Tag: moving forward

Letting Go of the Dead Things

When I crossed the state line into Georgia, my backseat packed with everything I owned, I dialed the number of the soon-to-be roommates I barely knew.

My chest pounding, I was choking on sobs, gasping for breath. 

I no longer wanted to be the person I had been.

Those girls prayed me through the rest of the drive to the house that would soon become my home.

All throughout that drive the words of a man I barely knew weighed heavily on my mind, “Whatever you do next, choose life.”

A warning, a calling, a word that would never leave my mind.

It changed the course of everything, because all I had known in the season beforehand was choosing everything else. 

Those next few years, life bloomed around me and I saw what it meant to make that choice and to live fully. Those girls who prayed me home became my closest friends. I still talk to them weekly, and we still pray each other into places of life when we can’t catch our breath.

I think about those words often, and what my life might have been if I hadn’t heard them or hadn’t obeyed.

I might have gone other places entirely, lost my way, lived with a permanently broken heart. I might have married the wrong man, never forgiven, never learned how to stand up for the right things.

But sometimes I step back into dead places and I choose the wrong things. Still, I stumble back into worlds of wanting to choose complacency and comfort. There are times when the process of “choosing life” seems painful and intimidating.

Because there are times when “life” means digging, upheaval, uprooting, re-planting. It means the loss of things that I’m not quite ready to grieve.

Life, if I choose it, may just mean the removal of something I once loved, that once fed me. It may also mean the acceptance of failure; that I have to dig up things that didn’t grow like I once dreamed.

“There’s a time to let go.”

When I first got to Georgia, someone told me those words when I asked him how to bear the weight of the pain I was carrying. He read verses in Ecclesiastes to me and then sighed, “If there’s a time for everything, I suspect there’s a time to let go.”

After that, he would spend months trying to convince me to cut ties with someone he knew was still pulling strings behind the scenes.

Now I know what he was really saying was: “choose life”. Choose to let go of the dead things.

I couldn’t see it, but he saw it. I finally see it now. I drug the dead weight across those state lines; my arms were screaming in pain, my heart and limbs crying out for relief. 

But still, I would go on to spend summers after making promises I couldn’t keep, and letting those same hands pull the strings that entangled me.

I didn’t know then, but I know now, life is the choice we get to make when the soil is hard, the plant is withered, the roots brittle and there’s nothing firm left to keep it living.

We can choose to sit with the dead, the brittle, the withered, the thing that will never feed us again. Or we can start over and choose life. Though it might hurt to dig it up and start from the beginning, if we choose life, we have a chance to hold, to share, something full and beautiful again.

The New and Good Year

I think most of humanity is in agreement about one thing right now: saying goodbye to 2016 will not break our hearts. I’m pretty sure that the guy who started the campaign to save Betty White is all of us right now. We all feel that nothing was off limits to the insanity of the year, and we’re all just ready to do whatever it takes to get to 2017 without taking another big hit.

That being said, 2016 was a year that I think I learned more than most of my other years combined. When I look back, I think I could fill an entire stadium with pages of lessons I picked up along the way. I’ll leave you with a little bit of what this year taught me. Through the good, the bad, the really bad, the unimaginably tragic, the incredibly scary, the weirdly ironic, and the unbelievably shocking, 2016 left me with some things I needed.

  • There’s a moment to grow up. You’ll know when that moment comes. You finally stop making decisions that are magical and start making decisions that are fruitful. You start realizing your decisions need to require you to think about other people, about investment. You learn that your feelings, your whims, your desires are not the most important things in the world. You can’t live for them or make your decisions by them because the consequences have never been and will never be worth it.
  • If living alone is possible in your single years, do it. It’s pretty wonderful to live in a house full of people laughing and splashing coffee all over the countertops, but there’s something invaluable about learning to grow into your own space. There’s something about coming home to silence and sitting with your thoughts. There are prayers you pray in that quiet that you’d never pray with other people running in and out of rooms. There are moments you can slide down and sit on the hardwood floor with tears in your eyes and without fear that someone is going to come barreling through the door. There’s just a peace and safety to work through all the questions in a real and raw way. I think solitude is one of God’s favorite medicines.
  • Your experiences are not always the truth. Your experiences are true because they happened, but what you believe about them and the stories you tell yourself may not necessarily be true. We fill in the gaps and the holes of our hearts with stories that make us feel better, and sometimes that’s the only way we know to survive. We tell ourselves the relationship ended because we loved them too much and they just couldn’t handle our love. We tell ourselves that our parents left us because they hated us, because we were never enough for them. We fill in those things left unspoken with stories, and the emptiness we sit with starts to feel less daunting. If I can figure out the story, I can craft a solution or write a really good ending. But sometimes, you don’t know what that story really is. Learning to accept that and letting go of the need to answer those questions brings a lot of freedom.

  • There is a fine line between conviction and stubbornness and one of them means standing alone. A convicted person knows that they do not stand alone, that they are accompanied by God and by truth. A stubborn person fights everything and everyone (sometimes including God and the truth) to be proven right. Whenever you find yourself in an argument ask yourself if you’re being convicted or if you’re being stubborn. And if you’re being stubborn, you’ll most likely end up standing alone.

  • There is no substitute for time. My sister told me this years ago and I think I’ve learned it more in the past few months than ever before. You cannot rush the process, you cannot shortcut your way to growth. There is no Miracle-Gro formula for your health. You can try all the juices, cleanses, whole30 diets, quick-fix fads, but the reality is that consistency will always be key. Time produces change, growth, and results. You can’t rush health and anything that pressures you to probably won’t work.
  • You become what you behold. God and I had a very serious conversation about this last night on the way to Target. I am a chronic fixer, and it is something we’ve been working on for quite a while now. I see pain in another person and bless my well-intentioned heart, I just cannot take my eyes off of it. I want to help them, to see them through that pain, to love them right on out of it. But what if I just started choosing to see the good in them, to call that out, to love on that part of them with such a fierceness that it grows and pushes out the pain? What if I really just believe that it’s light and Love that drives out the darkness, not my problem solving abilities? Because you know what I’ve learned? Focusing on the problems in other people just weighs me down with problems, but focusing on the good in and around them brings out the good in me. If we focus on pain, hate, differences, sin, heartbreak… that’s what we become. We become consumed with that very thing that we obsess over and it takes over our lives. But if we fiercely grow and water the good, it always overtakes the darkness. Love always wins. True, time-taking, good-loving, turning away and not focusing on condemnation love is always gonna win.

2017 is just around the corner. It’s going to have its problems, it is going to have its battles. There might even be moments when the Twitter and Facebook explode with some kind of disagreement that makes 2016 look like the year of child’s play. But 2017 will become whatever you focus on. This year, I’m praying to focus on the good and I’m praying that I’ll learn what that word actually means. Today it meant a hug from a stranger, a really good salad, and a walk downtown in a city that I would have never thought I’d end up in. There was good in 2016, and I hope for these last few days of the year those are the things I focus on.

Nevertheless, God protect Betty White.

 

 

 

That’s Not Where We’re Going

She sent me this photo and said she is starting to see the beauty in her past.

What she didn’t know was that while we are in different states and living different lives, I’ve also been constantly looking in my rearview mirrors.

So, when my eyes fell on that picture and her words about the past being beautiful, I took a deep breath and realized just how much time I’ve actually spent looking at the past.

I haven’t just taken a few moments to glance back to get perspective, I’ve set my gaze there. I have been so determined that I’m not moving my eyes until something good comes from it.

She’s moving forward.

The girl who sent me that picture and those words.  I could feel it when I read the words on my screen.

And I could feel this overwhelming feeling that it’s time for me to look forward.

When you keep looking behind you, you miss everything you’re surrounded by. You waste your present and you ignore the future. You lose so much: you lose your hope, you lose your dreams. You lose your joy and let me tell you, it’s a shame for the world to keep spinning without your laughter.

Eventually you will start to veer and if you don’t turn your eyes forward, you’ll go off the road and things will likely spin out of control.

We can’t keep looking back. That’s not where we are going. 

And we can’t keep hoping that something or someone else is going to come along push us forward, move us from this place, redirect our gaze.

We have to choose. We have to decide that we can’t just keep staring back there and wishing that things had gone differently. 

And we can’t let other people steer the car for us. We can’t depend on other people’s ideas, advice, or dreams to take us where we’re meant to go. We can’t just blindly follow someone else because we’ve lost vision for ourselves.

We’re going places. We’re still here and breathing. There is more ahead. Though it’s painful to think that you may move so far forward that you will never see a beautiful sunset paint over your past, move forward.

There are still sunrises ahead of us in the mornings to come.