Three years ago, I began this awesome journey of following the Lord. It has has been an adventure full of growth and faithfulness. A year and a half ago, to continue the growth He had started, God called me on the World Race. And now, to push me through the two biggest areas of growth I need, as well as deal with some health issues, the Lord is calling me home early.
For the past two and a half months, I have been dealing with pretty heavy anxiety issues. Anxiety is not a new thing to me. In college, I began seeing a counselor for it, and after a few sessions and the administration of testing instruments, I was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. My sessions with her helped me to understand a lot about what anxiety disorders look like (though that differs from person to person) and why I was experiencing what I was. I took medication for it until the end of my first year of teaching. That was right before I started going to 38th Ave Baptist Church and right after I started feeling the Lord calling me to walk with Him. The counseling helped me to understand it, the medication helped to stabilize it, and ultimately the Lord helped me to overcome it. So I thought it would be gone for good.
The thing is, as much as people (especially we Christians) see it as a faith/heart problem, it’s not always. Sometimes, it’s a health problem, one that I have been wrestling to defeat for two and a half months now. That is something the Lord is teaching me right now. It’s not something to feel guilty about. It is a chemical imbalance, not a lack of faith. To give you some idea of what my anxiety has looked like, it isn’t a struggle with fear or doubt. It was a heaviness, a sense of being impossibly overwhelmed that led to a constant flow of frustrated tears and responses of “I don’t know why I’m crying” and “I don’t know why I feel overwhelmed by this.” And cry I did, almost every single day. I’ve had so many moments of feeling like I need to retreat to the smallest corners and places, to escape from all of the stimulation that is making me feel on edge, such as multiple people talking, or too many people in a room, and I can’t sit still or listen to serious discussions for long periods of time without feeling like my brain and body will explode.
By the time I got to debrief, I was exhausted. One night, one of my leaders, a wonderful woman named Eileen, who is like a squad mom that travels to debriefs with her husband to pour into us and check up on us, called me to her room. She told me she had been watching me and was worried about me. She asked me a series of questions. After a few moments, she said, “Do you think you could be struggling with anxiety? Have you ever had issues with it before?” My first thought was it can’t be. I haven’t been having panic attacks. But then, she asked me how often I cried and why I cried and when I answered her, she just looked at me and it clicked and I knew. She told me I could stay on the race, but it seemed like unnecessary suffering to her. But I still didn’t want to go home. I didn’t want to let people down. I didn’t want people to think I was coming home for a stupid reason.
For months, even before understanding what was happening with my body, I had been praying and seeking after the Lord diligently. I have asked Him to take it away and give me peace, to help me to trust Him more, to grow me in my faith, to show me His heart for me. Let me tell you what He has given me instead. When praying for peace, He asked me why I care so much about what people think of me. When praying for more faithfulness, He reminded me of Job and how having faith meant seeking after Him and turning to Him just as I have been doing. He also reminded me that people, even those who have the best intentions, will sometimes get it wrong. When I ask about His heart for me, He told me I need to learn to give myself grace because He already has. See, my Father has shown me great love, He wants to mold me into the woman He created me to be. One that is confident, who hears and listens to His voice, as well as uses her own voice instead of echoing those of the people around her. He has shown me that making a hard decision right now can lead me to becoming that woman. I could stay on the race. I could push through and He would use it to grow me because that is what He does. But I’m finally hearing what He has been telling me for months: I don’t have to stay…because leaving will force me to face and walk through two of the most powerful chains keeping me from being who He created me to be. Until I learn to stop centering my life around the thoughts and ideas of others and learn to forgive myself and offer myself grace for moments when I am not perfect, I will never walk in freedom and confidence. Do I have to go home to walk through those things? No. He will find another way along my journey to get me there, should I choose to tell Him no this time and say I’ll just push through it. But I think it’s time to listen to what He is telling me, listen to my body and its wellbeing and to the deepest desires of my heart (those I can’t explain and can’t get rid of).
Staying would be hard…but coming home early means facing everyone who supported me and knowing that some people are going to judge me, feel disappointed in me, think I failed or worse quit, consider me weak, or disobedient, see me as a poor follower of Christ, think they could have done better, feel let down. That strong, brave girl that they supported and sent out to spread the love of Jesus around the world didn’t make it to the last three, so maybe she wasn’t that strong or brave. Some people will feel that they wasted their money sending me. I know all of these things because I’ve thought them myself. It will hard to feel that judgement, harder to feel my own and hardest to walk through the grace the Lord is calling me to. God doesn’t see me as any of those things. If I go home or stay, His opinion of me stays the same. Whatever happens, whatever I face and whatever you feel, God is going to be right there in my corner telling me, “You’ve done well, Makita. In your weakness my power is made evident. I love you. You are my sheep, you hear and know my voice, and you listen to my voice because I am your shepherd. Allow yourself to feel the grace and freedom I died to give you.” It’s up to me to shut down all the other voices I hear, be it my own or others, as I learn to walk through that grace and accept the role that He is calling me into.
So when you see me in a few weeks, if your flesh is feeling let down by me, I hope you will learn to give me grace. Though if you don’t, that’s okay too, because God already has and it’s His voice I will choose to listen to. I will miss the race, the people I’ve grown to know and love and the awesome opportunities I’ve been given. I will have moments of wonder in which I will ask myself what the last three months would have been like. I will cry because I forget to give myself grace or foolishly listen to a voice of my flesh or someone else’s… But I will not allow it to taint the journey I’ve been taking. I still did the world race. I lived in the mission field for eight months and God used me to bring kingdom to eight different countries on two different continents. I have good stories to share and I have grown so much from it. So please, ask me about it. Don’t sweep it away as some shameful thing because I didn’t complete the last three countries. It’s not shameful and I didn’t fail. I won’t be the person I was eight months ago, but it may take you a while to realize that. I am going to hold on to this woman God has been molding me into with all of my strength. It will be easy to go home and start to see myself as I and other people once (and maybe still) saw me… A baby Christian, weak without much knowledge, with a rocky set of beliefs, but that’s not who I am. So be one of those to remind me of the growth I’ve made. Ask me to tell you about the slums in Uganda, about the Lord giving me messages to share at Sunday morning church services in Rwanda, about the babies in Ethiopia, about the conquering of fear in India, about realizing what ministry in real life looks like in Nepal, about pushing against spiritual warfare that started in Nepal and continued in Cambodia, about learning what community and love in community looks like in Thailand, and about the time the Lord spoke confirmations to me through a husband and wife in Malaysia. Ask me. Don’t be afraid. If I cry, it will be from joy that the Lord allowed me to experience those things. I am such a blessed woman. I want to be able to share those experiences and blessings with you.
So friends and family, I’ll see you in May because I’m following the Lord’s voice and He is calling me back home. I love you and I am thankful for the love, support and encouragement you’ve given me. Those things were not wasted on me, because this journey wasn’t a waste and neither am I! The world race may be ending for me, but my journey is still only just beginning 🙂 See you soon!
p.s. I have one more blog to write from Malaysia so stay tuned!
