It’s been a while since I’ve written here.
This year has been very difficult, to say the least. Many lauded 2020 as the year of clear vision and new things. Little did we know, it would be so challenging, that we would be hit with a global pandemic and racial tension and natural disaster, and to top it all off, an election.
Sometimes it takes hardship to show you the realest things inside of you. I have written many times on this blog and on my social media about the healing and breakthrough I’ve received since moving to Nashville four years ago. Those lessons and growth milestones are true. But they are only the beginning and part of an iceberg that it turns out goes very deep.
When the social distancing and cancellations of this COVID season began, I went through phases that I’m sure many of you went through. I initially downplayed the illness, telling myself that everything was fine and people were probably freaking out over nothing. There were only a handful of cases back in March, and I told myself it probably wouldn’t even come to Tennessee. I was wrong, obviously.
Then, as it played out and got bad, I conceded that I was wrong and went through the procedures recommended by healthcare professionals. I stayed home and only was around the people at my job, the people at my usual grocery store, and my boyfriend. I joked at first that I was living my best life because I am very introverted and love spending time alone anyway. That also turned out to be wrong as my mental health declined a bit along with my physical health as I washed down my worries with pizza and sugar.
As I was forced to not have my usual church life, social life, and volunteer life, I found all sorts of ugly things come popping up and all of a sudden, the beautiful flower bed I had cultivated was showing some weeds. I got frustrated. I was worried I was going to be diagnosed with depression again or see my closest relationships fail or see my bank account hit zero again. All of a sudden my thought life was cluttered. Random bouts of deep insecurity or body dysmorphia or shame would hit me at the smallest things.
I thought, “Ugh, why are these things plaguing me again? I thought I had conquered this.” I struggled to write, and when people asked how my writing was going, especially on this blog, I’d shrug and say, “Eh, okay.” I did start a Facebook page where I try and post writings three times a week. So that at least kept me fresh.
But concerning things were popping up in my mental and spiritual life left and right. I started having insomnia again, which I haven’t had in a long time. I started needing more cups of caffeine to make it through a day. I started getting very irritable again. Once the COVID restrictions lifted a bit and I was allowed to see small numbers of people again, I started isolating. Some of my friends literally live 1 mile down the road from me and I couldn’t find the motivation or energy to go visit, when in the past, I visited them almost daily.
I felt like things were slipping from my grasp and I was going backward. I told my therapist I was scared of my past self sneaking up on me, that she was like a ghost who was bound to slip through the window. Thankfully, my therapist dispelled that myth, reminding me that growth can’t be undone and I am a different person than I was then.
I also started reading a book called Hinds Feet in High Places, which is about a character named Much-Afraid who is invited on a journey to the High Places by the Shepherd. It’s basically an allegory of the Christian’s walk to healing and wholeness with Jesus. It’s absolutely beautiful, and one word that stuck with me through it is precipice.
I am a words person, obviously, and many times, God will repeat certain words to me over and over again to reveal what he wants me to know in that season. In the midst of reading that book, God kept highlighting precipice to me. I’d see it in Instagram posts and hear it in messages, and I wondered what exactly it meant for me.
Now I know what it means – that I am on an edge of sorts. I am making a steep climb currently to my next level. And it is bringing up a lot of things I didn’t know were inside me. It is an awkward place to be in, a risky place to be in, a sometimes lonely place to be in. I am taking a road very less traveled. But it is for a purpose.
“I have brought you on purpose to this back side of the desert, where the mountains are particularly steep and where there are no paths but the tracks of the deer and mountain goats for you to follow, that the promise may be fulfilled.”
Hannah Hurnard, Hinds Feet on High Places
As I learned not too long ago, sometimes the way back is the way forward. Meaning, sometimes it will feel like you’re going backward because the road is hard and rocky. But what is actually happening is, you are being formed and moving forward in a truly authentic way. There are no shortcuts to the High Places. If there is, it’s not a real High Place and the cliff you’re standing on will chip off at the slightest bit of weight.
Walking with God is not a clean, neat, one-size-fits-all journey. It is gritty, it makes you sweat, it sometimes makes you curse, it is maddening, it is hilarious, it is serious, it is expanding and it is crushing, it is beyond everything you can fathom or know in your own strength.
It is to put yourself on an altar time and time again, trusting that only God can get you there. It seems as if you’re weak and out of control, but actually, you’re the most strong and in control that you could ever be. Because a thing you can understand is not a thing that will bring you to the land of beyond, where ambition and surprise and love live.
GK Chesterton has this brilliant writing related to this concept:
“As we have taken the circle as the symbol of reason and madness, we may very well take the cross as the symbol at once of mystery and of health. Christianity is centrifugal; it breaks out. For the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature; but it is fixed for ever in its size; it can never be larger or smaller. But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms for ever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox in its centre it can grow without changing. The circle returns upon itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travelers.”
GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy
As Lisa Harper preached from my TV today, rewarding faith is risky. It is expansive and contradictory, and I can’t wrap my brain around it. It is walking out of a boat onto water when science says you will sink in water. It is believing you’ll find a way when all you can see is a Red Sea in front of you. It is walking in fire. It is believing for miracles. It is speaking things that aren’t as if they are.
It is reaching beyond who and where you are, to who and where you want to be.
It has been a hard year so far. But it has been an important year. Many times vision is the result of trial. It might seem foggy right now, but I know the result will be a clearer vision than I’ve ever had before.
