Can I just be done?  I’m tired.  I want to quit.

Sometimes this is reality.  Sometimes God asks me to do things I am all fired up and passionate about in the beginning, but when the rubber meets the road and real life happens, it gets really hard.  It’s a constant fight against what my emotions want and what God has asked me to do.  I think in the past, I have interpreted those kind of emotions as my release from what God has asked….when in reality, I needed to push through what I want into what God promised.  I think I’m supposed to be uncomfortable.  I think I’m supposed to want to quit.  And I think I’m supposed to keep going.  In fact, I know I’m supposed to keep going.

But this doesn’t feel good right now.

And right now, it’s not sadness I feel.

It’s anger.

And I don’t like it at all.  It makes me unsettled and irritable.

My emotions tell me that if I quit and walk away, I won’t have to deal with all the drama anymore and I will feel better.

Finally.

My emotions tell me that what is making me angry is about what someone else is doing.

It’s not.

It’s about me.

I am allowing someone else’s choices, words, accusations, make me angry.  Why?  Is it that I agree with it?  Is it that I feel unknown?  I’ve been working on that one for awhile now.  I think a lot of it has been that somehow I’ve felt that the accusations are correct.  That I really am the person I’m being told I am.  And maybe I was at one time, But I’ve done a lot of work with God in the last couple of years….and those things are changing.

I think it’s more about feeling unknown.

This is a deep, deep barrenness in me.  I have always desired to be known and loved, no matter what is in those deep places.  Most people are built this way, I think.  This has never truly existed for me, except in my sister.  I have somehow always fallen short of what others want in a person.  I understand this.  It is human to want to remove ourselves from people who do not meet our expectations.  Our culture tells us every day that if we are around people that don’t make us happy or give us what we need then we should remove them from our lives.  And we do it.  Because we think it will solve our problem.  Fix our unhappiness.  Relieve our pain.  It doesn’t.  We just keep running into the same kinds of people until we learn how to love. No matter what.

You see, no matter how I feel or how much I want to quit.  I can’t.  If I do, I will never get to the promise.  It doesn’t mean the path won’t look different along the way, it just means I cannot give in to what I think I want.  I can’t make decisions based on the anger or sadness I feel.  Today the feelings are big.  Today is a hard day.  Today I want to quit.  This is why I write this all out to you.  It reminds me of what is real.  It reminds me that my own voice is not always the thing I should be listening to.  It reminds me of who really has my future in mind.  I think maybe it’s like grief.  You just have to walk the road.  It may seem like it has gone on long enough and that it needs to be finished, but it’s never over until it’s all been done. Some  paths take just a little while to navigate, some are still walking on the road after years.

So I walk this road until I’m done…..

Thy Will

I’m so confused
I know I heard you loud and clear
So, I followed through
Somehow I ended up here
I don’t wanna think
I may never understand
That my broken heart is a part of your plan
When I try to pray
All I’ve got is hurt and these four words

Thy will be done
Thy will be done
Thy will be done

Songwriters
BERNIE HERMS, HILLARY SCOTT, EMILY LYNN WEISBAND

I had a dear friend tell me once, that what I was going through was about eternal things.  I thought I understood this.  I thought I knew.  I did not….

So nearly two years later, I was having a deep conversation with a dear friend and God dropped this on me.  Like a TON. OF. BRICKS.  It has become so real in just a few days, that I am completely consumed by it.  It’s all I can think about.  I just keep asking God to keep me here – in the realness of it.  I don’t want this to fade.  Because it changes everything.

“He has specifically placed me in this family….My own family, my husbands family, this life.  He put me here because He knew that I would do what I am doing.  He knew I would say yes.  He knew I would stand.  For love.  For life.  For healing.  For restoration.  He made me for this.  For this season.   If I had said no or I had decided to quit, how many generations would it take for Him to raise up another to do this thing?  Would it take one, would it take four, five generations?  Who would choose to learn love?  Who would choose to stand for my husband?  Who would choose to stand for healing for all of the things that have wounded our generations, for all of the things that are dark and ugly that have created such damage and brokenness?  Who would stand for my children?  Who would fight for their lives before God…fight for breakthrough so that they won’t have to battle the things that our histories say are inevitable?  Is there another who will pick up all the ugliness and bring it before God without caving beneath the weight of its darkness?  It’s not about me being comfortable!  If I have to suffer to change things for my sweet husband, my children and their future generations, then I must to do that. I have to!  My kids will have enough of their own issues to deal with!  Why do they need to have our junk and all the junk of the generations before us?  They don’t!  If I have to suffer for that, then I can finally say I’m okay with that!  It’s about eternal things…not about my momentary comfort in this life!  I’m willing to be uncomfortable in order to affect the lives of my family!”

Does any of this make sense?  It’s not about me and my story.  What is your story?  Are you suffering?  What if you learned how to love in the middle of your suffering and God changed the course of your life and the lives of your family?  What if, by choosing to accept your “thorn” as Paul did, you opened the door for God to completely transform what you have accepted as “impossible”?  What if by choosing to say yes to Him, you made it possible for Him to change everything?  What if?

I probably don’t know you.  And I probably don’t know your story.  But I do know that God placed you in your family, in your marriage, in your life for a specific purpose.  For real.  That purpose is not just to live a “status quo” life and die.  You are meant to change destinies with your “yes.”  You are meant to be powerful in your stand for God.  Your pain, your suffering…are meant to move mountains. They are meant to change history.  Can you do something hard, something against your grain?  Can you choose to quit running from what hurts and ask God what He is trying to do through your suffering?  Can you stop looking for someone to tell you how to make the pain go away and ask Him what the pain is for?  When we are in physical pain, it is an indication that something is wrong and needs to be dealt with, not avoided.  What if you were the one that God placed right here, right where you are, to change an entire family, an entire generation?  What if?

So this life I’m living, this season I’m in, is not about having the perfect marriage, the perfect family.  It’s not about having a white picket fence and happiness forever.  It’s about eternal things.  It’s about God going to ANY (and I mean ANY) lengths to save a single soul….and probably a lot more. It’s about love.  Period.  And I know the end of the story.  God Wins.

It’s time for me to rest.

I’m not so good at this.

I have been focused and battling and standing for God’s promises over my life for so long that resting is foreign.  Resting brings quiet. Resting brings stillness. Resting brings guilt.

Ohhhh….there it is.  I said it.

Resting brings guilt.

I’m a mom. I don’t rest. Even if my physical body is still, my mind is always, thinking, planning, organizing, solving, preparing, praying, pleading, talking, fixing.

Resting means none of this.

However…..Resting does not mean giving up.

For years, I have been living in constant anticipation in my head – and not necessarily the good kind.  I’ve either been waiting for God to break in, in an extremely dramatic way, or waiting for the shoe to drop.  One could say that both of those things have happened.  But those events did not occur within the box I had placed them in. God has definitely broken in….and He surely broke in because the shoe I feared the most, dropped.

So resting means letting go of the warrior in me for a season and letting God deal with it. I don’t know how to do this.  He had asked me to be still for a very long time, but in that season, He was talking about my mouth, my words, my actions, my thoughts. My mandate was still to pray and fast and intercede for my family….and I could do that. That was something.  It was action.  It was movement. But…

Resting means I stop focusing on the promise and focus on the One who promised…

Resting means I stop holding on to the ideas of how this all is supposed to “end”…

Resting means I choose to stop waiting to be chosen…

Resting means I love…

Resting is choosing to just hang out with God and not ask for a thing…

So now what do I do when God tells me to “Let it all go and let Me handle it from here?”

I choose Him over my will.

I let him shift me.

I don’t give up.

I just let go.

I choose the yes.

And I rest.

Shame.

Today I feel it.

Today I want to hide.

Today I miss human touch so much.

Today I feel broken….

Too broken to love….

Too messed up for reconciliation.

Today the void is really big.

I haven’t felt this in awhile but I know I can’t let it progress too far or I will be under water before I even notice.  So I fight this fight because I know that it is not truth.  I talk about it because I know that we all feel these things at one degree or another.  It is such a hard thing to feel something and yet tell yourself that the emotion is the one lying to you.  It is a hard thing to know truth but feel the opposite.

I need to throw it off of me with these words I write because I hate the way it makes me feel.  It’s like a blanket that is smothering me.  It makes me feel as if I am covered in fine dust that clouds everything and refuses to let my skin and nerves and mind breathe.  It is a perpetual pit in my stomach.  An argument between what is real and what is not.

I hear the words that I am not good enough….That there is  a better choice than me….That I am hard to love….That I make poor decisions….That I am not worthy of walking through darkness with….That I am not special enough to be in the trenches with…..That my history will always dictate my future….That somehow I always fall short. These words are feelings.  And these words are lies.

When I began to understand that I was not chosen anymore, when I began to see my failings that helped lead to this pain,  there was a choice that was laid before me.  And I’ve realized it’s not a choice that I only needed to make one time….It is a choice I must make over and over and over again, until God moves me forward into another season.  And that choice is whether or not I am going to believe what I am feeling.

The truth is, God doesn’t think I’m hard to love and He’s been in the trenches with me since my first breath.  He is not ashamed of me, even when people are.  When I make a poor decision, He walks with me until I find redemption.  He never believes that I am a hopeless case, that I will never get it right. He knows I am the right choice because He is the one who chose me.  And He chooses me every day, even when not a single person notices my existence.

So, even though, in this moment, I don’t see how all this brokenness could possibly be put back together, I am choosing to believe that my feelings are just that.  Feelings.  And feelings are not facts.

So while I am still trying to find my way in this maze, and reconcile what I know to be truth with what my emotions tell me, I will feel and speak and choose breath.  I refuse to live in dust and ashes.  I need to say it over and over again.  I refuse to live in dust and ashes.  As an act of my will, I WILL NOT live in dust and ashes.  I hope you choose the same with me.

It’s coming. I know it’s coming. The thing I have feared the most for more years than I can remember. 

I feel it. 

I am afraid but I’m reminding myself that I will be okay. Reminding myself that Sarah had to stand on what God had promised Abraham for decades. Having Isaac seemed so impossible. Far away. Surreal. Her mind could not wrap around how God was going to do what He promised. 
Sometimes, when I think of her as a real person, not just a story in a book, I can feel her pain. Her struggle with Gods timing. Her deep longing for something that was just too far out of her reach. Her body had moved into old age for heavens sake! How could she keep seeing Gods promise? How could she not have doubts?  God had promised Abraham, right? What if she wasn’t really part of that promise? What if it was to come through another avenue?  Of course! That had to be it. So she tried to solve the problem. 

Hagar. 

Ishmael. 

Trouble. 

I have so many questions and no answers. None. Trying to be still and learn what God is trying to show me. He shows me an area in my life that is out of line and I work hard to grab hold but I have never struggled with His timing so much in my life. I think that is my biggest ache. When I look at who God has been in my life, I believe with everything in me that what He promised, He will fulfill. It’s the middle that I can’t quite conquer. In the middle I question whether I heard Him right. Whether I have put Him in a box and His promise is really something different.  I question how the heck this is all going to look in the end. I question my ability to love like I really want to. I question my ability to keep rising. 

Loving without be loved in return is the most painful thing…I don’t know if I can make it. Some days I feel so weak. My nature screams at me to reject so I can just stop feeling rejected every day. Every minute. I struggle with the constant ache. The constant pain that sits just below the surface. Even in joy I feel it there.  I want something that I feel like God promised but in some ways, because I have a picture in my mind of what that is, I feel like it is pulling me.  How do I rise when I’m being pulled at the same time?  How do I keep going?  

Maybe I’m just in a more emotional state. I just left from visiting my son before another deployment. My youngest is about to graduate from high school. There is so much going on. I just don’t want to fade into hopelessness. So this, I must do. I have to process to keep it from drowning me. I have to write to keep it above the waves. Thanks for surfing with me… 

I have hesitated to use this word in the midst of this journey I am on. I know and love others who are truly walking the road of grief…for they have lost someone they love from this world. It has felt disrespectful, insensitive, uncaring, to use a word for myself that seems to belong to another. One that feels as if it is owned by others in such a season of ache, of pain, of true loss. The loss of a son, a daughter, a love…gone from this life forever. 
This is not me. I do not grieve a death from this life. The ones I love still walk this earth. They are still flesh and bone and life.  They are not a breath, a memory, a thought. And yet they are lost to me. They belong to another. They have lives that I no longer look into.   Their love is closed to me. Their eyes no longer look upon me. And yet my love remains. Growing in its force every day. It does not wane. It does not loose it’s hold. It goes deeper. Wider. Stronger. And yet more quiet and more still. 

A father. 

A mother. 

A husband. 

A son. 

And I grieve. 
But I did not misunderstand His promise to me. 
I believe Him. 
So I grieve what I must live in this moment. I rise but still ache. I stand but I move forward. I weep but I know joy.  I do not understand but I have peace.  So it may not look the same as what I thought it needed to be….in order for it to be mine, but it is still mine and it is still this present road….

Grief is my companion.  

Hopelessness is everywhere.  I am seeing it in marriages, in children, in families.  We have given up.  We have given over our power to hopelessness.  And because we feel hopeless, we stop fighting.  We stop moving forward.  We stop living.

This was me too.

I gave up hope.  I gave up fighting.  I allowed myself to become disabled.  I just stopped.  Life kept moving around me but everything in me went on pause.  And as we all know, you cannot pause for long without moving one direction or another….and I slid….into the deepest pit I can imagine.  I gave up.  For a long time.  I gave up tending to my marriage.  I gave up praying for my husband and my children.  I handed over my future to my hopelessness.  And they all slid with me. For Two. Whole. Years.  We dove into the depths.

And then something happened.

God shook me to my core.  He allowed something to happen that I never dreamed would happen to me.  The circumstance came to my attention suddenly but my wake up wasn’t a lightening bolt or an earthquake.  It came slowly. Over many, many months.  Hope began to rise deep in my chest.  Where there was no life, something began to grow in the vacancy.

And now I cannot be stopped.

The enemy has taken enough ground.  I stood by while he attempted to devour my marriage and my family.  I forgot the promises The Lord has spoken over my life.  I put my head down and trudged along the ground because life just plain got hard. It took my attention.  It overtook me and I bent to its heaviness.

But now I rise.

NOW I RISE.

And now, he knows my name.

And he is afraid of me.

Because I am finding a power that I have been told my whole life exists.  I have loved Jesus more than half of my life.  I have known that He is love and kindness and justice and power.  But you see, I have only really comprehended the love and kindness part.  I could not find the justice and power part.  That was always for someone else.  I would look for other people that could pray it for me.  I just couldn’t make it happen in my own life.  And it was because of fear.  What I never saw was that I was afraid to feel His power, or any power at all for that matter.  I always saw power as something arrogant or self serving.  People used power to control other people.  To make them smaller.  To bully.  To get their way. I associated power with anger.  Anger is powerful.  It is intimidating.  It can be paralyzing.  This was my definition of power.

And then God began this process in my life….nearly a year ago.  He is wiping every fear I have away.  He is healing broken places that I knew were there but couldn’t overcome on my own and even more wounds that I never knew existed.  He is taking my fear and failures and turning them into passion and power.  Passion for broken homes and broken families.  Passion for my husband and children that I have never felt.  Power over the darkness and destruction of the enemy.  Power over every single attack from the enemy on my heart, over my past failures, over my family.

He will not win.

I see him and I know what he is up to. He has been doing it since the beginning of time and I stand up right now on behalf of my family, your family, my marriage and yours, and I say NO.  Your access has been denied.  You are finished.  You are seen and known and you will go back from where you came.  The end of your POWER is here.  The POWER of the ALMIGHTY GOD  is at hand.  And HE lives in me!!

Today is Father’s Day.  I wasn’t expecting to feel any particular way when I woke up but I do.  I feel sad.  Sad for my kids.  Sad for our family.  Broken.  Especially for my youngest.  She has such a deep ache and longing for her daddy.  It’s a terrible thing to have to watch.  And I cannot do a thing about it.  I pray for her….that God would answer her questions, that someday she will have the answer to “why”.  That she will somehow know that it wasn’t her…..that she was more than good enough.  That she was perfect.  That it wasn’t about her.  That her emptiness in this season is not wasted if she chooses that road.  You see, it’s not that she needs someone to tuck her in every night anymore or to wake her up for work or school.  It’s so much deeper than that.  It’s about seeing people with their dads….spending time together.  It’s about feeling secure in the fact that there is a man out there that is there for you and loves you no matter what path you choose.  It’s about asking for advice about growing up.  It’s about measuring every other man in her life against the one who should love her the most.  It’s about getting older and feeling sure that she is truly important, truly special.  That there is someone who would move heaven and earth to get to her if she needed him to.  Words don’t make this real for a child.  Only a daddy can do that.

It’s kind of like having a child join the military.  They choose it, but you as the family get drafted.  My girl got drafted into this circumstance.  She had nothing to do with it, yet she is paying a very steep price.  She sees herself as an afterthought, as a forgotten one.  She looks at her life and abilities and talents and knows that she is really special but actions are telling her that she is replaceable.  She needs to be able to be sad, angry, frustrated….to be able to work through these things but there is a void.  There is no safety.  No security.  I can only offer her so much.

I know that God can do anything.  That He can come in like a flood for her if she lets Him.  I pray every day that she will see His kindness in the middle of her pain.  That she will know she is loved even when she feels only hurt.  That she will reach out to Him and let Him heal her wounds.  That her life will be a testimony of hope for the forgotten.  That she will know love like she never imagined.  I know it is possible.  Because God has done that for me.

I love you sweet Maggie.  You are not forgotten.  Never give up.  If you don’t quit, you win.  Run to Him.

I had a great conversation with a friend of mine this morning….you know, one of those totally unexpected, spontaneous talks that leaves you walking away really thinking.  It wasn’t stunning and we didn’t solve all the problems of the world but there was just something about it.  Something unexpectedly beautiful.  And it made me realize something….or at least fully grab onto something about who I am.  I am not a fluff person.  She is not a fluff person.  And I’m not saying that fluff is a bad thing at all….sometimes it’s actually really refreshing.  But at my core, that is not who I am.  I’m a deep dweller.  I dwell in the deep.  I think deep.  I analyze (everything) really deep.  I feel deep.   And I realized something in talking with her.  I need deep.

In the season of my life, I have needed something deeper than the average devotional or email in my inbox every day.  I have needed deep, hard truths, that not everyone has been willing or able to give me.  It’s hard to speak truth to someone who is going through a “dark night of the soul” season.  We don’t want to be “that one”.  The one who may seem harsh or unkind.  We don’t want to hurt feelings.  We want to be encouraging and hopeful and tell them everything is going to be fine.  And everyone needs that, but for the sake of honesty, is that really going to impact a heart that has been torn in pieces to keep moving forward?  What if saying, “I cannot even imagine your struggle.  I know this is hard.  Harder than you think you can bear.  It’s going to be a long road and a really hard road and nothing I can say will make it any better but I am with you.  I commit to walking with you, praying with you, loving you however long it takes.  I will not put my own timetable on you.  But I will tell you when you are having tunnel vision.  I will tell you to stop feeling sorry for yourself.  I will tell you to stop complaining and run back to the tower of His name.  But I will love you fiercely and I will hold you up when you are broken and torn and cannot lift your arms one more time.”

You see, my friends Kelly and Becky and Angie, they are my truth tellers.  Kelly told me once to stop looking for scriptures to make myself feel better and find scriptures that talk about the character of God, about who He really Is, scriptures that glorify Him.  She reminds me consistently to praise Him, to speak out what I am thankful for and to get myself back in the tower.  Becky listens.  She asks questions that make me think and she points me to Jesus.  She sends me music that ministers to the deep places in me.  Angie speaks to me of her own testimony.  She hears the voice of the Lord in such a way that it oozes out of her without me even thinking twice about it.  And none of them are afraid to tell me the truth.

And then there is my sister.  She is my person.  She will never know what she has done for me because I cannot find the right words to express it.  She asked me once, “What if it’s not about you Mitzie?”  Sounds like a simple question but I was ticked.  I wanted her to tell me how I was doing “it” right and that I was seeing things the right way and that I was right on target.  But she didn’t.  She made me pull up short.  It took me a bit to get over being angry with her but I did when I saw how right she was.  It wasn’t about me in that moment.  There was a MUCH bigger picture.  And she was willing to tell me.  She impacted me the way that platitudes and Christianese never could.  She asked me questions that changed my life.

Here’s the funny part, every spiritual gifting test I have ever done has come out with one “over the top” answer.  Every. Single. One.

Mercy.

My gift is mercy.  And God is using this season to bring a wholeness to that gifting.  I can encourage and lift up and speak brightly of hard situations.  But I am now learning to speak the truth with that.  And I’m saying all of this because I feel like God is birthing in me a new dream.  A new purpose.  There is a fire in my bones.  A new fire.  A new vision.  A new hope.  I saw it clearly when I made the devil mad recently.  And I realized he was mad because I had pushed him back from something he thought he had won and he came at me with guns blazing and I WAS NOT AFRAID.  I saw for myself and FOR REAL that we wrestle not against flesh and blood (people) but against principalities and powers and rulers of the darkness (satan and his demons).

So here’s the thing.  I feel like people are looking for something more.  And needing something more.  Something more than the average devotional or daily encouragement.  They need real, deep, truths.  Someone to point them to hope and life and Jesus.  Something really real and deep and true.  I am only a person but I am here.  Stop living in hopelessness and reach out.  Stop accepting that this is just how life is supposed to be.  Stop making excuses.  Stop accepting that the things you think are truth, when they are just crap the enemy is feeding you every day.  Stop being afraid to ask.  Ask.  You will never know if you don’t ask.  If there is someone you have always wanted to talk to that you are drawn to, push back your fear and reach out.  If it’s me then reach out.  Please.  If it’s your neighbor then reach out.  If it’s a person at church that you desire relationship with, then reach out.  Stop complaining about how nothing ever changes and reach out.  YOU be the one to initiate change.  Doing nothing is still a decision and it’s a decision to keep being miserable.  Staying miserable is just a way to look for attention and it’s attention that never lasts.  Go after something that will last.  Forever.