Preface: This blog is a journal entry from yesterday (10 April 2019). I have not edited, checked grammar, etc. due to my conviction for this blog to be as transparent as possible! Thank you for reading!
I realized that my fire had been quenched this week.. ironically by the heat partially but also by my own expectations. Expectations of grandiose movement and action packed days. The Lord highlighted this month to me before the race started, and I am realizing the months that He highlighted have been my most unraveling, core shaking, rooting months. Both this month and Kenya have been emotionally and spiritually wrecking me in different ways. But they are ways that shake me up and remind me where my roots stand. Over debrief we started discussing vision and values as we head into these next few months, and I realized I was having THE most difficult time coming up with a vision statement or even goals for my life. This is the COMPLETE opposite of how I usually feel during these exercises.. I LIVE for that stuff. I’m a 1w2 on the enneagram and an INFJ on the Meyers Briggs.. planning and dreaming ARE MY JAM! But still… I sat.. I felt lost.. I didn’t have any drive left in me to create dreams with my imagination. Instead I wanted to throw my papers over the railing into the pool. I was so over it. God had turned my world upside down… the world inside of my head that I created and could piece together and make pretty no longer existed.
Instead, I was left with an image that my mentor had told me about earlier in the week… The image was a steamroller, making its way across a crop, flattening out every single thing that had ever been planted.. as the steamroller got to the end of the crop, I soon realized I was standing on hard ground.. soft enough to leave impressions from my boots, but not hard enough to throw some more seeds down to grow. I also am very very into the 4 seasons being representational of the seasons we walk through in life. And I find it no irony that I was wearing my winter boots, jeans, a jacket and a scarf in that vision of myself. It was cold, everything I knew had been flattened out, and I was left completely confused. According to one of my favorite authors, Lara Casey, winter is a season of waiting, of resting, abiding, reflecting, and clinging to the hope of spring ahead. “And maybe this season of waiting is your time of ripening—a season of preparation, getting you ready for something good ahead. Something far better than you expected.” There’s a reason putting words on paper felt so forced, so not like myself. Because God is changing my heart, He is trying to grow things inside of me that are going to take work, but first I need to rest, I need to let Him lay the groundwork and not feel stress when a big Holy Spirit connection doesn’t happen for the first few days of ministry.
I just finished listening to a podcast recommended by one of my ASQLs (Thanks, Alyssa!). The podcast is a discussion on the Parable of the Sower, by which I have now myself also deemed “The Parable of the Soil”. As I was listening to the story that I have heard over and over again, but told from the viewpoint of the Lord being the Sower, I soon realized my soil does NOT look or feel like what God wants it to be. My soil has thorns.. or at least it had some until the bulldozer came in and flattened them all out. The thorns are a representation of a “soil that understands, a heart that understands and desires to grow, but soon gets choked out by the concerns of the world”… haha. Wow. Ouch. (No thorn pun intended) HE gives us the desires of our hearts.. he doesn’t give us the desires that we create in our minds.. he gives us the ones that he has created and placed in our souls, in our spirits, because He is all knowing.
So as I sit in the common space of our home above the school for the next couple of weeks, in my red plastic chair, slight breeze blowing from the pink floor fan next to me, I think I’m finally content… I think I understand, and I think it’s time to partner with God to create some new soil, and to know that it’s o.k. to not have some sort of grand vision with goals and checklists in this season… because the biggest piece of surrender that He has been teaching me this year, is the surrender of what I think my life is supposed to look like vs. what it looks like in Kingdom terms.
Love y’all! -Nico
