Tag: healing

Categories
anxiety

God Is

Well, after a crazy couple of months, I’m back. This season has been incredibly hard for me. I know it’s been hard for a lot of you, but just because we’ve all gone through it, doesn’t mean it’s any easier for me. My story is valid because it’s my story.

At the beginning of March, before I knew the extent of all COVID would be for our world, I was thriving. Alone time was amazing. I could finally write and do everything I was pushing off. I could finally prove that God IS hope in the midst of hopeless situations.

Suddenly, the phrase “new normal” came into our vocabulary, and I realized that this wasn’t a temporary blip in history. This was a life-changing, catastrophic event that would affect every person on the planet. And suddenly, I didn’t have all the answers. I didn’t have the perfect Instagram post or Tweet to comfort anyone. I could barely comfort myself.

But I know the One who knows the future. I know the One who WRITES the future. And I realized just this week, after hitting a wall at the end of April, that I literally had the weight of the world on my shoulders instead of trusting God to fight my battles for me.

It’s been hard to open up WordPress and write anything public. My journal has been FILLED with my prayers, thoughts, feelings…the good, bad, and ugly. And after looking back at my journal entries from a few months ago, I realize that God has been faithful to comfort me and equip me for this very moment.

This past Sunday, I listened to a sermon by Pastor Robert Madu, who was guest speaking at Life Church. At the beginning of the message, he confessed that he was telling God that he didn’t ask for any of this. God reminded him that in the beginning of the year, Pastor Robert asked for more of God, whatever it takes to get closer to Him. Well, God answered his prayer, but not in the way that he expected.

That line spoke to me. What did I ask God for in the beginning of this year? God’s word for me this year was “holy.” I didn’t understand it, and I didn’t like it. It wasn’t a trendy word, like “adventure” or “success.” It was something I couldn’t do on my own, something that forced me to rely on Him. After all that’s happened this year, I’ve learned that God is the ONLY one I can rely on.

I wanted to share some of what I learned and prayed for at the beginning of 2020. My hope in sharing is that you would be encouraged that life will go on after COVID is over. Sure, we’ll have to face “a new normal,” but were we even happy with the “old” normal? (I know I wasn’t). What is normal, anyway?

So, without further ado, here are some lines from my journal for each day of January (except for some days where I didn’t write). If you all like it, I’ll share my journal entries from February and March:

January 1st: “God is a dreamer.”

January 2nd: “God is leading me, and this is the year when my faith in Him will grow…He’s calling the body back to Himself, and I’m included.”

January 3rd: “God is the God of the plains. We crave mountaintop experiences and fear valley experiences, but most of our lives are in the middle” (inspired by a YouVersion plan about holiness).

January 4th: “God is holy, pure, ‘other.’ When you come in contact with a holy person or thing, you can defile him if you are unclean. But Jesus was able to touch sick people and make them clean” (inspired by the Bible Project’s video on kadash).

January 5th: “God grows me in the season of waiting. And in the year where all my dreams are coming true, I want to even see God work in my everyday life.”

January 7th: “To be holy means to be set apart from sin for the purpose of serving and/or bringing glory to God” (inspired by notes from the Zondervan NIV Study Bible).

January 8th: “God loves us too much to leave us as we are” (inspired by a sermon preached by Pastor Steve at LFCC’s Young Adult Ministry)

January 11th: “God will prove Himself holy” (based on Ezekiel 36:23).

January 12th: “The waiting period is an opportunity to learn what God says and what we need to do” (inspired by a sermon preached by Pastor Ed at LFCC).

January 14th: “Thanks be to God that we can be holy by His grace. Amen!”

January 16th: “GOD IS SO GOOD! I’m trusting Him for the battles bigger than me” (inspired by a sermon preached by Pastor Steven Furtick at Elevation Church).

January 19th: “Let God show you the potential of what you have. When God calls you to do something, He provides the resources” (inspired by a sermon from Pastor Ed at LFCC).

January 20th: “It amazes me that God calls us holy people, but we’ll never be perfect until we die. I guess God sees us from an eternal perspective. He sees us how we were destined to be.”

January 21st: “We are a dwelling place for God.”

January 22nd: “Never doubt in the dark what God has told you in the light” (inspired by a sermon preached by Pastor Steve at LFCC).

January 23rd: “God will take your greatest hurt and make it your greatest ministry.”

January 25th: “I know this is hard but I can’t take the way we’ve been over the years. Our schedules are consuming us and I really hope something changes when we get a house” (to say the least, being in quarantine has allowed Lenny and I to get some wonderful quality time together!).

January 26th: “Don’t have a short memory when it comes to what God has done” (inspired by a sermon preached by Pastor Ed at LFCC).

January 27th: “Holy humans are set apart by God for His special use. While He owns everything, some people and places He reserves in a special way” (inspired by notes from the Zondervan NIV Study Bible).

January 28th: “I’m trusting God to heal and restore me. Whatever that looks like” (I started 2020 with some health challenges. Thank God that He got all of them out of the way before New York became a hot spot for COVID or else I wouldn’t have been able to go to the doctor as often as I did).

January 30th: “We need the support of others to wake us up.”

January 31st: “God is telling me to be still and focus on the present. To be thankful for what I have now. At one point, I considered the things that annoy me now as blessings from God, and I prayed for them.”

On that note, I encourage you to be thankful even for this season. It’s hard, but it will bring you closer to God. If you need help, please reach out. I may not have all the answers, but I know what it’s like to handle scary situations alone. Let me tell you, it’s much better with help!

God bless!

Your turn:

What has God taught YOU during this season? (Comment below!)

Categories
anxiety

My Song for the Season: “Here Comes Heaven”

Every year, I focus on a different aspect of Christmas. I’ll usually hear a song on the radio that sticks out to me and reminds me to be conscious of whatever God is teaching me. Listening to actual Christmas music about the birth of Christ and not about drinking hot cocoa and waiting for Santa Claus is so refreshing for my soul!

The last couple of years, God has put it on my heart to pay attention to the fact that Jesus came to us. Before the Christmas season even started, I listened to Elevation Worship’s new CD Hallelujah Here Below on Spotify. On my phone, if I’m listening to a particular CD, sometimes Spotify will throw in songs from the artist that are on a different album. When the song “Here Comes Heaven” came on, I thought it was from a Christmas album. But that’s the beauty of Christian music: when we have Christ in our hearts, it is Christmas every day. This song brought tears to my eyes when I first listened to it. I knew this is what God wanted to teach me this year.

Before Christ came to Earth, the people of God did not hear a prophecy or any word from the Lord for 400 years. For centuries, people waited for salvation and peace with God. They performed their rituals in hopes that they were pleasing God, waiting to hear from Him. Little did they know that He was preparing the way for Heaven to come to Earth.

In the ninth chapter of his book, Isaiah prophecies what it would be like for the Messiah to come to Earth:

“the people walking in darkness
    have seen a great light;
on those living in the land of deep darkness
    a light has dawned” (Isaiah 9:2, NIV).

When I was a kid and would have panic attacks, I would run to my parents and ask them to help me. Instead of addressing it, sometimes they would just tell me to think about something else. If I couldn’t sleep, my dad would tell me to dream of going to Florida on vacation. Just putting my attention on something else brought me such peace.

This Christmas season, I want to focus my attention on Christ. During the most depressing time of year, it is easy to get caught up in buying the right presents, filling our schedules with parties, and forcing ourselves to interact with family members we don’t like. But that’s not what Christmas is about. In fact, it’s not about us at all. Christmas is about Jesus coming to Earth, giving us peace with God, peace with others, and ultimately, peace with ourselves.

“Here Comes Heaven” is about how peace has finally come. We don’t have to strive anymore. We don’t have to wait anymore. While we shop and wait and traffic and wear our ugly Christmas sweaters to different events, we can trust that the work is finished. Jesus already took care of everything that needed to take place.

What is our response to Christ coming to Earth? Worship. Praise. Recognition. It is okay to enjoy different Christmas traditions, but at the end of the day, we need to remember the One who took away our grief, our confusion, and our enmity with God. We can now have all the fruits of the Spirit.

This year, consider what it means for Heaven to come to Earth in your life. While God has a global (universal!) perspective of His creation, He also values you and has a unique and specific plan for you. If Heaven came to you this year, what would that look like? How would your life be different? What fears wouldn’t make sense anymore? What mourning would be lifted from you? What wait will finally be over?

Photo by Sam Schooler on Unsplash

Categories
anxiety

Where Healing Begins

In 2010, Tenth Avenue released their album “The Light Meets the Dark,” featuring a list of songs that had gotten me through a rough season with anxiety in the summer of 2012. These are the lyrics of the chorus of the song “Healing Begins”:

This is where the healing begins
This is where the healing starts
When you come to where you’re broken within
The light meets the dark

I believe that you come to where you’re broken when you are surrounded by a great community who can support you while you are dealing with your feelings.

Naturally, I am an introvert. I prefer to be by myself most of the time. While it is healthy for me to journal and process my feelings on my own, I learned early on in my faith that I needed to be around people who can help affirm my identity and remind me that I am bigger than my darkest moment.

I praise God for the many communities that He had provided for me throughout the years. At age 12, I accepted Christ at the church I now attend because of the non-judgy attitude of the youth group. In college, I had friends on campus that would understand me at my core, because they loved me and pursued me enough to reach into those depths and ask me deep questions. In the summer of my sophomore year, I relied heavily on my college-aged friends from back home when I was dealing with loneliness and depression. When I went to Spain, my culture shock immediately dissipated when I met the godly group of young adults and teens who volunteered to take me under their wing. Because I’d had such an easily accessible community at Nyack College, it was difficult for me at first to branch out and make new friends when I graduated. However, God shortly provided a co-worker that would eat lunch with me and challenge me to grow.

I’ve found that at this time in my life, I truly need intentional community. The other communities that I had been a part of were handed to me on a silver platter. However, now, while I spend most of my days alone, I need to intentionally make time to be around my friends and family. Thank God for the three groups that I have joined this summer, where I can let my hair down and let people love me for me. As I write this, I’m sitting in the house of one of my best friends while she does schoolwork. Yesterday, I visited my sister, and we spent the day together while I did laundry and edited my novel. My husband and I also plan regular date nights each week.

Marriage does not make loneliness disappear. I want to be vulnerable with you and say that sometimes I feel lonely. Having a husband and (eventually) a house full of kids does not replace the need for Christ-centered, consistent community.

Community is not just sitting around the table and breathing the same air. Community is laughing together, crying together, listening to each other, and breathing life into each other. It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you realize the importance of being together for the purpose of encouragement, support, and sharing experiences. While seasons change, pursue the people that fill you up, and know that they will walk with you in the best and worst days of your life.

If you’re like me and community does not come naturally to you, I would encourage you to find people in church, a gym, or in your own home. There are a ton of people around you who desire community, who have thousands of friends on social media but who feel disconnected from others. True connection is having the courage to reach deep into the hearts of those you love and pull out the good, the bad, and the ugly. Often, the hard part is allowing them to do that to you as well. However, as you open up and risk, you will grow more and more comfortable over time.

Matthew 18:20 says that Jesus is in the midst of a group of two or three who gather in His name. The same God that sheds light on Scripture in your locked bedroom is present in your meetings with friends and family who want to lift you up.

Here are some questions to get you thinking about how to have godly community and experience the healing that God has for you:

Who can you ask to be your friend today?
How can you invest more in the friendships you already have?
What is keeping you from truly opening up to your friends and family?

Photo by Rosie Fraser on Unsplash