(not so) Complicated.

The past couple weeks I’ve been re-reading a book called The Art of Listening Prayer by Seth Barnes.  The book serves as a guide to help spark conversation between you and God by giving you prompts to ask and then allows breaks in time for you to journal the responses you hear.  I went through it while on the Race when I was first learning the importance of two-way communication in my walk with the Lord and since then have grown more consistent in taking time to just sit and listen to Jesus. 

 

Rereading the book two years later has been really refreshing to me and has shown me just how much I’ve grown in my ability to discern the father’s voice.  Where it use to be hard to hear even one or two words in a whole hour of sitting, now I’ll often get entire paragraphs of him speaking life just after my initial prayer!

 

The other day however, something really weird happened.   I almost hate to divulge this because it seems so immature and ridiculous but I’m hoping that by being honest, I’m able to encourage someone that might be walking down a similar path and stumble upon this blog at some point.

 

After opening my book to the latest chapter, I initiated another conversation with God and he began speaking.  I started writing, and then thought “I don’t really want to do this right now”….I put my pen down. 

 

I put my pen down?

 

The God of the Universe had something to say to me and I…I put my pen down?!

 

I just didn’t want to listen.  HOW RIDICULOUS IS THAT?  I realized what happened about 3 minutes later and thought “oh no…no bueno…what just happened?  I need to figure out my motivation for choosing not to hear from God”.

 

After a couple days of praying about it and continuing conversation with God, he revealed to me just how often I chose to view the world through my own perspective instead of his.  I emphasize the word chose because I am very capable of seeing his perspective, of hearing him out and viewing the situations I’m in from the eyes of the father but instead I CHOOSE to view them through my own. 

When I get into a funk, I am given two choices.  I can look at it through the lens of the cross and allow for my feelings to fall by the wayside, paling in comparison to the sacrifice of the cross OR I can not talk to God about it, let my bitterness grow so intensely that my once just dreary mood has dragged me down into one that borderlines the depressiveness exemplified by sadness, anger and fear in the disney movie Inside Out. Unfortunately, I must confess that even as a missionary, I will still often chose the later.  Hence, this blog.

 

I chose not to hear God as he speaks life into me and offers to pull me up from the depths of my despair and into his arms and instead allow myself to feel lonely or sad or ____insert emotion here____

 

 

In general, Life in India hasn’t been complicated, in fact it’s been really uncomplicated…and I think that has scared me to some extent.  It really hasn’t been until I moved to Hyderabad that I’ve felt connected and settled to one place. As a 24 year old college graduate, I had the opportunity to be control of where I was going, and what I was doing with my life…and since the day I gave God the go ahead to lead my life, he’s led me in the least complicated direction.  He brought me here, I fell in love, he brought me back, I’m still in love. It feels SO right.  I live with people that I love, in a place that I love, doing what I love to do.  So not complicated.

 

So why do I still struggle with choosing his much less complicated view of life over my own, much more complicated and less fun view?

SERIOUSLY…WHY ON EARTH DO I DO THIS?? 

Well, I honestly don’t think I know entirely why yet but I’m beginning to realize that I think I like life to be a bit complicated..and not in a good way like Avril Lavigne tries to make it sound here.  

 

 

Complicated story lines, interesting plot twists, and endings that comes from left field…it’s all rather enticing to me.   Growing up, my family life was always really dramatic, we were always about to move to a new town, have new step siblings, no longer have those step siblings, meet new friends, say goodbye to those new friends, move to a new house or start at a new school.  Change, people crying, dramatic screaming exits became a normalcy for me and even more so, something I could confront and conquer with confidence (albeit false confidence). Being afraid got me no where in life but this confidence led to the road paved in emotional gold…I got really good at being the one every liked at school, I learned to make friends super easily and even profited from having a super unique story to tell other people:

           “yeah, my mom’s boyfriend came to our house and tried to murder us so we left and came here”.

           “I don’t really know my dad, he left when I was 3 months old” 

           “How many sibling’s do I have? umm…ok….yeah, so my stepdad left a while ago and I haven’t seen him or my siblings since then so I’m not really sure how many siblings I have anymore actually” .

 

“WOW” they’d say…”you’re story is so cool, so interesting, my life is so boring compared to yours”.  I’d smile and move on, knowing that I was the one the other elementary school kids would come to first when they wanted to hear a good story. Complicated became who I was….and to me, complicated wasn’t half bad. I liked the attention.  I didn’t necessarily love the inconsistency that was my life but I liked how it was different, and ever changing.

Each passing birthday meant a new year, and an opportunity for a new drama to unfold…

On some personal level I planted this truth deep down inside myself and it grew into a continuous mindset that knew whenever things started to “level out”, it wouldn’t be that way for long .  I remember telling myself quite frequently as a child “today was nice…glad I had a good day, but I better brace for the storm coming up”.

 

From a young age, I always viewed my mom as one of the strongest women in the world.   She was a single mom for nearly my entire childhood, beat cancer twice, provided for 2 kids under a single teacher’s salary and worked at least one side job on top of teaching every Christmas season so my sister and I would have presents to open on Christmas day.  She is a rock.   When her husband or boyfriend would leave her, you could tell she would feel the blow but she always got back up, would pull me aside to tell me it wasn’t my fault and that she would always love me and be a constant in my life.  Occasionally there would be a meltdown while cooking, which I eventually figured out had to do more with emotional hardship and less with the spam she was trying to flip on the pan but that’s a story for another day.  Her strength in being able to move forward convinced me that complications were a part of life and although they were inevitable, they didn’t have to be crippling or even keep me from living as a strong, independent woman.

 

Even in college and on the World Race I think that the idea of being strong and getting back up no matter what happens had a deep root in who I was.   I mean my name, “Andrea” literally means Strength….I’ve had innumerous people prophecy over me that I am a lion and a strong leader…I had two different people on the same day share with me a vision they received while praying over my future spouse of “two lions playing and wrestling together, walking forward and leading the Pride”.   It’s exciting isn’t it?  Being told your whole life to be strong and then having it confirmed as a gifting…it’s quite exhilarating. 

 

However, I’m beginning to realize that maybe my understanding of Strength may need a bit of an overhaul. Maybe my false confidence as a child has shaped my view of what strength really is and the strength that other’s see in me is something I can learn, pick up from Jesus and grow into instead of reshape and try to force on. Maybe, the strength I need is different than the strength I’ve had and maybe..just maybe..I was never really as strong as I thought I was.  

 While reading through the book of Matthew these last few weeks and trying to relate it to my life through God’s perspective and not my own, I’ve see that Jesus strength is indeed different.

His strength doesn’t come from crying all night and deciding out of his own pride that he’s done playing victim. 

His strength doesn’t come from false confidence or the fact that he wants other people to view him as trustworthy.

His strength is pure, it’s steadfast and it’s real. 

His strength is rooted in his humility and not his pride. 

His strength is powered on faith, the one true faith in the one true God.

 

As a missionary, I’m beginning to realize that I may not actually be as strong as I think I am…If I were, I wouldn’t be trying to hold on to complicated things.  I’d be running to hear the voice of God at every opportunity because I know that his voice is everything other than complicated and my identity no longer lies in the fact that I am complicated but that I am chosen, that I am a daughter of Christ. 

Im also learning that It’s ok that I’m not at that point yet,  what’s important is repentance and the desire to seek him above ourselves and our old habits.  We are a new creation, I am a new creation.  I can re-learn how to be (God’s view of) strong by preferring his voice above my own.  His voice, his view of the world is what will continually save me from myself, it’s what will save our country from itself and it’s what will save us as a people from the hate that has deemed this earth as habitable. 

 

I don’t have it all together, heck, I’m still struggling to figure out why I put my pen down in the first place but one thing I have figured out this week is that complicated is no good for me anymore and complicated has got to go.   

Instead, I am inviting in strength…more of God’s strength and less of my own.

I’ve not been given the gift of life to please my fellow man but to move mountains…. between JC and me only one of us holds the source of strength needed to do that and in case you just skipped to the end of the blog…it definitely ain’t me!

 

He replied, “Because you have so little faith. Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.” Matthew 17:20