(a very honest blog, that you mustn’t hold against me when I’m a couple months down the road and feeling better, hehe)
There have been days in these first few months when I paused, and thought, “What the heck am I doing here?” I mean, I’ve literally been pulling weeds for two months. What’s the purpose? Why did I travel all the way around the world to do this? Why would I leave everyone I love, and the place that I love, to do something meaningless? These are the thoughts that have been going on in my head for weeks now.
“I can’t grow like this.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“No one gets it.”
It’s awful, really, to see myself this way. I know how ridiculous it sounds. And yet, that’s where I am right now. It’s the ugly, messy (at times, dramatic) truth.
This thing, the World Race, is kind of like walking through fire. You have to woman-up (because I’ve always hated the phrase ‘man up,’ as if women weren’t the toughest things in this world) and just go for it, or else you won’t make it out alive; you won’t make it until the end. You have to have the guts. It really does take some chutzpah to live with people 24/7. I mean no break, constant, always around these very different-from-me people. It’s exhausting, and you have to toughen up in a new kind of way. The funny thing is: people surround you relentlessly, but you always seem to feel alone.
You may go into said fire with people surrounding you, you may even be holding hands, but in the end the fire gets to be too much. At some point, and you’re not sure when it happened, it becomes an ‘every man for himself’ situation. It’s no longer about the team or the unity, but it becomes bitter and angry when those feelings are pent up inside for just one minute too long. And instead of a life-giving environment, you’re met with a critical one: one that’s always looking for a way for you to be better, do more, and be more spiritual.
It eventually gets too hot, and you do get burned. Someone says something that scrapes a little too deep, or it might have been just plain rude. To be honest, the people you’re doing this life with really don’t know you at all. You find yourself too scared to reach out and find your way through the flames—because you know you’ll come out of the other end scorched. So who do you turn to but the two or three other people who do understand you? Even then, you are judged and perceived as not part of the group—but sometimes you just need a minute, ya know? Sometimes, you need someone that just gets you.
Because even though I am with a group of believers, surrounded by my comrades—it’s still a fight. We should have our backs faced away from one another, ready to fight the world. But instead, it’s the other way around.
Then the heavy smoke of judgment starts to engulf. You feel it in eyes, and in the feedback at the end of the day. You feel it in actions and words. It slowly weaves its way and you begin to inhale negativity and limitation. Pretty soon it’s difficult to breathe normally with the thickness of this kind of smoke, and you’re struggling and gasping through the month. The control of the environment makes this 25-year-old, independent girl feel so restricted. And all you can think about is getting back to the real world where you can breathe clean air again; where really you can be yourself (your truest, goofiest, most honest self) again.
So what do you do when you can’t find the passion?
What do you do when you don’t agree, and you can’t buy into it?
It’s a different kind of loneliness.
A unique kind of frustration.
It’s a pure, one-of-a-kind experience of truly “abandoning” it ALL.
[THAT is when you try to remember the fire. Not the one you’re walking through, but the one inside of you.]
And so, I’ll remind myself that fire in the Bible is used in a positive way, to explain that God is amongst us. Our God is one who stands in the fire with us. I’ll remind myself that I know who I am in Christ, and really that’s all there is to it. Nothing else matters.
Jesus Himself commissioned us to keep the fires within us burning:
“For this reason I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands. For the Spirit God gave us does not make us timid, but gives us power, love and self-discipline.”
2 Timothy 1:6-7
Hopefully, little by little, the fire within me will extinguish all other flames surrounding me.
…and each day, despite the circumstances, despite myself, I’m taken back to His throne room and simultaneously bettered by Him, and adored-no-matter-what by Him.
So I’ll remind myself to not let the disappointment of a season take away my fire.
Where there is fire, there is God.
Where there is fire, there is life.
“if we are faithless,
he remains faithful”
2 Timothy 2: 13
So here’s to grace, and our ever-faithful God who never gives up on this very frustrated version of me.
