hope

Walking collectively with a limp: Life halfway through 2020

Categories encouragement, Faith, Healing, hope, Uncategorized2 Comments on Walking collectively with a limp: Life halfway through 2020
Walking. Vancouver, Canada. Summer 2016. Photo credit @jen_yeager

The Year of 20/20 Vision.  Perfect Focus. Clarity.

Towards the end of 2019, the year 2020 was being prophesied about enthusiastically.

 “This is going be my year,” many people felt.

For me, 2019 was a year of great leaps.  It was the year I happily began sharing my story of the radical transformation that God has done in my life and connecting with others in the hopes of encouraging them that they can overcome anything. 

It was also the year I felt ready to open my heart romantically again after about 3 ½ years of not dating whatsoever. 

I learned so much in 2019 and grew in ways I never anticipated.      

However, the very end of 2019 hit me like a series of unrelenting tidal waves: a handful of personal relationships ended, an event team I loved cut the program I worked on and my family rang in 2020 with the funeral of my brother’s best friend all the way since childhood who passed away tragically and unexpectedly on New Year’s Day. 

At the start of 2020 I didn’t write very much because honestly, I didn’t know what to say.  I wanted to uplift others and yet my own faith was hanging on by a thread.

I just thank God so much for work.  Having an extremely full schedule during this time softened the blows of this season and forced me to keep walking forward; although literally every step I took, it felt like I was limping. 

As I wrestled daily through my own feelings of sadness and hollowness, I was in communication with several friends who began confiding in me about their own bumpy starts to 2020: deaths on top of deaths, rejections, traumas and setbacks. 

It felt like a dark cloud hovering over what was supposed to be such a great year.

Around March I finally began to feel strong again and that’s when “2020” as we know it thus far truly hit.  And it just kept on hitting:   

World-wide pandemic.  Shut-down.  Uncertainty.  Sickness.  Death.  Racism and racial injustice brought unignorably to the forefront. 

I was on church Zoom calls where stories of sicknesses and deaths of family members were a sad reality.  I attended a Zoom funeral.    

I’ve listened as several of my closest black friends and family members opened their hearts on a whole new level.  They have been vulnerable enough to let me into their sacred spaces of pain and elaborate on the true depths and realities of their own experiences of the indisputable, blatant and repeated racism they have faced throughout their lives. 

I’ve felt the worries and sadness of close friends who have brothers and husbands who are in law enforcement and who are genuinely some of the good guys. 

I’ve spoken with friends with pre-existing anxiety and depression who have felt driven to the edge due to months of isolation and uncertainty. 

Mass job losses and relocations.  Passions, plans and dreams put on hold; indefinitely.    

It’s been a season of almost all of us coming face-to-face with the unpredictable, uncontrollable, harshest and darkest realities of life.

Six months into 2020 and it feels like the entire human race is collectively limping.

Sitting in contemplation of all of this makes me wonder: what if the truth is that we’re always limping but we just don’t notice it until times are desperate? 

What if the way that this time is affecting almost all of us in some kind of profound way is just evidence of the fragility of the human condition? 

Maybe we are always this delicate but life going on as normal allows us the illusion of feeling somewhat in control. 

In reality, we’re always just a phone call away from things never being the same.

 One heart beat away from facing the inevitability of our own life slipping away.

But what if 2020 really is the year of 20/20 vision after all; maybe just not in the way that we thought?

Isaiah 55:9 says “For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.”

While our original goals for 2020 may have been noble, maybe God’s priorities for this year are even higher.  

Maybe through the midst of our collective pain He wants to heal us and simultaneously refine and guide us to grow in strength, endurance, hope and humility and expand our capacity for empathy and compassion. 

Maybe He wants to deal with us individually and guide us to right our wrongs, challenge our mindsets and bring all of the things that are really important to the surface.      

Marinating on all that life has thrown our way this year and everything that has been laid-out in front of us, I think #goals for the second half of the year would be to slowly progress from limping to walking in power and righteousness as described in Micah 6:8:

“The Lord has told you what is good, and this is what He requires of you; to do what is right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”

I hope as you finish reading this you receive peace to endure your present circumstances and a sense of renewed strength to walk boldly into your future.

I also hope we don’t all move on too quickly from remembering how it feels to be so collectively shaken.  I hope and pray that our hearts stay soft enough and our minds stay open enough to continue to contemplate life; where we’ve come from and where we are going ❤ 

xoxo,

Danielle 

Quarantine Glow Up: God Heals

Categories encouragement, Faith, Healing, hope, tips, Uncategorized2 Comments on Quarantine Glow Up: God Heals

This is a picture from a photo shoot I did with my friend Athena right before the Covid-19 quarantine became increasingly strict. 

We had done a previous photo shoot together almost exactly this time last year and somehow; despite all of the madness going on in the world right now, there was a distinct sense of peace over our shoot this time.

“Girl, I just feel different this time.  I feel really good; just like settled,” I told her.

She laughed and said, “it’s probably because you’re so well rested because there’s nothing else to do!”

This could be the case.  While some of us are working during this time like nothing happened, that’s not my story and it’s not many other people’s story; all of the work and projects I had booked are postponed until further notice. 

So, what to do?  There’s a lot of things we can focus on during this time.  I see lots of people talking about their #quarantineglowup in a physical sense and I am all for that. 

I am always an advocate of trying to look our best and if we’re privileged enough to have the luxury, why not use this time to jump even deeper into our beauty, wellness and fitness regimes since time allows for it.        

But there’s another glow up that is worthy of our focus as well; a spiritual one. 

I was praying last night about some deep stuff; stuff from like playground years.  The kind of stuff you know you should get to the bottom of but it’s always super hard, annoying and painful to go there. 

Frankly, it’s something I am irritated that I’ve had to seek such constant healing about over the years and I struggle to get to where I feel totally at peace with it.  I don’t like the process; it’s uncomfortable, ugly and painful. 

Last night through a very simple conversation with God, he dropped something new into my spirit about the situation that was seemingly small but somehow brought me to new dimensions of understanding…it brought a significant level of new healing. 

I realized that this isn’t meant to quick.  It’s meant to be a process and sometimes it’s going to look worse before it looks better. 

This idea of “worse before better” can be like what it is like when we go to an actual spa.

I think we can all agree that most beauty treatments have us looking pretty crazy mid-way through. 

When we’re getting scrubbed down and exfoliated our skin looks red, splotchy and irritated but that is the process it takes to remove the dead skin cells to reveal fresh, soft and glowing skin.

When we’re in the process of getting a pedicure, our feet look like we’ve been kicking bricks as we sit there, polish free and mid-callous removal.

When we get our hair colored, we spend a big chunk of the time looking like aliens with aluminum foil protruding from our heads like futuristic antennas.

Not only do we look way less glamorous than we are used to; sometimes we are also more open and susceptible to harm during these times of extreme beauty renovation.

I remember when I used to go to this infrared sauna placed in Hollywood and they would tell me after each session to be careful because at this time my pores were super open.

Due to this, my skin would be more prone to ingesting toxins in the environment, the dirt, the pollution and anything I let get close to my skin while my pores were so open.   

Likewise, spiritually when we’re going through this process, we are open and exposed.  I’ve learned that Jesus is literally the perfect person to know what to do with us in these moments and we can trust Him in our uncomfortable and vulnerable state.         

Just like all my girls know, lotion never applies as smooth and skin never radiates as brightly as it does after you properly exfoliate, steam and apply a mask. 

Similarly, spiritually, as you go through the intensive and often lengthy process of opening up and getting brutally honest with God you begin to enjoy the glow that only all of the time spent deliberately surrendering to that process can produce.    

And the same way that a nail spot won’t charge you and throw you out into the streets mid-manicure in your unfinished state; God won’t do that either.

“And I am certain that God, who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus” (Philippians 1:6). 

He’s patient with us and walks with us through our entire process until it is complete.    

All of the hair and nail salons may be closed right now but the spiritual spa is always open and the owner is always available throughout the day and into all hours of the night.  He is a gentleman and if you come close to Him, He will come close to you (James 4:8).    

This may not get you the blatantly obvious Instagram-type glow up gains but the gains earned will be gains where it’s most important. The benefits will far exceed any likes on social media.

xoxo,

Danielle