I believe; help my unbelief

While I know I’m quite behind on blogging about all of my recent travel adventures… I’m currently in South Africa (again), and just have so much on my heart that I want to take a break from blogging about adventures and be candid about my life lately.

It’s easy to flash the pictures and tell the funny stories, but if I’m honest, I have to say that my move to London and my traveling abroad has taken me to new spiritual depths than I could have ever imagined. It’s pushed my faith way outside of my comfort zone and put me in social situations and interactions that I honestly couldn’t have imagined and definitely wasn’t as prepared for them as I thought. I think it’s easy to feel solid in who you are or to confidently be secure in your faith when you’re protected by like-minded thinkers. For me, I have been discouraged and disappointed with how much it has shaken me and how I am not as solid as I always thought. I almost feel embarrassed to say it, but I also just can’t help but be transparent about it, because if God is really the God I have always proclaimed Him to be, then He is certainly a God way bigger than any of my self-created disappointments or insecurities.

When I got to my hotel room in Johannesburg, there was a bouquet of flowers sitting in a vase on the desk that got my attention. I actually thought they were dried out roses at first and really didn’t think much more of it. They reminded me of all my dried out corsages I had kept from my high school dances (talk about throwback memories!). Throughout the day I kept catching a glimpse of these flowers and finally decided I wanted to send a picture to my mom because they just looked so beautiful to me. As I got closer to them to take the picture, I touched them, smelled them, and realized they were actually very much still alive. Maybe a silly thought, but it got me thinking about the similarities between this image and my life right now.

I don’t know how else to describe my current spiritual walk other than to say it’s weird (random side note, but the partner I’m traveling with says that about nearly everything. We went to a museum in South Africa expecting to look at human bones and ended up being put on a boat. I died laughing when he sat down on the boat and said “this is weird”, but, to be fair, it was really weird).

I have to first clarify that my belief in what is truth and who God is has never changed, but sometimes my attitude towards it and my behaviour has. Traveling, meeting new people, and learning history that I never knew before has challenged my mind in ways I never really knew possible. Also, being alone and not knowing anyone has created a longing for friendship and companionship that I had never experienced and has shown me insecurities about myself that have been so shocking (and bizarre) to me. It’s honestly been a very scary yet humbling experience. I’ve found myself praying fairly consistently to God to just not let me get away. I never want to be in a place of complacency or a place where I can no longer depict truth from tolerance.  

What I love though, is despite of this all, my ups, my downs, my uncertain thoughts, my poor decisions, my self-doubts… my mom remains constant in her love and friendship to me. I can say my thoughts out loud to her, and she doesn’t make me feel dumb or condemned. She just has a way of making me more certain that God is working something through me and through my experiences that will shape me to a place I need to be. It’s incredible how confident she is about it too. She will just say things like “Just let God teach you and enjoy Him. I think that you are seeing how big and great He is!” Meanwhile, in my prayer life, I feel like I’m holding on for dear life. My prayer lately has been “I believe; help my unbelief”. It’s like this weird, weird place where I feel so strong in my faith yet so not. I feel like to the world, I may seem dead in my faith, but in my heart and where I’m learning more about the world (like big, big world, outside of Kansas City and the United States), I’m realizing that I just have a lot of things I need to sort through with God. My understanding and view of God is definitely being transformed and that in and of itself is blowing my mind.

Half of my battle has been to just let God journey with me, be obedient to his promptings, get planted in a home church, find a life group, and believe He actually knows what He’s doing. I think a lot of it has had to do with feeling frustrated with God that things haven’t played out the way I wanted or thought they should and another part is feeling really hurt by fellow believers yet extremely loved and accepted by people who don’t even know God. I’ve been startled, because I have never ever been in this place with God. It has also made me upset with myself, because I was imagining an entirely different journey than what has played out.

When I saw this bouquet of flowers, it was crazy how I immediately thought of God. How something that could look dead could actually be so beautiful. That when we look at our lives, knowing all that we know about ourselves, and when we struggle to see anything good, God looks at us and sees something beautiful. He makes beauty out of my fumbles and failures. My questions and my upsets don’t faze Him. If I have a mom who can so confidently and lovingly listen to me and tell me that I am His and that He has a plan for me, then why wouldn’t God, the God I know and love, feel the very same.

I realized that these flowers were a perfect illustration of who I am and how I feel.  Rejections, disappointments, loss of loved ones, broken relationships, etc. don’t define me. My brokenness and my failures are the very thing that makes me whole and useful to God.

“You [insert name here] are fearfully and wonderfully made”.

God is meeting me where I am today. It’s not always the prettiest of encounters, and I’m not always willingly obedient, but we are wrestling through it. It’s not perfect, but I just know that despite the fact that I might feel dead or dried out, and even so very useless at times, God looks at me (and you, if you can relate), and says I am so very beautiful and even still, there is purpose and there is a plan.