Summer is my favorite time of the year.

I’m a water girl and the way to beat the Texas heat is to go swimming. I also get cold very easily. So water + heat = living the dream.

I anticipate the coming summer beginning November 1st. Christmas is my second favorite time of the year so that helps time pass slightly faster so the true countdown to summer bliss begins roughly January 3rd.

Summer has traditionally been filled with lots of laughter and sunshine and friends and yes, swimming.

There’s just something about peoples’ spirits being high amidst the oppressive heat that fills my own soul.

Summertime is a dream.

And then there’s Summer 2022.

I want to be careful here. Summer 2022 has felt like two alternate realities. In one: I’m traveling the world and going on these incredible trips and seeing so. many. different. ways. God is showing up!! In the other: I’m drowning. From school. From relationships. From my past.

The theme for the summer has been dependence.

It started when our team left for Greece. We had a rough idea of what we might do, but quickly found ourselves each morning in prayer before the Lord, asking Him to make known to us what He had for us that day.

A whole new meaning to Daily Bread.

Honestly, watching God wreck my well-intentioned plans as a trip-leader was actually really cool. Our natural God-given giftings were used in ways to further His Kingdom. All three of us on the team learned big lessons that felt tailored to us. It was just so right to live in the unknown anticipation.

And then we came home. And I went into a tailspin.

I came home and was overwhelmed by grad school (I would end up writing 90 pages of academic papers in the span of 9 weeks). I was distraught over a relationship that wasn’t playing out as I had hoped. I was mad at turning thirty. And I was every emotion on the feelings wheel about a new diagnosis from my counselor.

So my summer looked like this: I would go on a week-long trip. Be home for two weeks. And then leave for another week-long trip. This cycle happened 4 times.

The trips themselves were physically draining, but emotionally, spiritually, mentally refreshing. Life in-between demanded every ounce of me. Grad school/life/counseling/work/trip prep. I would barely meet the majority of deadlines. I missed a lot. I frequently felt like I was drowning.

I still have one more “cycle” to go through, but the summer grad school semester has ended and I have some of my mental sanity back and can look back on the past months.

God knew I needed the practice of dependence in Greece to be able to survive the following weeks.

I’ve taken up running this summer (yes, I too am questioning if I’m possessed). I call it running, but really it’s a slow, wheezy jog.

Those thirty minutes each evening have become sacred.

As I coax one foot in front of the other, I’m audibly laying out my thoughts and frustrations and hopes and desires to the Lord. The majority of nights, my prayers have been fiery. They’ve been raw and honest and desperate.

I’ve spent a lot of this summer mad at God. AND I’ve spent a lot of this summer falling deeper in love with God.

In with dependance has come elements of surrender and patience and trust and steadfastness. I’ve experienced both frustration and relief as I’ve watched God stretch me and break me. 

Dependence: reliance on, need for, seeking support from, leaning on, clinging to; trust in, faith in, confidence in, belief in.

There’s a verse in a song that has cut me to the core every time I hear it:

And if dependence runs in Your design
Then who am I outside of You
Lord, without Your breath I won’t survive
So I must be made for trusting You

God Song, Hillsong UNITED

I’ve been through a lot of hard things, but this has been a different kind of hard. I haven’t quite put my finger on it. I do know that I have been poured oooooouuuuttttttt. The **only** one I have been able to depend on has been God. Even when I’m mad at Him, I can still depend on Him. He will not abandon me.

I end the last quarter mile of each nightly run huffing out Deuteronomy 31:8.

“It is the Lord who will go before you. He will be with you. He will not leave you or abandon you. Do not be afraid or dismayed.”

12 year old me said that when I “grew up” (we’ll say 25yrs old), I would be an interior designer, married to an Aggie and have little kids who were pretty much the equivalent of small cherubim.

16 year old me said that when I grew up, I would be a graphic designer who lived in the suburbs with a godly husband and planning for three to four children.

20 year old me said that when I grew up, I would be married to a godly man and together we’d run a summer camp. Our four children would eventually spend their summers at camp and our family of six would all be best friends.
(20 year old me also made a pact with a friend that if we were still single at 25, we’d make each other create online dating profiles. Because who’s not married by 25?! If you were a godly southern woman, you’d be making sweet tea for your grandchildren by the time you were 28.)

24 year old me said that since I was allllmost grown up but still unmarried, childless, and career-less, that I was doing something wrong. I still wanted to be a wife and a mom but by now had settled on the dream job being in a middle/high school girl’s discipleship role. So even though most of my friends were either dating, engaged, married, or pregnant, I told myself I was just a little late to the game and it was going to be okay. I still had another year.

L. O. FREAKIN L.

25 and 26 year old me lived in a foreign country, asking people about life and faith and hearing countless life stories of essentially strangers. Which, spoiler, has been awesome. But also nowhere near where I thought I’d be.

When I first considered moving internationally, I was aware that it would mean leaving my comfort zone and could be, as one person said, “putting my life on pause.” I had another person who told me I should instead stay in the States and move to Dallas to put myself in the young adults scene and therefore be more dateable. I liked that idea because that was what I wanted…so I was admittedly frustrated when God kept pushing me out of what I thought was the Promised Land and into the Land of Unknowns.

It’s funny now to look back on my life. In retrospect, 99% of my life has been classified by the Unknown. As far as life markers go, the only one that I could have “predicted” was to go to university at A&M. (But even then I changed my major three times!) All the other things are tied for first place in the “Biggest Surprise” category. However Greece miiiiiight be in the lead. As my time in Greece comes to an end, I am flooded with emotions while I celebrate my time here and grieve what will no longer be. All as I prepare for another journey into the Unknown.

Several times a week now I get asked what’s next for me. I rejoice in the comfort and peace God has provided for the last months as I answer them simply that I don’t know yet. Most times I’ll then explain how it’s been my experience that when I start to make my own plans, God has no problem scratching what I would call Plan-A and moving instead to Plan-That-Did-Not-Exist-And-Was-Never-An-Option-So-What-in-the-World.

I was challenged to adjust my thinking about this when a friend shared on social media about her most recent experience in med school. I’ve known her for almost nine years now and the entire time she has talked about being an OB/GYN so that she can serve women in the Middle East. After years and years of working towards this righteous dream, it took only moments for that dream as she knew it to be destroyed. As she processed through what had happened, I was tempted to think she had written it just for me. “[This] was not my plan A. But I misunderstood God. He said there is no plan B. But I did not have the wisdom to understand His plan A.” She recognized that her dreams to serve in the Middle East are righteous, but “they were limited. [Her] hands are open to what the Father wants because His infinite wisdom is beyond [her] finite understanding and limited vantage point.”

Anyone else want to shout “Amen!”

I’ve been sitting on this post for almost three months now. I’ve come to terms with being in a different place than I expected. It comes easily to say that I don’t know what’s next. I have a lot of peace about the Unknown. But do I believe this Unknown is better than my righteous dreams?

There have been two particular verses that I’ve been meditating on quite regularly:

Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand. (Proverbs 19:21)
For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. (Isaiah 55:8-9)

I am almost 27 and know of 4 single God-fearing men, think my friends’ kids are cute, and will most likely take yet another job that isn’t in youth ministry. I have never been further away from these things that I’ve asked God for daily (for almost seven years now). I have also never been more okay with where I am.

Some days are easier than others to be so “okay” with where God has me, but it’s undeniable that when I am focused on His will rather than mine, I have an infinitely healthier perspective. I have to fight to believe that God’s ways are higher and better than anything I could imagine. But regardless of if I believe or understand or live like they are, no matter what they’re still better.

 

Moving to Greece was the fastest life decision I’ve made so far.

It took all of three weeks.

Or 51 weeks…depending on how you look at it. But that’s a story for a different time.

I count it as three weeks because that’s how long Greece was even the tiniest option before God and I had a conversation where I chose His will over mine.

So much happened in those three weeks. God moved mountains and barriers and concrete walls that I had put up in an effort to stay in my comfortable, manageable life. And He came in and leveled them. I’m talking flat out destroyed some. At one point during that time I distinctly remember asking a few close friends to tell me reasons why I shouldn’t move to Greece. I wanted them to pull me out of the frenzy of such a huge change.

The most chaotic three weeks have become a pillar of promise.

Because God has wrecked my plans with His, why do I doubt that He is going to come through now? When I am tempted to doubt that God will provide financially, emotionally, spiritually, physically, mentally, I am reminded that He will supply every need of mine according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:19). I am reminded that His ways are not my ways (Isaiah 55:8-9). I am reminded that He is the source of everything (Romans 11:36).

June has been full of phone calls, text messages, letters, and meetings. Full of bold prayers, little sleep, tears, and laughter. But it has been marked by provision.

God has provided above and beyond in partnerships, both in prayer and financially. He has provided places to stay, to the point where I’ve had to turn people down. He’s provided faithful friends who will randomly text me, celebrate even the smallest victories with me, and who are on their knees praying for me daily. He’s provided exactly what I need, when I need it…and most of these gifts have been far beyond what I could have even dreamed.

When I stop to thank Him for who He is, for what He has done because of who He is, I am overwhelmed with His abundance. So quickly I try and fit God’s provision into boxes….just like I unintentionally did a moment ago. I want God to check the financial box, along with the emotional, spiritual, physical, and mental boxes. Once those boxes are checked, I’m good to go. But here’s the thing, He has given me Jesus, in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell (Colossians 1:19). Someone please tell me a box that the fullness of God cannot fill.

During this support raising time I have been praying Ephesians 3:20: “Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us…” This is a sweet verse that gives perspective to higher and better than my human mind could even imagine. Check out what Paul has to say right before and after his proclamation of God’s abundant ability:

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith––that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. -Ephesians 3:14-21

God has provided financially, emotionally, spiritually, physically, and mentally. In very tangible ways. Some of those times it’s been immediate, others it’s been after a deadline has passed. There are still areas and situations where I feel like God hasn’t provided even half a percent. But even then, He has already provided His Son.

So when I’m tempted to ask, “What if God doesn’t come through on ______?” I’m trying to re-train my brain (and heart!) to instead ask, “Where in my past have I seen God be God?” and then “Where, right this minute, do I see God being God?”

He began this process of moving to Greece by moving mountains, and He’s continued moving them…sometimes by an inch, sometimes by a mile. And sometimes I need to praise Him for the gift that is the mountain itself, and not just the movement.

Which, speaking of moving…I move to Greece in 71 days.

 

 

 

“And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” Colossians 1:17

I have been saying for the last few weeks that I feel like God has been putting me on the bench. Do you know the feeling?

Within the past year, I have been handed numerous things, only for them to be enjoyed and then taken away. A mission trip that would have combined so many of my passions. A job that would fit well with how I’m gifted. A relationship that ended too soon. And most recently, stepping back from serving with a ministry that I love.

My response has simply been, “Why?!”

Why let me figure out what makes my heart beat fast, only for it to be shut down without warning?

Now I never was super big into sports (holla for two and a half years of JV tennis) but as I was talking with a friend the other day and wrestling through words, this picture just clicked. So hang with me.

Most team sports have a literal bench. The main purpose of the bench is for players to gather around it when they’re not on the court/field/rink. There are three main people we find on the bench.

Person #1: The Benchwarmer
This was me in high school. I needed the Athletics credit, but had no desire to actually play the game. I went to practice, my name was on the roster, but I was never chosen to participate when it came to competitions. I actually sat on the bench many days. You’re welcome, Weatherford High School kangaroos.
Being benched gives the Benchwarmer the space to remain comfortable.

Person #2: The Hothead
When a coach sends someone to the bench, sometimes this is a disciplinary measure. The player is breaking the rules of the game and needs to take a few to cool down and remember that when they are 85 and old and grey, it will not matter that the opponent’s toe crossed the line and that the ref failed to see the “severity” of the offense.
Being benched gives the Hothead the space to be disciplined. 

Person #3: The Devoted
Even the best athlete spends time on the bench. No matter how many 3-pointers they can shoot in a row, they won’t play the entire game. At some point, the coach lovingly sends them to the bench to recover because the coach knows there is more of the game left to play.
Being benched gives the Devoted the space to rest. 

When it comes to sports, I’m definitely a benchwarmer, but for the most part, I can say with confidence that’s not my bent when it comes to life. I’m a goer and a doer.

There have absolutely been times in my life when I’ve been sent to the bench because I needed to be disciplined. God knew that the most loving thing for me was to take me out and make me actually face my sin problems. While I still sin (aka- fall short of perfection) every day, I don’t think God has sent me to the bench right now for discipline.

Sometimes God sends us to the bench to let us rest.

And I don’t like it.

Deep in my soul I know I’m tired, I’ll even say it with my words, but I don’t want to stop playing.

Rest is 100% Biblical. God created the world in six days and then RESTED the seventh. (Genesis 2:3). This idea of time set aside for rest is also known as a Sabbath. A couple days ago I read in Numbers 15 that God commanded the people of Israel to straight up stone a man who broke the Sabbath…he was breaking it by picking up sticks!! STICKS!!! The man was gathering sticks during a time when he should have been resting.

I don’t frequently pick up sticks. I do frequently forget to rest.

“Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Matthew 11:28-29

I will certainly stop to veg on the couch and I’m all about the recommended 8 hours of sleep a night. Within the first hour of my morning I strive to meet with Jesus and let His Word fill my heart. These are good examples of taking a “time out” to catch my breath and strategize, if you will. But true rest for my soul requires more. The verse that has stuck out to me the most through this season so far has been Colossians 1:17: “And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

Do I trust God to be God? By stepping back and allowing space to recover, I am saying that He is bigger than I am. He doesn’t need me to keep playing in order to win the game. Sometimes the most loving thing is for me to sit on the bench and watch. To stop and let my soul rest…remembering that in Him, and through Him, and to Him are all things (Romans 11:36).

He holds everything together. Everything.

My time on the bench doesn’t have to mean that I’m unengaged. It means that I stop to remember who God is in my life. It’s already been several weeks that I’ve taken up residence on the bench. Most days I still struggle to accept this gift of rest. But Lord, thank You for reminding me that you hold all things together…including this bench you have me on.

What’s your response to being put on the bench?

When was the last time you rested? What does rest look like to you?

Does the way you rest reflect your belief in God’s ability to hold all things together?

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“But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and worthless elementary principles of the world, whose slaves you want to be once more?” Galatians 4:9

“Pray that I would find comfort in being known by God.”

My mentor at the time texted me that morning, asking for an update on life and how she could be praying for me during the upcoming week. Thankful that someone genuinely wanted to know how I was doing, I took full advantage of the opportunity and quickly wrote out a considerably lengthy reply, sparing no detail and boldly asking for prayer on a number of different things I was facing. I hit send and then re-read what I had said.

Topics such as work, school, and rest had the expected prayers tied to them–perseverance, perspective, and priority (thank you, junior high english class for teaching me the beauty of alliteration). And then hello, request from left field. I don’t think I have ever asked for comfort to come from being known by God.

It had been several months since a friend had hurt me deeply, so I was shocked that my response to “how’s your heart?” did not have the same hope-filled answers that I expressed in the preceding weeks. My heart was hurting again. I was regressing. I felt as if I had drawn the Candy Land card that sent me back to the very first purple square.

Desperately trying to put words to the sudden return of the ache, I saw my heart unfold: I missed the familiarity. I missed the understanding. I missed being known. Maybe you can relate.

“I felt known. Yes, God knows me best, but it was refreshing to have another person with me. Pray that I would find comfort in being known by God. And pray that for [Friend] too.”

First of all, I want to say that there is nothing wrong with wanting to be known by someone else. In fact, it’s Biblical to live in community with other Believers!
“And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as in the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.” Hebrews 10:24-25
“If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored all rejoice together. Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” 1 Corinthians 12:26-27
“Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.” Galatians 6:2

A pastor at my church always says that the purpose of the Body is to multiply joys and divide sorrows. I love it. Paul, the author of Romans, instructs the Church to “Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.” (Romans 12:15) Rich beauty emanates from a life lived alongside other people. We should be known by other Believers, but we should be first and foremost run (really sprint) to being known by God Himself.

There is a reason God is called the Author of Life.

I love how David cries out to God in Psalm 139:13 saying, “For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.” (Emphasis mine.) God Himself formed me. He was there from the instant I came into being, and He hasn’t gone anywhere.

In that same Psalm, David praises God for His presence:
“O LORD, you have searched me and known me! You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar. You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O LORD, you know it altogether. You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain it. Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence?” (Psalm 139:1-7)

I read those verses and am overcome by the nearness of the Lord. He knows the depths of my heart, and even comes with me to those deep dark places. Yet He still calls me beloved.

And then Galatians 4:9: “But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and worthless elementary principles of the world, whose slaves you want to be once more?” 

Ouch.

Where/what/who are you running back to?

When is the last time you cried out to God?

Where are you searching to be known?

I am praying that we find comfort in being known by God.

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