My quiet time this morning began with a simple request. “Lord, comfort me.” I rested my hand on my heart and allowed the tears to flow. When your world is spinning where do you go?
This is a hard season. A season full of uncertainties. But isn’t life always full of uncertainties? This current reality we find ourselves in is just making it more visible. Maybe during this time God wants to make other things visible too. There are many things he wants to reveal to us in times of rest and reset that our hearts don’t even realize they hold.
Hold. It means to grasp or carry. Our hearts grasp onto false senses of security and carry burdens unacknowledged. In Hebrews 3:12 we are told to search our heart regularly because what is hiding there will make us unresponsive to what God is trying to do in us. The world we knew as “normal” made it hard for us to see. Full of distractions and noise we struggle to name and be with what we really feel. Somehow, we have come to see our feelings as the enemy of success. Maybe that is wrong. Maybe by denying our feelings we also deny our passions.
What are we really running from when we run from our emotions? Times like this, stress-filled times, bring out the best and worst of them for sure. Just a few short months ago we ran at a hurriedly pace through life, each passing day like another leaf that fell unnoticed. Unnoticed doesn’t mean non-existent and the problem is that the things that remain unnoticed within us are also left unseen.
What constant contenders fight for your attention leaving the real you unnoticed, and unseen?
One of mine is perfectionism for sure.
It tells me it isn’t polished enough. Well, to be honest, I am tired of polishing. I tired of the limiting story I’ve allowed my perfectionism to tell me and keep me stuck in!
There is another story. Why do we struggle so to let it in? I believe because we are more afraid of the true self within us than the false self that constrains us. Maybe we’ve grown comfortable with the restraints.
Could this be a time in your life where God is trying to make visible what your heart is meant to hold? Is he tapping on the door of your soul, but you have been too afraid to let him in for fear of what he would find?
When we do this, we shut out the only thing that can free us. God’s love! And we miss finding our truest selves⸺the only version of us who can live our truest story. You see shame tells you that “You need to be someone else to be accepted.” Love says, “The world is waiting for you to just be you.”
Hiding will always keep us from our truest story.
Today, allow yourself to be fully seen by the Father’s heart and let him hold you in his arms. Especially, when you feel messy, overwhelm and fearful in the midst of all this uncertainty! We need his presence more than ever to reset the storms within us and help us see from his broader, wiser, loving view. I believe he has waited patiently for this moment, the moment when our pace would be slow enough to hear him excitedly show us the beauty within that we have yet to notice!
It may sound cliché, but when we reach the point in our stories where we finally realize who God is and who we are in him, something powerful shifts in us. A fire is formed within and we are no longer afraid to let it shine! Maybe this space and time has formed just the right conditions for you to finally see what God has been smiling about all along when he looks at you!
Be You- Be a Light!