"You make beautiful things. You make beautiful things out of the dust. You make beautiful things. You make beautiful things out of us. You make me new, you are making me new."
I remember singing that song at training camp. I'm going to be honest. I didn't know a lot of the songs that we sang at training camp, but I did know that song. I feel like that song followed me through the whole race. Every time we sang it, God started laying something new on my heart that He wanted to mold in me.
He started with my identity as a really professional, put together, everything is always fine, young woman. He started showing me that it's ok to not be ok. He surrounded me with a team that loved me and loved hearing my stories, my struggles, my celebrations- a team that wanted to sit and listen to 3 hour stories of the best and worst times of your life and wanted to hear those stories because they loved you. God started showing me that it was ok to open up to people and let them in beyond the perfect little foyer of my life that I had created.
Next, He started telling me to dig deeper. He kept telling me to take His hand and jump. Slowly but surely I did. He started showing me that I put a lot of my identity in my independence and I had a lot of walls built up of which I wasn't even aware. I didn't let myself trust anyone fully and I wasn't trusting Him fully… So I started to let that go.
In Ethiopia, He showed me His love over and over again. He showed me that His love is unconditional but love from people is conditional. We aren't God, so we can't love fully unconditionally, but we crave that kind of love SO MUCH. He showed me how that love only comes from Him. He also started redeeming a lot of experiences that I had with music and showing me that when it's for Him, it's beautiful.
Then, I had the wake up call that as much as I would like to think I am strong, without God, I'm nothing. My strength comes from Him and if I work out of that strength that comes from Him, everything seems a lot less hard.
He also started showing me that a lot of times I found my identity in my friends or in boys or in the fact that boys liked me. He started to slowly strip me of that identity and gently show me that those places were not where it should be.
And boom. Malaysia. So the Lord has been teaching me all of these lessons and I'm thinking, "This World Race thing is to that hard…" and then everything started crumbling. A dream came back to me that I had been struggling with and it started to consume my mind. I felt so isolated and so sure that no one understood how I was feeling or could help me with how I was feeling. I was letting a lot of lies rule my thoughts and letting them morph and change and worst of all, I was believing them. I spent so much time wrestling with God that month about this dream and pleading with Jesus to just tell me if it was real or not. One night in worship, God (and my teammates) told me to ask for prayer about it and God made me speak out everything that was in my head. Suddenly, it was in the light. It was no longer isolated to my mind and it could no longer control my thoughts. I realized that I had lived a lot of my life isolating things from the people around me and compartmentalizing my life, I guess. So God set me free of that.
Vietnam was crazy and it was the first month that Jesus started bringing music back into my life. I had the opportunity to sing at a coffee shop with Evan and I loved it. But God started to show me that I had a lot of my identity in music and I had a lot of pride associated with music. He also began to show me other things in which I carried a lot of pride and started to humble me on a daily basis. In Vietnam, I started to really see what it meant to find identity in Christ. I remember one day praying and struggling with my Malaysia dream and something that Joe had said to me popped into my mind. He said, "even if the dream was real, what does it really change?" Nothing. If I am made new in Christ, something that may or may not have happened in the past changes nothing.
God next started solidifying a lesson in simple obedience. He taught me that simple obedience to His work, no matter how tiring or frustrating or mundane, is what He calls us to every day. That work can look like fixing a spreadsheet more times than you can count and that's ok. He calls us to His work and asks us to accept with joy. If I am finding my identity in my job or in my work and not in Jesus, cultivating that joy will be hard.
Thailand came with team changes and new challenges. I feel like Jesus pushed me to be more bold and more in constant prayer. I prayed so much and felt so close to God most of the month, but it was also so easy to give into all of the distractions around us. It was easy to fall back on finding identity in my clothes or how I look as we were doing bar ministry. It was easy to get caught up in looking pretty and not basking in the simple truth that to the Lord, I am always beautiful.
In the DR, I was baptized in the Caribbean ocean at PVT. I had known since Malaysia that my mom would be there when I was baptized and when the opportunity arose, I knew that was when I was supposed to do it. I started walking in more boldness in the authority of Jesus. I began to more confidently speak about Jesus. I started being more convicted of things that hadn't convicted me before. I started praying for bigger things. And God started showing me more and more who I am in Him.
I am His daughter. He says I'm beautiful. He made me perfect. Jesus is my strength. I am forgiven. I am grounded in His love. I am made in His image. I am free from the chains that held my identity- things that were not from Jesus. My function in society doesn't define me. I am a new creation in Jesus and my life is for His glory.
I feel like this journey over the last year has taught me a lot of things but I think the biggest definition that it has made in my life is my identity in Christ. I have known Jesus since I was a little kid, but I spent many years not understanding what He really did for us on the cross. I had been walking many years thinking that my walk was with Jesus and that my heart was for Jesus but my actions did not reflect either of those things. I was looking to things of the world and society for my worth and my identity. I wasn't walking in confidence that I am a child of God. I was letting myself be defined by my surroundings and by the way society defined me and not the way that God defines me. But this year, God changed that. God knew exactly what I needed to learn and endure this year so that He can send me into whatever comes next in His perfect timing and to set me up to do His work for the rest of my life.
