Skip to main content

Breathing

I woke up on my thin mattress on the most comfortable metal bed I've ever slept on. I opened the window, killed a mosquito that picked the wrong time to fly in, and felt a slightly cooler morning breeze run through my hair. I threw my hair up in a messy bun and opened my bible. I spent time with Jesus and I asked Him what He wanted me to do today. There was no question of who I wanted to be that day, besides a follower of Christ. There was no question of what I wanted to wear besides the love that God had given me for the people, and whatever was dry on the hanging clothesline on the balcony of our small leaky apartment. There was no reason for me to think about how I would appear to other people during the day, or whether or not I was meeting my own expectations because crossing stateside borders had forced me to leave my expectations in America, and Jesus had slowly peeled back layer by layer everything I had wanted and tried to force myself to be until all that remained was Christ in me. I'm stateside again, come home to find that I serve the same God here as overseas. I don't know who I am anymore. I don't know what I really want to wear clothing wise, or my favorite food. I'm pretty sure my favorite color is still blue. I'm not really sure how I want to decorate my house and I don't think about what my life looks like to other people, or what they think of my actions anymore. I'm done holding back truth to make other people more comfortable. I know that I'm marrying my best friend who loves me for me, every person that I will be and the person I am now even if we're not really sure who that is. I know that I need Jesus more than I need sunlight or food or water or air. And I know that waking up and letting Jesus define who I am today without the tangles of my own expectations feels like breathing again. It feels like sweet, cool rain in a desert, like finding a homebound friend in a foreign land. I know that wherever I lay my head to rest for the night, whether it be in a dusty apartment in East Asia, or stateside staying with my mom or my inlaws, or beside my husband, that He is here and He is enough. I don't know who I am, but I know who He is.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

This Cat

So. I suppose I'll just cut to the chase. Ever since being married, I've been slightly depressed. Bouts of sadness brought on with no warning or reason. sometimes not feeling anything at all, sometimes just the plain loneliness of being in a new town away from all of my friends and family, and sometimes a mixture of all this with the mixed in fear of the extra newness of living in a new house with a new truck in a new town with a new husband. Everything is new and different. Everything . From no longer being in college to where I go to sleep at night. I've told exactly 2 people about all of my feelings that I can't seem to stop feeling. (Or the occasional lack-there-of). I'm not going to pretend like I don't know what the problem is. That it's been about a month and a half back in the states, that everything is new, that I'm very concerned with being a "good enough" wife at everything from cooking to sex to dishes and that I cry easily when I d...

divorce

Everything's changing, but somehow nothing is new. Leaves are falling, seasons are changing, people moving, the branches look bare. My heart feels bare. People are getting married, born, dying, divorced. How was I to ever know that my parents would fall in that last category? That I would become a statistic, that I would now have 2 of everything. 2 birthdays, and 2 Christmases, and 2 houses. and 2 separate families somehow. And a million pieces of my heart, tattered and thrown around, left in different places. If I went around gathering those pieces all together I don't think that I would ever be able to make them fit together just like they were, before I knew brokenness or what "I have to talk to my lawyer about who will pay for your health insurance" meant. Tides roll in and they change direction. My mind tells me not to forget Jesus, that He is always here with me. And all of me longs for His presence. I feel caught in between the riptide, pulled into the undertow...

Moving Day

Somehow, in all of my waiting to thaw, I had forgotten that Jesus is like fire to my ice. That He is my protector. I'm fighting back, because even though this is hard, my God is worth the fight. Even though my stomach is turning a little bit because I have filled it with fajitas and it hasn't been completely full in a while, even though I still have to fight back tears when I look in a mirror, He's worth it. And if He doesn't want me to be defined by Ana or calories, then fine, I'll force food into my mouth bit by bit. I'll gain some extra weight and wonder if anyone can notice that last months jeans are fitting snugger than before. Because I can think I'm ugly every day and night and guess what? It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because I am not keeper, God is my creator and He tells me that Godliness is beautiful. I will cling to that with everything I have left in me. The Holy Spirit is beautiful, and He is within me. I have to be beautiful by ...