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