Well, I don’t really know how to start; I haven’t written a blog for a while because I really didn’t know what to say, and I’m not even sure what to say now. I’ve been sitting here looking at this word document for days, and I haven’t made any progress, but I’m going to try my best to just tell you.
Abba has been really pushing me the last month and a half; and don’t get me wrong, that is a really good thing, but it’s also really hard. I was really excited for month two after hearing from the Lord as he told me how much he wanted to show me what it meant to be his daughter; but once we got into ministry and the month, everything went lukewarm. I couldn’t hear from him, I wasn’t feeling much (I know now that was self-imposed), and the Lord was bringing up a lot of things from my past about my mom and a few other things. I found myself really angry with Abba that these things were being brought up again, when I truly thought I had dealt with them and healed from them. And I think that I partially have healed, I had an incredible counselor my senior year of college who helped me work through a lot of things that have happened to me throughout the years; until then I was choosing to act like they didn’t effect me.
But now I’m starting to acknowledge that a year of counseling isn’t going to heal the things that have cut me down to the core and shaped the way that I view relationships and love and my worth as a human. As we all know, I’m a feeler, I feel absolutely everything, for everyone else that is. I know that I am good at empathizing with others and loving them well and having compassion and seeing them, it’s one of my greatest gifts from Abba; but when it comes to myself, it’s another story. I am not good at letting people love me, or care about me, and trust them that they will stay, I know that I don’t want people to do this because that puts me in a place where I could be hurt. I want to be loved and known, just not at the cost of my security; but when I am not seen and known I feel like I’m not important (these two things seem to contradict each other ya know?).
When feelings about my mom have come up over the last month and half, my squad leader has begged me to feel them, but I can’t, I won’t; huge alligator tears start to well up in my eyes, and then I look around and suck them back in and just don’t feel them. I feared (and still do) that if I feel those feelings, they’ll suck me in and I’ll break, I feel like I’ll die (dramatic I know but I truly fear that these things will crush me) and never stop crying. I can feel my chest constrict. I fear that people will look at me with annoyance and wonder why I can’t just get over it, that they’ll point and laugh and call me a victim. So instead of opening up, I just haven’t talked to anyone about any it, at all, not even Abba. I’ve just chosen to numb things out, something I used to do my Junior year of college when I felt like my life was in shambles, something that I am very good at.
But the thing is, I don’t actually want to do that, I don’t want to go home the way I left. I want to know more of Abba, of his freedom, his redemption, his voice, and his love, for the world and for me. I want to know him and surrender things to him. Since the start of the race my squad mentor Ashley has been asking me about these feelings and about my life, and I’ve never really been able to put a name to anything. There is so much going on in my brain and heart that I just feel completely overwhelmed. I have said again and again that I want to surrender these things to Abba, but I don’t know how.
Side note, during debrief in Baños when I heard from the Lord, he took me to a very special place, and I hadn’t been able to go there again until just last week. Are you kidding me? A whole month and some weeks since I’ve been able to confidently walk into the Lord’s presence and talk to him. The really crazy thing is; it wasn’t even my choice. Just wait for this ya’ll, it’s crazy, and it’s vulnerable; this part of the story is a deep part of my heart, and something I have never experienced before.
For team time last week one of my teammates asked us to do an exercise she calls “giving it to Jesus”. She asked what it was we were struggling with, what was its shape, its color, and then imagine what it would really be like to give that to Jesus, what was his facial expression, his body language, and how did it feel to give it up? Yikes right?
I did not want to this, I have been choosing for almost 2 months to not feel anything, and she was asking me to do the complete opposite. Naturally, I felt overwhelmed about the first question of what I was struggling with, a better question would have been what am I not struggling with! I couldn’t think of one thing, so instead I just wrote what I felt were my struggles: unforgiveness, doubt, fear, and choosing not to give things to Abba in the fear and doubt that he is actually good. The shape? I couldn’t think of a single shape either, but I did keep envisioning this all-consuming fire. I could see the fire surrounding me in my mind, a fire that was overwhelming me like all these emotions I’ve been having recently, a fire that was sending me into a panic. The color of the fire was a bright, hot, red. It was a fire so red and hot that it was actually burning me, it was making me want to scream out in fear and pain. I was terrified. Then, she asked us to give it to Jesus, and in that moment, Jesus brought me back to our special place I hadn’t been to for almost 2 months. I was facing him, and I looked up to him with panic in my eyes because I didn’t know what to do, I felt hopeless. I had nothing to give to him, I just had all of this fire surrounding me and consuming and burning me, every time I tried to hand it over I couldn’t because it was giving me actual, real pain. I was crying and felt like I couldn’t breathe, terrified that this thing was going to overtake me. But as I looked at him in those moments, he just looked at me, with no trace of pity in his eyes, only love, and then it started to rain. He made it rain until the fire was gone, and as I looked down I saw that in my hands, where I thought there was nothing, were embers (I think this is him saying that all of these things I have been feeling that are overwhelming me and threatening to take over me, are in fact because of just a few things). I held them out to him, still not knowing what to do, still feeling scared and in pain, and he just took them from me. I don’t know what he did with them, but after that, he put my burned and blistered hands in his, lifted them to his lips and kissed my burned palms, and he healed them. After that he pulled me into his embrace and I began to cry. I felt relieved, I felt safe, I felt chosen, I felt loved. I felt like I could finally mourn, like I could finally cry as much as I needed to and it would be okay, and all the while he just held me and let me do it.
Then, my teammate asked us to share these experiences with each other, and as I did, I felt all of those things I just wrote physically manifesting in my body, and I cried in front of my team for the first time since I had decided that I didn’t want to. And the sweet gift that the Lord gave me is that my team stayed, they still chose me afterwards; and none of them have used any of my vulnerable, broken story to hurt me. They have only loved me. This week as I shared my testimony with our new (but old?) team, I cried again, a lot. And again, Abba was so sweet to me, in those moments of honesty with my team Abba showed me that he is walking me into that. He is walking me into choosing my team while He is also choosing me; he is helping me feel the things I don’t want to feel, and letting me know that he is right there with me feeling them too.
Later in the week as I told my squad leader about my teammates exercise, he told me to read Isaiah 6. When I did, I read about a seraphim who touched the lips of Isaiah with a coal, an ember ya’ll, healing him, pardoning him from sin and guilt. Talk about the Lord you guys, Abba is so dang incredible.
Although the fire I experienced was something I would choose to never feel or experience again, Abba is using that fire to refine me. I don’t know how to surrender things over to my sweet Papa just yet, but the sweet thing that he showed me in that vision was that he will take it, he will do it, I just have to let him.
Love,
Mack
“Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. And he touched my mouth and said: “Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.”’ Isaiah 6:6-7
