{it's ok}

I spent most of my morning the other day crying on the couch. It was actually a cry of relief. The kind of cry you have when that loved one who was in a perilous situation made it out ok, and maybe even better than before. That near death moment that you escape last second and unscathed (for the most part) kind of cry. I realized both are true, because I feel like I have spent three years watching my spirit die, my soul shrivel up, and my life fade from being any sort of promising kingdom changer. And yesterday, I saw all three escape in the nick of time. Mostly unscathed, somewhat ragged and leaving me asking myself how I got here.

 In the midst of a season of longing for answers, seeking clarity, and almost resorting to talking to myself in the mirror in hopes that it is another person and they will respond in the deafening silence, I am beginning to see it's ok.

Clarity and knowing can steal the joy from  life. And in the gap where joy and peace should reside we  fill it with other thing to define ourselves by. In the longest of silences, I have never shut up enough to actually listen. But clarity isn't the point. Clarity isn't the journey, it isn't the adventure, not the story I have been invited to be a part of. Knowing only means I know, but it cannot complete me in any way.

Something about 24-25 opens and closes so many of the doors I imagine in the hallways of my mind. The insecurities of adolescence seem to drift away, distant and foreign, but are replaced by the insecurity of definition. When you're 18 it seems who you are becoming is an adventure full of joy and discovery. As you grow older, the pressure builds to have an answer, to define yourself by what you do and who you know. To define yourself by success in numbers, knowledge and direction. Discovering the world around you is no longer a journey, but a daunting task to complete that is full of haunting insecurities and is like chasing the light. You'll never arrive.

It's ok.

In some ways, my desperate attempts to figure it all out has made me whore myself out to every cause, Biblical teaching, mission organization, job possibility, creative idea, and new fad that has popped into my range of vision. I find myself grabbing at anything and everything that promises definition, security and fulfillment. I pride myself in things that, in my pathetic definition of adulthood, make me look smart, put together and wedge myself right into that dark little place of allowing everyone, everything, and every word shake, shatter and re-define me. In all of this; in opening every beckoning door, in seeking to define myself standing alone and strong, I have never been more weak.

I have collected definitions for myself, like a creepy hoarder, stealing and hiding thing after thing, job after job, word after word, friend after friend to tell me who I am. Tell me where I should be. I keep yelling at God to shut up but stay close. That I don't believe Him but I can't let Him leave. I keep asking for what I want, but never acknowledging that I actually have NO idea what I want, or what I even need.

And so I cried yesterday, because after months of building bitterness as walls around my crumbling spirit. After spending months holding it together, trucking through life, snapping at everyone, and freaking out internally on a regular basis like a spaz, I froze.

I shut up.
I quit running.
I gave up.
I quit trying so hard.
I gave up trying to figure all this stupid annoying stuff out.
I gave up asking. Wanting, dying in the worst way I can.
I shut up and said, I can't. Not anymore. I just. Can't. Do. It.
I just don't care about any of this anymore...I just don't. And I can't make myself...

 I froze for a second of time and said out loud: "God. I can't do this. I am pressing the reset button. Can we start over?" I know i can't erase what has lead me here, but I can clear the battle field. Of the things that are strewn across it, I can take out the parts that don't mean anything, that draw my attention, that subtract instead of add. And I can be renewed. Isn't that what starting over is? It is never forgetting, just clearing the battle field. It is re-starting, re-kindling.

And I cried because of this...words that are  drawing me back in with the wonder, the beginning when I first stepped out into all of this. Gently, freely and refreshingly.

I was never dying, I was changing. I know it isn't over, I am not foolish enough to think this is the end. I am not foolish enough to believe I will understand, or gain some ounce of knowledge. I am not foolish enough to believe that this is all gone, solved in one small moment. But I am just foolish enough to believe things are changing, that God is beckoning me, and maybe just maybe He is inviting me back in a new way, a way that celebrates instead of despises me. I am just foolish enough to believe that...

it's ok.

"I am the Lord your God...

I go before you now.

I stand beside you,

I'm all around you.

Though you feel I'm far away

I am closer than your breath

I am with you more than you know.

I am the Lord your peace,

No evil will conquer you

So steady now your heart,

come into my rest.