I'm Ready

HEY Y’ALL! It has been quite some time since my last journal, but God is just showing me a lot of stuff lately that I really wanted to type out and share!

You stood before creation Eternity within Your hands And you spoke all life into motion My soul now to stand

You stood before my failure And carried the cross for my shame My sin weighed upon Your shoulders My soul now to stand

So what can I say And what could I do But offer this heart O God Completely to You

So I'll walk upon salvation Your Spirit alive in me This life to declare Your promise My soul now to stand

So I'll stand With arms high and heart abandoned In awe of the One who gave it all

So I'll stand My soul Lord to You surrendered All I am is Yours

Do y’all ever have those thoughts that you just can’t shake? Like something that you used to struggle with and then out of nowhere the thought just pops into your head again and it leaves you feeling discouraged? Or like something is wrong with you?

This has been me for the past couple of weeks.

About a week or so before Thanksgiving, a lot of stressful stuff was popping up. It seemed like one thing after the other and it had me exhausted. And what comes with my exhaustion? Bad thoughts.

The Sunday before I would be going home, I sat at my friend’s table and couldn’t keep the tears from falling. I was stressed, I was a little sad (this would be the first holiday without my Pop), and these dark thoughts were popping into my head. I was feeling like a complete bother to the people around me. I was going to just go home for the night and leave my friend alone, but as the tears fell, she just encouraged me.

Later that night, something happened with an old friend from back home. It was an exhausting and scary situation. I don’t know what I would have done if I had gone back home to be by myself. But, with my mom doing everything she could over the phone, and my friend and her mom sitting with me as I cried and cried, my eyes were opened to what the enemy was trying to do. He was trying to get me alone so I’d be facing this dark situation by myself on top of everything else. I was grateful that I stayed, and was reminded that these people genuinely care about me.

I started to feel better. These feelings only hit me once, slightly, in the next two weeks that passed. And then out of nowhere they hit me hard while I was in Disney with my sister.

I was confused and aggravated. We were having such a great day in Epcot, I had just been running around giggling in Canada (my favorite), and then I just got super depressed. All of the excitement and giddiness had been sucked out of me. Mikayla sensed it, and when we got back to the hotel she pulled me off to the side.

I told her everything. I told her about how I felt like a bother. I told her about these people that I loved so much that I didn’t want to lose. I told her about how scared I was to possibly have seasonal depression again. I told her about this numbness that would randomly hit me, that I would just look at my friends goofing off and laughing around me and all I could do was watch. I told her about how much I missed my Pop. Everything.

She sat there while I cried and she just listened to me. When I got everything out she encouraged me and pointed me to truth. I left that conversation feeling a lot better. I knew that the enemy was just trying to get in my head; I just didn’t totally know why this was hitting me so much.

The next day, my friend picked me up from the airport (and brought me Starbucks, she’s too sweet). She asked me about my trip and then she asked me about the night before, I had texted her and told her that I had a rough night. I told her everything, just like I had with Mikayla. I told her about how I was frustrated that I kept feeling this way because it’s not what I actually think; it’s just what keeps popping into my head. And as I thought through all of these emotions, feeling confused, she mentioned something that made so much sense. When I was young and my brain was still developing, I had it in my mind that I would lose everyone I loved. I had faced a lot of trauma, and a lot of broken relationships. I had it in my mind that I wasn’t good enough to make people stay. When I was young, I couldn’t process all of that, my brain couldn’t make sense of it all. But then she also spoke truth into my life by saying that I couldn’t hold onto people in fear that I’d lose them…I had to be okay with God being the only constant. And for a while I really thought I was, but that’s because deep down I knew that the relationships that I had at the time weren’t good for me. So now I had to grow in being okay with true, genuine friends not always being there. I had to trust that no matter what happened, that God would use it for good, and that He was holding me.

We spent the afternoon watching movies and making banana bread with one of our other friends and then we made our way to the 6:30 City service. We got there as the doors opened and sat almost front and center. We started with Raise a Hallelujah (such a powerful song) and then Jason came up to give the word. All I can really say right now is that week after week, Jason’s shares such powerful messages and it is OBVIOUS that he puts his time and his heart into them. I can always take something out of the message, but this week it was everything that I needed to hear.

He started off by talking about Christmas and good memories. I remember loving Christmas when I was really little...I don't remember when exactly I stopped, but I know that I got to the point where I dreaded Christmas. Don't get me wrong, I love the story of God sending baby Jesus to save us, but I disliked everything else. But as I thought about how much I was looking forward to Christmas this year, I couldn't help but think that maybe the reason why I disliked Christmas wasn't because of seasonal depression, but because Christmas carried a lot of hurt for me. But where did that start? I couldn't shake that from my head as I listened to Jason's message.

My notes:

Luke 2:9-11

-A Savior shows up when you're about to die and restores you -> leads to great joy

God cares about your emotional well being!!

-You were created for JOY! NOT for a constant state of sadness, a dark cloud over your life, depression, etc.

Where does joy come from?

-relationship

-an overflow of love (The more you lean into perfect love, the more your life manifests joy)

Psalm 100:3

-we are the people of His pleasure

-when we get up in the morning, He SMILES

Joy is NOT a state of emotion, it's a state of being

-it's a lens to see the world through

Genesis 2:7-10, 15-16 (words written over your life, how God wants to be involved in your life)

*MADE FROM DUST*

-you had nothing to do with being formed, so why spend your whole life trying to make yourself something else?

-you weren't given the right or permission to make yourself, so what does the Father make? -> He only has the capacity to make good things

-God has already made me who I need to be. If He needed me to be something else, He would have made me that way.

-When I say something bad about myself, I'm not saying something bad about me, but I'm saying something bad about how He made me (Ephesians 2:10)

*BREATHED INTO HIS NOSTRILS*

-Adam does nothing to get his needs met. God has already given you everything you NEED to have!

-Hebrew word for breath is Spirit! (!!!!!!!!!)

-Fruit of the Spirit is LOVE, JOY, ...

-God works while you REST

-what do you believe about your Father?

*THERE HE PUT THE MAN HE FORMED*

-He places us where we need to be -> only ever in good places

*MADE THE TREES GROW*

-God is responsible for things growing

-> we all have things that need to grow, but our responsibility is to rest in His perfect love

*RIVER FLOWS INTO EDEN*

-God pours everything into your life that you need

-you'll achieve far more if you rest in God's love for you

*TAKE CARE OF IT*

-just take care of what He's given you

-you have the power to decide what you allow to live in your brain

-take EVERY thought captive and call it out for what it is -> replace it with TRUTH, that's how we guard the conditions of our soul

*GOD COMMANDED THE MAN*

-the command is to ENJOY your life

-when negativity creeps in, you can make the decision to fall back into His faithful arms and declare His goodness

At one point in his message, Jason mentioned how he was always insecure of how he talked, but the very thing that the enemy wanted to tell him was so imperfect was the very thing that God wanted to use. I thought back to those times that I'd be with my friends while they were goofing off and I realized the reason why I wasn't laughing and smiling with them was because at some point in the past month, I had started to feel insecure of my laugh and my smile. I'm not saying that God is trying to use my laugh to share a message, but I really do think that the enemy is trying to keep me from laughing and smiling as I go into this season that is usually really hard for me. I realized that maybe I'm not as joyful as I thought I was. I think at one point I was really good at being joyful. When things were really hard, I was able to look forward with joy, knowing that God had it all. But when things started to go really well? I started to think of how they could go wrong. Joy and fear do not exist together. But where does joy come from? An overflow of perfect love!

Another thing that hit me in his message was a note that I took from a devotional or sermon when I first moved out here. "When God wants to bless you, He'll send you relationships. But, when the enemy wants to hurt or distract you, he'll also send you relationships." It occurred to me that the enemy has used a lot of relationships in the past to hurt and distract me, and for years and years that led me to put up walls and not tell anyone anything. Obviously I've gotten pretty good at being vulnerable, but healing from that past of so many broken relationships is a process. These broken relationships kind of blurred the idea that God really CAN use relationships as a blessing.

After Jason's message, we jumped back into a time of worship...with my favorite song in the years that so many relationships had hurt me. (The Stand by Hillsong) I was talking to my friend's mom the other day and she told me that a lot of times God will peel things back in layers, not to hurt you, but to heal you. I could feel that in this moment. Over the past month, God had been bringing me back to those years. And in this moment of worship, He was bringing me back to the place I was at years ago, not to hurt me, but to continue to heal me. I feel like I go through certain seasons of healing from certain things, and I really feel like since I came out to Pittsburgh, God has been healing my relationships and teaching me more about them. Some days are really emotional, others are not.

One of the worship leaders felt a song on his heart that he started to sing over/with us. The words were "Are you ready for God's blessing? Are you ready for a miracle?" Was I ready for God's blessing? Was I ready to believe that He could use relationships to bless me? Suddenly it all made sense. He was trying to teach me about relationships in this season, so not only would He be opening my eyes to my relationship with Him, but He would also be sending me blessings of relationships that would portray the love of Jesus.

And as negative thoughts tried to make their way into my head a couple of days later, I thought back to Sunday. I turned my music up and was encouraged by the words:

I know your past is broken

You can move on it's over now

Here in the presence of the Lord

Tired of running, running

Be still and know He's in control

Here in the presence of the Lord

So maybe these friends will be in my life forever, maybe they're just here for a season...but no matter what God's plan is, I'm ready for it.