Tag: fear

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 

Single for the First Time (My Story, Part 1)

Categories Faith, Healing, Singleness1 Comment on Single for the First Time (My Story, Part 1)
Spending time in the Colorado mountains days before making one of the biggest decisions of my life; to become truly single for the first time ever. September 2015.

All my life, I was the girl who was never without a guy.  From age 15 to 24 I was in a serious, long-term relationship.  That relationship ended.  For the three years following that, I lived my life indulging in unrestrained freedom; doing literally whatever I felt like doing.  I dated and did my thing at my discretion. 

It all looked like fun on the surface but I could feel my recklessness catching up with me.  Why did I have zero peace; in my mind and in my heart?

The weight of the darkness I had dabbled in all in the name of YOLO, the bottomless pit of emptiness and the looming feeling of the purposelessness of my life were things that nice makeup and a bright white smile couldn’t conceal anymore.

Even the Facebook pictures chronicling my escapades began to feel weighty and fake and made me wonder; “what am I doing all of this for? I’m not happy.”

There was so much evidence showing me I needed to break off from my latest guy and make some serious life changes.  I felt invisibly chained to my own patterns and circumstances; powerless to move forward.

I was stuck between wanting desperately to change my life but being completely horrified to do so.

I found myself turning to an unlikely source, a Christian friend; the only one I had at the time.  I wasn’t the type to ever willingly step foot inside the doors of a church. I didn’t even know whether I believed in God or not but I was at the end of my rope.   

My friend was very uplifting and seemed to always do the right thing. I’d never even heard her curse. It appeared to me that she had her life together, so I felt like maybe she could give me good advice. I believe God used her to do just that.  I asked her:   

“Do you think God rewards us when we do the right thing…even if it’s something that’s really hard for us to do?”

She responded with a sweet and certain “yes.” 

Her simple answer was all of the assurance I needed to have confidence that there was something better waiting for me; if only I could be brave enough and strong enough to do what I knew needed to be done.

This teeny tiny bit of hope I felt was my “mustard seed of faith” (Matthew 17:20) and at that time, that was all I needed. 

I took the leap and cut off all of the random guys in my life. 

Less than three months later, I accepted Christ. 

I thought it may be useful to write out my journey for anyone who may feel a hard tugging on their heart to leave someone (or multiple someones).    

I urge you, sister-to-sister: if you have that nagging “knowing” feeling deep down inside of you that you need to break up or leave the situation-ship that is draining you way more than it is lifting you up but you feel totally stuck, I hope this gives you just enough hope as my friend did with me to believe that better days are ahead. No matter how scary it may feel right now, if you jump, Christ will catch you and help you every step along the way. You are not alone, uncared for or unloved. This I know. 

So, here are my stumbling, fumbling first few weeks of being single for the first time ever. I didn’t know what I was doing at all so this is not a blueprint or advice as much as it is encouragement that if Miss Always-Got-A-Man could do this, anyone can.

There was no real plan, method or rationale to my process but this is what I did:

  1. I Went Cold Turkey

After making the necessary phone call and having the final conversation, I blocked the number.  A little while after, I lost my cellphone and took that as an organic opportunity to get not only a new phone but a new phone number.  I blocked all social media.  I was serious and I knew I needed to do a hard reset.

  1. I Sat in My Feelings

I let all I felt wash over me without hiding or distracting myself. I didn’t “get under someone new to get over someone else.”  I forced myself to stay alone in the discomfort of the fear, the sadness, the quietness.  I cried and punched my pillow and I just let it all flow.

Since I never took time for myself in between guys, I was not just feeling the absence of the latest one but instead I was finally feeling the weight of every man left behind that I had always just numbed by jumping right to the next one.

3. I Rested Unapologetically

I remember feeling like a cellphone with the charge on zero percent.  My job at the time alternated between being super busy and then having huge amounts of downtime where I didn’t work so I was afforded the opportunity to do nothing for a pretty long span of time.  I did a lot of nothing.

There were long stretches of days where I didn’t leave my apartment, turn on the lights or even open up the blinds.  I let my body sleep for as long as it felt like it.  I was determined to detox completely from the habit of always having someone there for entertainment and validation.  I wanted to break the physical addiction of automatic access to comfort and pleasure.       

  1. I Slowly Started Seeking Light and Safe Stimulation 

After a few weeks of literal hibernation, I slowly began to visualize in my mind that my battery, previously dead, was now slowly turning into a thin green line of charge but I still wasn’t really desiring any major interaction with the outside world. 

I started surfing YouTube for some light-hearted entertainment and landed on the Hodgetwins YouTube channel.  I would binge watch video after video and just laugh.  I started incorporating nightly trips to the Del Taco drive-thru during this time & filled up on whatever I wanted which at the time mostly consisted of a few vegetarian hard tacos, French fries and a large Coke Zero.   

  1. I Stuck to My Guns and Resisted the Strong Temptation to Reach out

I remember at exactly the one-month mark when I was enjoying what had become my typical nightly indulgence of Hodgetwins and Del Taco when out of nowhere I suddenly felt a strong and forceful push urging me to reach out to the same guy I was completely certain that I needed to move on from. 

I logically knew that wasn’t good for me and most confusing of all, I knew it wasn’t even what I actually wanted to do. It was the strangest sensation of feeling as though I was being violently and repetitively bullied by a force outside of myself to do something that would actually cause me harm. 

At the time I knew nothing about God or the bible or anything but after white-knuckling it through the abnormally extreme intensity of the mental torment of that night, I now believe that this was my first clear and memorable experience with spiritual warfare. 

When I woke up the next morning after conquering the battle raging inside my mind that night, the overwhelming urge to reach out to or see that person had lifted completely and it never returned again.  I had passed the test.  It was James 4:7 playing out in real time.

….Part 2 Coming Soon!