This week has been hard. Yet in that hardness has come healing and freedom that I wasn’t completely convinced was possible. Perhaps one of the hardest things we did was surrender our burden to God. Walking through the woods, we were to contemplate what our burden was. Um, burden? I definitely had an ‘s’ on the end of that word! Burdens were racing through my mind. When we were given a chance to carry a log to represent the weight of our burden and its figurative size, I chose two pretty big ones. I thought that the spider that crawled out of one and bit me, and the ants that came out of the other and crawled all over me, were good representations of how these burdens were affecting my life.
So at the end, we were to throw away our burdens. That’s where surrender comes in. I couldn’t do it. I could not give those things up to God. Yes, God, I’ll go to the ends of the Earth for you, but you can’t have THAT. THIS, I can deal with, You can deal with the rest. It took me a while and there were definitely tears. I actually found myself seething in anger at one point. Some of these burdens are what I have made my identity. If I got rid of them, who would I be? As painful as they were, they were what I relied on. I finally did throw down my logs, but reluctantly and definitely with hesitation in my heart.
The next day, I realized a few things. First, surrender has a lot to do with vulnerability. That’s not something I’m so good at. I tend to think that I can do things by myself, that I’m okay. But it’s okay to not be okay and I need to be able to share when I’m feeling something other than happiness. God doesn’t want me (or anyone) clinging to things- he wants it ALL. The good, the bad, the ugly, the miniscule, the big– he wants it all. And I was finally able to give it up to Him. Second, I finally believed something I’ve been told all my life: I am a daughter of the King. I am coheirs with Christ. If I give up everything that I think makes me me, I still have the knowledge that I am a beloved of the Most High and that God delights in me. He sent His son to die for ME. That is more than sufficient to give me my identity.
It’s been very healing to be here and share myself with people. I think we all want people to know who we are, to know our stories, but years of let-downs and lost trust jade us to believing that true community isn’t possible and that lying is the only viable option to stay safe and secure. It hurts to trust people and to let them in. Yet, to truly live in community, we have to let people in. Oh, it’s hard and the process isn’t easy, but opening up has been more freeing than I ever could have imagined.
