from them. I am telling the Lord that I don’t need His love in my struggle because, “I’ve got it handled”. But I need to be loved even when I am at my worst. And keeping that from people is robbing both of us from giving and receiving love.
When I put it all out on the table, I definitely do not have it handled. My life is a broken, sinful mess. But the beauty of having a savior like ours is that he desires to know that part of us. We can rejoice in our struggles and our sufferings, because He has saved us from that. I don’t want people back at home to look at my blogs and my pictures and just see the adventure and the scene that I created behind the camera. I want to share with you even the ugly parts of this journey.
I have experience spiritual warfare like never before during my time abroad. In Cambodia, during our second day of ministry, my team encountered a possessed woman at a buddhist temple. She screamed and yelled curses at us, pushing and hugging us, and following us around telling us things in languages that didn’t even sound real. That month was hard. I cried almost every single day. My thoughts when I woke up were “why did I do this.” I remember being on the phone with my best friend, Libby, and telling her how it was and realizing I didn’t have one good thing I wanted to say. I was scared to fall asleep every night because I was experiencing sleep paralysis to the point of seeing demons in my face screaming. I would lay there motionless as a demon whispered to me, “don’t tell.” and walked over to my teammates and pressed on their faces while holding eye contact with me. These are things I can’t make up, people.
In Thailand I struggled a lot with feeling useless. Our ministry was a lot of manual labor in the rice fields and I had a full arm cast because of my elbow. I felt like I was more of a burden to my team than a help, just someone in the way all the time. The enemy used my temporary disability to attack me.
In Africa I struggled a lot with feeling alone. Which I felt wasn’t valid because I was living in a room with my 5 teammates and I was never alone. I would walk outside and was instantly with 500 kids. I would go in the kitchen and my host brothers and mom were in there. I would work out in the hallway and people were constantly walking by. But at the same time I felt like I was in a room full of people and no one could see me. I wrote in my journal one day during our second month there, “At times I feel like the thing I am best at is being at arms length. Being close enough to see but not to touch. In the action but hovering above it. Reaching out my fingers but never quite being able to grab hold.” I felt like I was there in body but not in spirit.
In Guatemala I have experienced spiritual warfare in a way that was familiar in the past but I didn’t recognize until recently. When I was in my early years of high school, I struggled heavily with depression. It was when I was in the beginning stages of finding my faith. I remember there were days when I felt so close to the Lord but then they were followed by nights of nightmares that would leave me feeling hopeless. I would wake up and think to myself that living another day was more work than I could afford. For the longest time I had no value on my life, I believed I was waisted space. After I fully gave my life to the Lord I realized how much the devil was attacking me in that pivotal point in my life. He was aware of the power I would have as a believer and he didn’t want to allow that to happen. I thought I was done with that part of my life but then I got to Antigua and it came back. I was sad. All the time, every day. For no reason. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t even ignore the feeling- and believe me when I say I am a master at pushing feelings aside. It was to the point where I would wake up before ministry and just cry because I didn’t want to get out of bed. But through the grace and redemption that is offered to us daily from our Father, He showed me that the enemy was sneaking up on me, trying to make me suffer like I did before and that I did not have to put up with that.
The beautiful thing about all these hard points in my life these past months is that every day is filled with enough joy and love from my creator to triumph over these struggles. He has shown Himself to me every single day. Even if I didn’t see that it was Him in the moment, He still showed up for me because I mean that much to Him.
If I didn’t have these struggles, I wouldn’t be me- a broken human. And that would mean that I wouldn’t need Jesus- a perfect savior. I don’t want to look all put together anymore. I want my brokenness to be seen so that my Saviors glory can shine through me.
“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.”
