a restless heart – Page 9 – faith journal by k. sauer

Exposed

I told someone yesterday, I write my way out of the dark. I have to expose the feelings, the sentences, the lies – and everything else – to the light. I’ve never been able to keep it internalized.

Even if I’m struggling with something about someone else, I generally don’t hide until the struggle is past. I open up and tell them what I’m struggling with. It’s not a reflection on them, truly; I’m choosing to be vulnerable with them about even the ugly things that go on in my heart. I hope for a deeper trust, but I’ve figured out over the years that it’s not a really good idea, being that honest with people. They don’t really see that I love them when I share. I suspect they feel more attacked.

All this makes me wonder what it is I trust about my own friends. I suppose I always hope they will share the same with me, or even if they don’t, that at least they will be willing to be there. I see others; but I don’t always see myself. Maybe that is why I share my struggles; maybe I hope that someone will look at me and tell me what they see, help me sort out the mess.

So I write me out, and then I sit there staring at what I’ve written, and I despise what I see of my heart splayed out there. I don’t really wonder why people walk away, seeing me like that. Heck, I’d leave too if I didn’t have to live with me. I could be on my own side here – why do I sabotage myself the way I do, being so defiantly honest about my mess?

My ability to maintain any sort of “reputation” has been nonexistent for years. But even when I was maintaining one, I walked around with a to-do list in my head: “don’t talk too much, it’s her turn now,” “I have to be humble now, not proud – deflect that praise,” “why don’t we just pray right here – because it will impress her that I stopped immediately to pray” (not sure if God even listened to that one!), “keep a straight face,” “love this person who is being unlovable because you really need to”, “do your devotions – everyone else around you is doing it, and they’re watching”, “they all say it’s right – just do it, your heart should follow at some point.” Seriously, the list went on and on.

And to be very honest? I was the most self-centered, self-focused person I knew, and I felt FAKE. I could see what perfect looked like, and I was determined to get there. My determination led me to Bible college, where surrounded by cream-of-the-crop Christianity, I figured I had never actually been a Christian in the first place, because I wasn’t one of the best there. I went from being a potential RA into accountability discipleship that left me asking if there had ever been any real fruit in my life.

When my health went down, so did my ability to maintain that constant drill. I had no choice but to learn to live from my heart. I’d grown up being a good girl by choice; I was shocked and horrified to discover just how far short I could fall of the perfection I’d been trying to reach. The questions scared me good at first; the way other Christians reacted to me hurt deeply.

But I discovered something. I could live with myself if I brought that mess into the light. Did you know that having a pure heart means being quite literally poured out? Pouring my heart out – confessing – saying the same thing as – my sins to God, and to others – it left my heart free. I was no longer weighted down by the choking need to measure up – to my standards, or to anyone else’s.

And being exposed like that made me more vulnerable to love. It made me more desperate for the Cross to mean something more than “I just have to do the right thing.” It opened a door into my soul to let the Gospel come in and rule my life. I stopped caveating God and worrying about the timing on His work in me, and started trusting. I stopped striving to be less and chose to be who I was, which is less anyway. I stopped trying to make room for people and opened my eyes to see them. And I stopped choosing judgment to make myself feel better and I learned to grow in (and under) grace. I chose to stop rooting out my own sin under Adam and to live under Christ without judging myself or my actions, since there is now no condemnation in Him.

Instead of underestimating God, I stepped out on Him, staked my life on His power in me, and His timing for my heart-change, which doesn’t run on my “must-be-perfect-now” schedule. My testimony doesn’t ride on my own “righteous” conduct. It rides on a Holy Spirit who intercedes for me and Jesus Christ who stands between me and holy God, perfecting me for relationship with Him.

In a sense, I gave up my own responsibility for my life, which oddly resulted in my giving up my own right to my life. I can no longer do anything without considering who God is in my heart as I go forward – whether it’s taking pictures, interacting with my family, losing my temper, or getting sick. But I get to live from my heart now, and without layers and layers of hidden muck to work through, things are pretty open between God and me – even if I’m not quite sure about Him sometimes.

So I pretty much live wide open. I really have nothing to hide about myself, though I do use some caution when I share publicly out of care for others in my life.

That thing I’ve been struggling about recently? It’s living THIS with people who know me, living this with people who thought I should be one thing and haven’t seen the change they’ve been looking for. It’s living this without the physical capacity to compensate for my own mess. I’m engaged in a daily battle to pick up the grace of Christ and put it on over my internal struggles and questions instead of reacting and trying to fix me up and come up with my own answers without Him.

And the more of me that gets exposed to His grace, the lighter I feel, because if no one else in the world will come alongside and understand and want to know me, He does, and He knows it ALL, and wants my heart anyway.

By kelle | June 24, 2011 | from here, God n me, grace, His |

Summer

The morning wakes eerie rose behind a thick cloak of gray today, a red morning rising, predicting the storms to come later, I suppose. The heat has been relentless here of late; it is hard to breathe when even the rain breaks up as it nears the sea. I try not to take this time too seriously. It is summer, I say. We had a lovely, perfect spring; of course summer will follow suit and pay her dues in full.

She plays an apt metaphor for my life of late.

I know that my online identity is limited to my most recent blog post, as if hot summer is here and will never end, but I have been in this place before. I can’t deny it any more than I can push off the seasons, and there is no air conditioning relief for the weight on my spirit of late. I half pray for the storms to break over me now, pray for rain to refresh me, even if rain comes with wind and hail to do violence to my way of life.

I don’t change unless my heart changes, and I feel it restless, reaching for change. I cannot live in-between forever. My waiting is nearing its end; God is drawing near, and I want to look at Him, want to raise my hands and my whole life up and lay it out before Him now. I haven’t done that for a long time. I haven’t been here for a long time.

I remember the intimacy of this place. The knowledge of Him, the deepened trust. And now I come with fear and more experience, but the fear of Him is the beginning of wisdom. It leaves me human, lets Him be God who He is, without my limiting Him.

I never know how much I am willing to live here in this place. I want something more than this, and I have it sometimes, when I take pictures, when what I see is beauty to others. But when what I see is that we who want to be right are really missing God’s grace entirely, when Truth turns tables in temples and anger doesn’t look like love at all, I want to drop off the face of the earth. I’d rather not exist than see this truth, but it burns in me and I cannot escape it as my love deepens like His and I dare to speak, knowing that my earthen vessel leaves much to be desired.

I know freedom. I know grace. I know the joy of it because I have known judgment. Yet I am only learning to offer it to others in the way God has offered it to me. Am I not to speak of what I know until I can be an authority on it? I don’t know. My dust wasn’t meant for perfection. My spirit is already whole in Christ. I learn to speak with boldness because I know that I am no longer condemned by Him. But sometimes speaking with boldness means accepting the condemnation of others, so I have to make a choice – do I want Him more than I want not to be alone?

There are good days, when the sun sparkles in and the world feels exciting wild, when even the storms tantalize my restless heart ready for anything. And there are days when the pain goes so deep all I can remember is that “All is not lost,” and God draws near because no one else will.

I learn slow to be still, and not to lash out. I learn not to push Him away. I learn to accept this gift, even if it is not received.

There is so much more than here. I forget too often.

By kelle | June 22, 2011 | from here, God n me, grace |

Break

I remember now, the way I woke up the morning after the never.

I remember how I wanted to throw up, how the tears wouldn’t stop. I remember wondering how I would ever live again. I remember the words that drove the knife in that day and in the weeks following, the “God cannot operate outside of His principles,” the “all I saw in you was anger,” the “this love you have, I don’t see any fruit in you from it,” the “God wouldn’t tell someone to love somebody.”

I remember how everyone I trusted who had never made my choices pushed me away and shoved me down and beat my passion back. The walls closed in. There was no safe place.

They didn’t know, didn’t realize that the love I’d chosen wasn’t mine. And I didn’t want it. I would have been satisfied to walk away, move on to the next crush, put my life back together without the gaping fissure of an open, wounded heart. I WANTED their perfection, their principles, their fruit, their idea of God. I wanted to stand in a room without witnesses and speak my love IN love to the person who had insisted on a witness, speak to him face to face without the safety net of accountability he needed because he didn’t dare to face his own heart.

But I do strange things with my pain. I can’t help smiling when others accuse – and not the kind receiving-it smile – the angry, “I can’t believe how much this hurts” smile that makes others think that I hold nothing sacred, that I must have no soul. When others reject me, I speak truth at the top of my lungs, fire-and-brimstone with little care for grace except that God is not striking me dead as I cry out, and I am desperate to be heard. It doesn’t matter how pure my heart may be, though. If my outward actions don’t conform to predefined fruit, I will fall short of the glory of God, which in the end, turns out to be defined by everybody and nobody in particular.

“Don’t expect God to send lightning and change my mind,” he said, and I hear it again and again from people I love, see it in their eyes as they turn away from me and write me off, because the things I say and live and share that come from the deepest part of me where He lives and moves in me are too much. Do they think I don’t know that? These things are too much for me, the thoughts that He thinks, the God that He IS, regardless of our definitions.

But I made Him a promise, that I would believe that He is, that He is who He says He is, and that I would live in the light of what He showed me.

That is why I chose to love.

That is why I say the things I say.

That is why I woke again this morning to a letter that broke my heart all over again.

Because what do passionate people do but break other passionate people when we don’t agree? What do we do but push each other away when what one believes threatens another’s belief about God? Why does every one of us have to be right? Is the Cross not enough to mend our brokenness? Why is it that when we “accept Jesus” we must immediately move toward reform, instead of learning deep the meaning of the Gospel? Why does God ask me to speak truth that is only made clear by His Spirit? Can’t He do His own work without me?

I don’t always choose my own isolation. And sometimes I do choose it, for the sake of others around me. So that I can learn to speak truth in love. So that I can learn to interact with others who know God differently and live sincerely. So that I don’t yell and weep and blow apart with pain over what should have been joy when I found it – they told me so!

But He wants me to speak now. To live around others. To put all this mess out here, and watch Him hold back the lightning while others look on and dismiss me. And why should I not suffer this way as He suffered? But how dare I identify myself with Him, when it is those who believe who put me to shame, when it is those who are right who say I am wrong?

I’m folding in today, asking Him why He made me this way, holding grace in one hand and dust in the other. I’m wishing me perfect, writing me off. I am not what I want to be. The work of God is believing Him. And now that I have, I can’t unbelieve Him. I can’t just stop with what I’ve already attained. All I’ve got ahead of me to hope for is “that I may gain Christ and be found in Him, not having my own righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith; that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death, if, by any means, I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.” (Phil. 3:8-11)

There’s no wonder in being right all the time. The wonder is in knowing God.

And for the rest… I just don’t know today. Everything hurts.

By kelle | June 21, 2011 | from here, God n me, His |

Speak

I have hard things to say. I have hard things to live.

Then the word of the LORD came to me, saying:
“ Before I formed you in the womb I knew you;
Before you were born I sanctified you;
I ordained you a prophet to the nations.”

Then said I:

“ Ah, Lord GOD!
Behold, I cannot speak, for I am a youth.”

But the LORD said to me:

“ Do not say, ‘I am a youth,’
For you shall go to all to whom I send you,
And whatever I command you, you shall speak.
Do not be afraid of their faces,
For I am with you to deliver you,” says the LORD.

Then the LORD put forth His hand and touched my mouth, and the LORD said to me:

“ Behold, I have put My words in your mouth.”

– Jeremiah 1:4-9

It is sometimes hard to be who I really am. If I feel that I am not allowed, I go into hiding, rather than break unwritten rules with my very existence.

“Then I said, “I will not make mention of Him,
Nor speak anymore in His name.”
But His word was in my heart like a burning fire
Shut up in my bones;
I was weary of holding it back,
And I could not.”

– Jeremiah 20:9

I’ve been told that I see the world a bit differently than other people see it. I didn’t really believe it until the last few weeks, not really. I didn’t want to believe it. I think I kept hoping that maybe they were wrong, that I did see things the same, that this one “original” thing about me wasn’t really original.

I will stand my watch
And set myself on the rampart,
And watch to see what He will say to me,
And what I will answer when I am corrected.

Then the LORD answered me and said:

“ Write the vision
And make it plain on tablets,
That he may run who reads it.
For the vision is yet for an appointed time;
But at the end it will speak, and it will not lie.
Though it tarries, wait for it;
Because it will surely come,
It will not tarry.
“ Behold the proud,
His soul is not upright in him;
But the just shall live by his faith.

-Habakkuk 2:1-4

The looks I’ve received from friends, the conversations I’ve had with family, the struggles Pete and I have faced recently in our marriage – the reasons I am GOOD at my photography, the way I can design something that speaks so deeply to who a person is… It all began to make sense.

You see, I SEE people. It is my gift. It is not merely a talent, not something I’ve developed or chosen. I don’t see what people wear, their faults, their blemishes. I don’t always remember names, I don’t always remember details about their lives. But do I see people as God created them.

I’m a “pick-right-up-where-I-left-off” person, because people don’t change to me. And I unintentionally relate to them from this place, because I literally can’t see how to relate on any other level. I have no point-of-reference for relationships that are based merely on mutual interests or similar life circumstances – partly because I’ve never been in one place long enough to build those relationships, and partly because I believe that relationships are meant to deepen. They cannot survive forever on interests or circumstances.

This works beautifully online, because I can share who I am here, choose what I share here, and I can seek out others who are sharing real. These relationships deepen quickly without my knowing how many children they have, where we come from. It is a meeting of hearts. But in real life, and specifically in the culture in which I live, I’m realizing that hearts don’t meet that often, and open hearts like mine make others feel vulnerable, exposed. For the longest time, I thought I could control it, put it away, be “discreet” – but I can’t. My body absolutely cannot handle the turmoil within.

I almost never see the fruit of my life and how He uses my mess for His glory. And to be truthful, I almost prefer it that way. I don’t want to know He’s using me. I don’t want to be a tool in His hand. But I want to know Him real, and I want others to know Him real, and I’m His, for whatever He means to do with me – even if I can’t see the direction.

With me, what you see is what you get. I’m not secretly judging with my words or the life experience I share, offering my heart for connection. The cold shoulders, the forced politeness, the glances that reveal buried resentment, the non-invitations to normal gatherings – I see them. And I try to love past them, but I am never again so open once I have seen them. It feels like slow training to die, honestly. I channel my heart into creativity, put my words away, pretend I don’t actually have to live in the real world.

But I do have to live here. And whether I like it or not, what God reveals to me is HIS work, not mine. I want to close my eyes and live my life unaware, live it safe. But I’m not called to see the safe things. I’m not called to believe the safe things.

So I’m learning to share what He shows me about Himself, and slowly learning grace when intellect and blindness overrides Spirit-work. And while I may be wrong about some things or unsure about some other things, I can – and will – stand up any day of my life and tell you this: that Jesus Christ was crucified for me, and for you, and for everyone, and that in Him, I am already complete and perfect before God. “It is finished,” Jesus said, dying ONCE for all, forever to stand holy between me and God, cancelling out my desperate human need to be like God, knowing good and evil, deciding right and wrong.

This is what makes me who I am. It is Gospel worth living – and dying – for.

This is what I see, that God created me and you and everyone with a whole lot of amazing, and you can choose to live it or choose not to live it, but I can’t help seeing it. And whatever mess you’re in, whatever you do or don’t do, however you measure up to your standards or anyone else’s, I will still see you as you and what you are or could be in Jesus. I will still see you as He meant you to be, free from the life that kills, alive to God who doesn’t live in a box. I may see that He is working, may notice that He is reaching for you. And being me, I may say it. And I will always hope you will believe it, even though I know you’ll probably write me off and think I’m off my nut.

Please bear with me as I start to process this in writing. It’s a life that needs living. Not a well-rounded blog post.

By kelle | June 20, 2011 | from here, God n me |

Painting

REACH
for a brush to stroke magic

SWEEP
vibrant life across blank canvas

COLOR
white with aubergine imagination

DANCE
through worlds all the way home

SING
the hued heart songs everyone knows

BREATHE
long and deep like babies do

BE
as one, your heart and hand

FIND
His grace for now – and then

By kelle | June 12, 2011 | grace, pip, poetry |

Time

“I realized that I want what the crones (the old gypsy women) have: time for all those long deep breaths, time to watch more closely, time to learn to enjoy what I’ve always been afraid of…”

~Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies

I’m sorting today. Trying to stay quiet. I probably overdid yesterday, running errands in the morning, mad-cleaning the house just before last night’s engagement shoot. Well, okay, not probably. I DID overdid -do. Whatever. I went to bed late last night, couldn’t finish my dinner. My whole system just quit, and it hasn’t quite started up again this morning.

So I’m taking this day slow, sorting failure from personal expectations, putting my energy into the life-giving things, pushing off stress. Mostly, I’m trying to be still, doing what my body’s been hollering at me to do. I don’t know why I’m afraid of being still. Maybe because I think I won’t be able to stay still, because I completely believe the stress and panic of racing time will always win. Maybe because I feel like my plates won’t keep spinning if I sit down to watch them go.

But I want the time today. I need the long deep breaths and the drawing near.

By kelle | June 10, 2011 | from here, health, quotes |

Tired

I’ve been fighting this thing for ten years – or longer. I don’t really know anymore. It’s been too long. And it won today.

My doctor says I need to believe I can get better, but I’m having a hard time thinking in a straight line, let alone moving to do the things that will help me get better. I’m too tired to despair, really. I’m just tired.

You should see my house. Or maybe you shouldn’t. The kids are generally well-behaved, but the house… They’ve made a mess of it. I want to summon some adrenaline to clean it up, but nothing comes. I’m holding the walls as I walk. I don’t know where my cane went. I can’t believe I want it again.

I’ve been numb on the left side of my body for a week now, ever since our gentle spring exchanged places with a full-blown Charleston summer. The heat and I, we don’t do so well together.

I’m praying to hold out just another two weeks – at the most – just to finish some things, just to find my way clear to take a couple of months off. I’m afraid today I won’t make it, that people are going to be waiting on me again for things I under-promised and may now be under-delivering.

I’ve felt this vulnerability coming on for a while – I told a lie last week to cover it, to try to be stronger, to try to maintain my autonomy. It was stupid, but, really, who needs all this drama?

Little things stress me now, like getting out of bed, things that make noise when they are dropped, questions that need answers. All this weakness, all this stress – I haven’t lived here for a while, and every day lately, I’m breaking down a little more.

I can’t do this, any of it, and most of the time the Christ-strength isn’t physical – it’s grace that says “all right then” and lets me breathe in the midst of my failure.

It’s taking me over, and to be honest, I’m a little scared. It’s too real, and I feel like a nightmare, moving sluggish without being able to wake up. I don’t know what is most important anymore. I can’t think that far. I can’t think beyond the next thing, if I can remember what that is.

By kelle | June 8, 2011 | from here, health |

End

People talk about coming to the end of yourself. I’ve talked about it myself. I’ve been there and back, and I’ve half a God-desire to live there all the time, because that is where humility lives, in that deepest place of need.

But the other half of me… I don’t want to live broken. And I realize that as close to the end of myself as I may feel sometimes, I know I’m not really there when I feel myself pushing back angry. Sometimes it is only on the other side of my anger that I find the end of me.

I think I get angry because I am scared that the end of me is the end of everything. Because if I have one more need I can’t meet myself, I’m going to overwhelm everyone who loves me. Because I should have known better than to get to this point in the first place.

When I reach that point, when my anger boils over and my body betrays me, there’s nothing left to do but to fall in, collapse into whatever arm is there to support me – if there is one.

—–

I’m living raw lately. Physical depression plays around the edges of my consciousness every day lately, and exhausted hopelessness about relationships and the course my life has taken.

I look at decisions I made years ago, and I remember what I wasn’t thinking then, hate myself for making them when there were others involved. It seems I lived better when I didn’t have choices, when my parents decided about the moves and I just found myself in new places, and made my place wherever I was.

I always wondered what it was like to grow up in one place, and I thought about it again last night, about finding a little of myself here, with my great-grandfather and my people who came before me in Charleston – it’s a little like coming home to live here. But I haven’t always lived here, and I don’t know the ways the people around me understand their lives in the light of the things that never changed.

All my life is change, and I am always the stranger, never the insider. I think people like me, we’re always the most at home with the ones we love. But when those relationships become strained, it makes us wonder where our place is, if we have a right to exist at all.

There is something about the will of God that comforts me now, something about His sovereignty, the knowledge that where I am now is where He knew I would be, that this day was a day He wrote for me in His book. It is as if He made the decision, and I can let go of my right to “choose,” find myself in this place, and make a place here, like being a kid again with a Father looking out for me.

—–

I realized the other day that I hate my own drama. As if I have a place to determine whether it’s okay or not. As if the clay can say to the potter, “why have you made me this way? I could have done a better job on me…”

I’ve gotten emails and notes from a few of you who are praying for me. Thank you. There are things that have happened in the last few weeks I don’t know if I can ever write. Pete and I are both tired, so near the end of ourselves all the time lately. I have wondered some days if I am not in danger of a nervous breakdown. I feel a bit as though I am observing myself from a distance. Lately, I just want to know someone is near, that I can just be, and it will be okay. This isn’t all there is to me.

I am just a few projects out from finishing up the massive to-do list that backlogged behind my rebranding, and then I’ll be able to treat this mess in my body, be able to let down for a couple of months and find my place again. You know, after I find the end of me again. I’m praying that this end won’t be a real end, that it will lead to something new.

By kelle | June 3, 2011 | depression, from here, God n me, grace, health |

Odd Grace

It has been the oddest sort of day. It’s that “odd” that comes when my skin starts to fit again after two weeks of out-of-body living, when fears that held me down reveal themselves unrealized, when things that don’t make sense make sense of other things for me.

I began the morning with a wonderful visit to last fall when I won my new camera from Epiphanie Bags. Today was the day I launched that giveaway I’ve wanted to launch since the end of September. Today, I got over 400 comments on a post in eight hours, thanks to Maile Wilson’s mentions on Twitter and Facebook.

After weeks of invisibility and fears that my blog wasn’t really worth following after all, I’m bemusingly visible. My name is out there. All over the place. My facebook likes jumped 120 in an afternoon. I’m not only getting giveaway entries – I’m getting “wow, I’m so glad I discovered you” comments at my blog. I feel half-naked, with only a small portfolio posted because of my trip last week and the way my health tanked this week, keeping up with my planned – and postponed – launch giveaways.

I’ve played a star for a day, and I still feel oddly like Kelly Sauer, and I’m beyond okay with that. I think you really never know what you’ll do with attention until you get it, and your response still depends on where you are when you get the attention you’ve been craving. I wouldn’t have responded the way I did today, were it not for the other thing that happened. Or the other thing, or the other thing. There have been lots of things lately, to be honest.

The thing that grounded me today was my wisdom tooth extraction. I can’t believe I’m analyzing this, but with my medical history, you have to understand that I am really, REALLY vulnerable when it comes to dealing with doctors, and even MORE vulnerable when they are talking about drugs and anesthesia and putting me to sleep – and out of control.

I’d forgotten to brush my teeth on the way out of the house this morning, and the secretary smirked, annoyed, as she handed me a toothbrush and toothpaste. I had also forgotten to mention at my consult that I can’t have epinephrine because of the way it speeds up my heart and sends me convulsing, so when I walked in on edge and told them about my fear, the surgical assistant brusquely told me not to question them; they would take good care of me. And I really, really wanted Pete to be able to come in with me and at least hold my hand until I went to sleep, because I didn’t want to go to sleep alone with others around me I didn’t know – but he wasn’t “sterile,” they said.

As the drug that was meant to make me feel like I’d had a glass of wine took effect, I felt the tears slip out unbidden, and then the ceiling blurred, and I felt the lidocane needle going in just as everything went black.

When I woke, I didn’t even know I’d slept, but they were done. I almost didn’t believe they’d done anything, except for the gauze in my mouth and the tooth in the doctor’s hand. The world swayed as they walked me down the hall to a recovery room. They gave me two IV’s to keep me hydrated and ease my recovery a bit. The doctor was concerned because I was “so little” and wanted to make sure I’d be okay for the rest of the day. I didn’t bother talking too much, and when they brought Pete in, I let them talk to him as if I was as out of it as they had told me I would be. It was easier not to fight.

We’d dropped off drug prescriptions for the pain and swelling – but didn’t pick them up with me so tired. I’ve had two babies. I’ve had another wisdom tooth break into my mouth without so much as a by-your-leave, causing me a week of absolutely horrible pain before it got pulled. I decided to leave the Percocet alone and see what motrin and water would do, and I had a strange, slow-but-coherent day.

I suddenly understand why well-known people follow and interact with just a few friends when strangers are trying hard to get their attention. I planned the giveaways to gain exposure for my name and my brand, so that people might see that I am here and be interested in having me take their photos. Yet even as people have commented and liked and followed and tweeted, I recognize that many may not continue to follow and like and tweet and comment.

But I can’t watch numbers. They slay me. And not in a good way.

All this week, I’ve been fighting an internal war, despairing over the lack of entries (especially my free engagement session – I have a promise to keep with this one), frustrated with my own lack of steam, ready to fold all this up and go back to the me I chose that I could mostly control without the dream, instead of laying my dream out and letting God decide what to do with it.

This is the week that “being me” has seemed the ultimate failure, in my relationships, in my business, in my writing, in everything, but somehow as those tears slipped out at the oral surgeon’s office today, I felt released from my own expectation into a grace I hardly dare to grasp most days, despite how hard I fight to believe I can grasp it.

But life abundant isn’t lived on a checklist of expectations – not mine, not yours, not theirs, not anybody’s. People are going to be repelled by me, no matter what I do or don’t do. Loving as He first loved me doesn’t mean rolling over to become what another person wants me to be. Sometimes it means bearing with another; sometimes it means leaving outcomes in God’s hands and trusting His heart and His desire for my life. It is more about submission to hope than I know how to define yet.

I look at all of the comments and follows and subscriptions I’ve garnered today, and I know that they are following because of the giveaway, not because of me. And you know, I’m okay with that. I don’t know if God brought every one of these people across my path for a purpose, or if it is all simply a result of a savvy business collaboration. I’m not really sure I care, because my perspective on the outcome has been altered beyond recognition today.

This week, I went back fishing as Peter did after walking out on God. I found myself in a place without justification, willingly betraying Jesus because I couldn’t deal with my own fear and pain, and it was a graceless place. So I defaulted to what I know, to what I could do. And let me tell you, it was like fishing all night and catching nothing. Again. As if I didn’t exist on the map, as if all the time and energy and effort I’ve put in has really been worthless.

This evening as I stare weirdly at comments and comments and comments, I feel as if the net is full as the sun is rising. My boat is starting to sink. I’ll never be able to manage all these “fish.” But something is oddly different, and I look over to shore with Peter, and there stands Jesus, preparing sustenance, waiting for me to join Him in spite of my well-deserved shame. There is grace, waiting on the shore, willing to remind me that I’ve forgotten to live from who I am, that I’ve not been choosing to be His when we both know He is all that makes me who I am. I dive wildly into the water.

I respond to a potential client, and I put my heart for every bride I meet on the page for her. She can find another photographer – there are plenty to be had. And in the long run, it might be best for both of us. I have to let God pace my schedule and my heart, because I lay it all out every time.

I hear Him asking Peter-who-betrayed-Him – asking me – “do you love Me?” And I reach for a response I rarely dare, because my heart knows it true, “Yes, Lord,” I say timidly, thinking of His next words.

“Feed my sheep.”

And whether I want it or not, I know my life is about that grace I’ve just found with Him on the shore, watching, waiting, sharing food with those He loves and offering them the same freedom to BE and to be wrong and to be imperfect and to not live up to my expectations and to live in what pain they carry – the same freedom to live human that I’ve received from Him.

It’s been an odd day. But odd is good for me, I think. Just sayin’.

By kelle | May 27, 2011 | from here, God n me, grace, health, His |

Absent

I watch the news, talk to my family and friends; I want to fold up with sorrow. Tornadoes whipping across the Midwest. An active hurricane season predicted for the fall. Earthquakes, tidal waves, floods. Accidents, cancer, death. I feel as though I’ve been gut-punched when my mom calls to tell me my cousin was killed in a motorcycle wreck last weekend. His dad was in another motorcycle wreck just a day later. He hasn’t wakened yet. My young friend – 18 years old – just had her thyroid removed because of an aggressive cancer that had spread into her lymph nodes. Other friends lose their babies. Every day, we watch dreams die and face disappointment.

I can’t hold all the sorrow – the earth can’t hold all our tears – but casting my cares on God seems useless sometimes, because when it comes down to it, He’s doing His own thing. Our dust is screaming with rage that He doesn’t step in and save us – was the earth as disappointed as the disciples when Jesus died, instead of claiming His place as King? Our dust is subjected to this toil, to this death, and we cry out against it, and accept it, and become inured to it, and it is hard to live in any hope at all when it seems as though God is only interested in His Gospel.

I see all too clearly and not clear enough. My eyes are wide open, but I feel so blind. But He promises to lead the blind in ways they have not known. And God, I don’t know this way, this way of unreserved trust when God seems like He’s off doing His own thing while tornadoes are tearing up towns and people are dying and the whole earth is crying out.

I wonder what He is waiting for. I do not wait humbly. I demand His intervention.

I’m surrounded by death when I want so badly to live, when I want to give a more innocent world to my children, a world that becomes daily more dangerous. The more I see, the more I understand that the only hope I have, the only hope I can give them, is the Gospel, that Jesus came so we could know God. Good news indeed, hard news too, for knowing Him does not mean we can manipulate Him. Knowing Him means taking Him where He is, as He is. And I made a promise once that I would.

God is focused on a different story than my story. And to me on the ground watching all this go down, it doesn’t feel fair that He gets to do that. Not if He loves us. Not if He really cares. And I don’t have an answer to throw at my struggle. He never really gave one.

But at the end of every day, I have just this, that “faith is the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things not seen.” That I don’t know, and He is God.

I am groaning today. Calling out from the depth of me, “even so, come quickly Lord Jesus.” We can’t do this anymore…

By kelle | May 25, 2011 | from here, God n me |