real.

Sometimes I am completely taken off guard by how responsive God is. It’s not as if he isn’t real, or isn’t longing to interact with us. I just forget sometimes that he is REAL, you know? Real in the sense that if I punched one of you, you would punch me back, fall over, bleed, something! God reacts like that too in very real ways.

Well…

At the beginning of this school year (my freshman year in college) I asked God to start teaching me things in real ways. I wanted to experience life in all its glory, excitement, rage, terror and joy. I was ready for God to take off the training wheels and roll with the punches. I knew it would be more difficult and I would have to stretch a little more than normal but I was more excited than anything. I was ready to be “real” with God and with life. Away from all my mentors and family and church.

And He listened.

He let me get settled.

And then He ripped the carpet right from underneath me.

If any of you have been following my posts, then you might have a small idea of how I have been growing and what I have been struggling with. These posts barely even touch the amount of things I have been wrestling with, screwing up with and healing with.

I am not writing this post to complain about how hard things are or talk about how unhappy I am or even try to share the things I have been learning. I just think that sometimes we ask things of God or we ask Him to be real with us and the we don’t really expect Him to respond. We are okay with telling Him we are willing to surrender everything to Him because we don’t really expect Him to call us on it.

I don’t now if I went into this with that mindset or not…but I don’t think I really understood what I was asking. I don’t even know what I was expecting.

God has placed me on a journey through myself. When I asked Him to be real with me, He started to show me that in order to really be with Him, I have to be real with myself. I have to take apart who I am and piece myself back together. I have to be real about my mistakes and embrace them. I have to be honest with people about where I am, and sometimes where I am is not a very good place.

Really surrendering yourself to God is a lot more than being okay with Him mixing up a few things. If you told God “okay God, this is it. Your will be done,” and then He decided that you needed to leave your job and move across the country, would you do it? Really…would you do it? If he told you that the guy you are engaged to is not the one for you and moved you to break off the relationship, would you do it? If you could feel the Spirit tugging at you, telling you to adopt a child even though you have no idea how you could afford another mouth to feed, would you do it? Would you trust that He would provide?

Almost everybody reading this probably thought “I would if He would ask me to do something like that, but I doubt He will.”

HA!

Yes He will. and yes He does.

But after we tell him yes in our nightly prayer by our bedside and He really does takes us up on our sacrifice, we change our minds. This school year, with a lot of help from God and my own mistakes, I have been saying yes…and really saying it. It has been a long 6 months so far but this weekend was the point where I finally let it all go….

I have made some not so great decisions that have hurt a lot of people. They have hurt myself. Hurt my relationships. Hurt God. But I wasn’t being real with myself about how serious they were. I didn’t want to think about what I needed to change in myself (I didn’t even want to admit there was something wrong) and I didn’t want to face the pain I had inflicted on myself and some of the people that mean the most to me. But I finally did. And it was scary. It was terrifying, actually. It was the most comfortable moment of my life and the few days afterwards I didn’t even want to talk to anyone because I had no idea who I was and I was so ashamed of myself. Some major changes were set in motion and they left me very vulnerable and completely blind to what the future is going to be like.

I am still walking blind. I am still dealing with the shame. I am still trying to forgive myself.

But I am hopeful.

I say all of this to ask you….when was the last time you felt that way? Have you ever? Have you ever been in a place where you HAD seek God to find yourself? When was the last time you really meant what you said when you told God that you are surrendering everything to Him? Do you even think you could?

It is scary. It is unknown. It is hard.

But losing myself in order to find the heart of God has already been the best thing I could have done for myself.

with love,

j.