What's Hard in the Middle of the Pandemic

So, it happened this week for me.

I’ve been waiting for some of the unwelcomed things I needed to face to unfold and it finally happened.

Yesterday in the midst of doing what I thought was best and what I thought was good

-Joe spoke some words I needed to hear.

They definitely weren’t words I wanted to hear they were the kind of words I usually arch my back and I try to defend.

And this is how I initially responded.

I got intense and I defended my actions.

I recounted how much “I was doing”.

I even tried to tear him down, because if I made his story weaken maybe then it couldn’t be true . . .

And then it happened.

His words sunk in a little further than the surface and I stopped and I rested in them.

I dove in deeper and I got curious about them.

Because I’ve found the things, which sometimes feel like they’re breaking my heart are actually chipping away at an old wound that needs healing.

And when I did this I realized something

• not only was Joe seeing something deeper inside me that I couldn’t see, he was tenderly loving me enough to not leave me there.

You see, it would probably be easier for Joe to leave me alone and not cause me any discomfort, but then he’d risk getting to love every ounce of me and I would risk healing.

When someone tells you something and you don’t want to hear it, nonetheless receive it.

What about you?

Are there things this pandemic is bringing to the surface for you?

Is there junk you’ve been cramming down or dressing up or defending them as ‘what you should do’?

When I had to face the ugly truth the other day, it wasn’t the way Joe pointed it out or even the timing of it that made me upset – it was the fact that if what he was saying was true

It meant I had to change . . .

And I think this is the hardest thing about seeing ourselves for real.

You see, so many times I can tell myself I’m doing it to be helpful or because it’s what the person needs.

After all that’s how I’m wired.

But what if these things we’ve done for years aren’t what is best?

What if we’re actually hurting those around us, then what?

These are the questions I’ve had to sit in lately.

And the funny thing is right now I can honestly say I’m glad to have it out in the open and uncovered.

As hard as it is to face, it’s so much easier to live without it.

God always knows what we need, doesn’t he?

He knows we need him to chip away at the very things we place our trust in the ways we try to control what’s actually uncontrollable.

To be honest with you as a mom this has probably been my greatest struggle. My control has always reared its ugly head in my life. It’s always come from a deep place of fears.

I’ve spent years afraid that the demons I wrestled as a young person would be what my kids struggled with too.

I feared all the brokenness inside of me would somehow screw them up as adults too.

I feared failing them terribly and failing myself too.

In all of this fear I even made up scenarios that really never existed.

But you know what I learned again this week, that we tend to forget the good and the hard things we’ve battled through.

We often forget the times we’ve been brave.

The brave times we’ve fought for what God has wanted in our lives and fought off the battles of our Enemy. We forget the brave steps we’ve taken to overcome some of our greatest struggles to get to a place of health.

Because being brave is found when we ask ourselves the hard questions and we receive the hard words spoken in love & truth that we’ve needed to hear.

It’s in us listening in the quiet and believing what we need to know.

Brave things happen when we surrender our hurt to God and trust that he’ll make good out of it all.

It’s found when we move into a wounded marriage rather growing apart.

It happens when we speak our grief out loud and invite others to sit beside us even in our ugly cries.

It’s there in our moves and our transitions as well as the processes of all the changes our lives take us through.

It’s in our brokenness as well as our healing.

It’s seen in the dead of winter as well as the beginnings of the spring.

It’s found in the darkest of the valleys and in the highest mountain top views too.

Because God can be sighted in all of this and sometimes the most courageous thing we can do is to name these moments and remember just how much we’ve grown.

So, as you’re in the midst of these long hard and beautiful days as you’re heart might lean towards telling you all of the ways you’re not enough remember to recount all of the days you’ve bravely showed up and let God sweetly tend to your heart.

Facing the ways we need to heal, isn’t our enemy, these aren’t our flaws or shortcomings

- these are the very things God uses for us to find who we were created to be.

We can be certain that our healing will come in all sorts of ways and that it will always occur from places of brokenness.

It's from brokenness we are truly made whole.