Growing Pains

It is quiet in my house this morning.  Everyone is off running their own races.  All that can be heard is the clicking of my keys as I type.  I am only accompanied by my mind, racing at thousands of miles an hour, plaguing me with things I've tried to ignore.  I try desperately to turn it off and stop the nagging feeling of not being enough.

For a long time I trained myself in not caring.  Not caring about other's expectations, not caring about God, not even caring about me; it was just easier that way.  Days like today make me wish I could be that way again.

Today I feel ugly, not enough, broken, and captive.  Society says beauty is measured by tiny bellies and long hair and I am pretty much the exact opposite. I think I have moved on from certain hurts and then the pain comes rushing back in.  I am looked down on and treated badly who claim to have the same Father as me.  Today it just feels like all the emotions are hitting me at once.


I don't post most of what I write when I have days like these, mainly because I don't search for pity or sadness from my readers.  Today though, I think it's time for someone to be real.  Living in grace doesn't always make things easier, in fact, sometimes it makes things harder.  Where I would have been able to stop caring in the past, now I find a softness in my heart that sometimes cares too much.

The world outside my grace bubble is radically different.  I walk into churches, hear messages, encounter people, and hear prayers fueled and driven by fear, guilt, shame, and our failures.  Those very people, so shackled to their religion that they can't even see the truth of Jesus, cut down the beacons of grace around them.  It's a battlefield out there and I have been made painfully aware of that.

It's so easy for me to get tunnel vision and forget how much it just really sucks living unshackled in a prison, offering the prisoners keys to their chains only to be met with rejection and lack of desire to be free.  I feel discouraged.  I want people to see how wonderful it is to be free.  I want those outside the church to know that Jesus isn't that judgmental church goer, fire and brimstone pastor, look of disgust, or list of rules.  That's not who he ever was.

For me, I know this, even though I am discouraged in this moment, there is hope.  Though I can't stop caring and become hard, I know I can stop feeling worthless because my identity is rooted in more than my inadequacy on the battlefield.  I am enough because Christ is enough and we are one.

I am held tightly by him on these days of being broken-hearted.  He gently calls me beautiful when I feel unwanted.  I am free even when I feel shackled.  My hope is that one day I might be able to show someone else that they are all those things too.