Bravehearted Beauty

PINIT

Hello Bravehearted Beauties. It’s been a long, LONG time. Sixteen months since I’ve logged in and written here. I wasn’t sure I’d ever return. {Pretty sure I’ve said that before!} So why am I here today? Because there’s always a story behind the beauty. I don’t just go on solo vacations, chasing waterfalls and posting pictures because I think it’s fun. I actually don’t like solo vacations very much at all right now. But I love beauty, and I hunt for it because I need to hear the voice of God in the midst of my brokenness. Psalm 19 says all of creation pours forth speech every single day. I believe that with all of my heart! I sensed God’s presence and heard His voice for the first time when I was 12 years old, on top of a mountain at a summer camp in Arkansas, overlooking a valley. To this day, I turn to the beauty of creation for more of God.

Yesterday, I tried to confine my story to a tidy little Instagram post. Sometimes it works. But today, words are welling up stronger than I’ve known in over a year. I’ve felt the rumblings of this for months, but didn’t know where to enter in and begin again. And then it happened. Today is the day to sit down and let my story take up more space. At a certain point, not writing, or not speaking your truth, can start to do more harm than good. And honestly, I wasn’t just not writing. I was running away from writing. Running away from the very thing God made me to do, and that, my friends, never leads to life.

God made me a writer. And when I write, I feel His pleasure. Adapted from one of my favorite quotes of all time: “God made me fast. And when I run, I feel His pleasure.” Olympic runner Eric Liddell coined those words. I came to know them through Chariots of Fire decades ago, and a dear friend reminded me of them today. I’m slow as molasses and don’t feel any pleasure running, but we all have our own thing. And when we do that thing God made us to do, we’re in the sweet spot…feeling His pleasure and feeling more like our truest selves.

Back to the image of a waterfall and what it speaks to me today. In my quiet time away from the blog, the words of my story have been gaining strength, swelling and gathering into larger stories that can’t be contained or silenced. The stories begin small, somewhere way upstream, rambling slowly and not drawing much attention until they reach a horizon line of sorts. And then like rushing water that falls over a hard rocky edge, thundering, crashing, smoothing, softening, and eventually pooling peacefully in deeper places, so are my words. I have thundered at God in private and have written a few snippets publicly, but I haven’t let the river of words, or the story, run freely. There comes a time, and only you and God can know it, when the words of your story gather together…to be told. And that doesn’t mean every detail is shared all the time, but it means that over time, the entirety of your broken and beautiful story finds its voice.

So if God made me a writer, and I believe in the power of bravely sharing our stories, why haven’t I written anything here over the last 16 months? And only sparsely the year before that?

I didn’t like my story. More bluntly, I’ve been angry about my story. And not just angry about all the brokenness, but angry at the One I’ve trusted to redeem it. I’ve only recently been honest enough with myself and with God to let that anger rise and to give it a voice. And in case you haven’t found this out for yourself: God can handle your anger. And more than that, He loves you every bit as much when you’re dropping f-bombs as He does when you’re singing His praises. That’s just the truth of how He loves. That’s still hard for my old, performance-driven self to believe at times, but I’ve thrashed against God and tested Him every bit as much as He’s tested me. And He’s still here, standing just as close, looking at me as tenderly and lovingly as ever. If anything has changed, it’s me, not Him. {And I needed to change, so painful as it is, I’m willing to accept whatever change will heal and transform me into all I’m meant to be.}

So there’s the anger, and it deserves a voice. But I’ve learned that anger is a bodyguard emotion. When you find the courage to deal honestly with your anger at the door, you’ll gain access to deeper emotions…the ones we try to hide from others, and even from ourselves. For me, the most prevalent and pervasive emotions behind anger are fear and shame. These two bullies have kept me silent for most of my life. I’ve tried to outdo them with perfectionism, performance, control, a clean house…anything to bring order to my inner chaos. But all of that was like trying to hold a beach ball under water. Fear and shame can’t be pushed down forever. In fact, the harder you try to suppress them, the louder they become. The more you try to control them, the more control they gain over you.

Why are fear and shame so powerful and prevalent in our stories? That would take an entire book to answer. I’m not going to write the next book on shame or fear today, nor am I going to tell you every reason why they exist in my story, but I’ll tell you this: our stories make no sense until we get honest about our fear and shame…where they’re rooted, what drives them, and how they drive us in our daily life and relationships.

And this, my friends, is where I’m going to lean hard on what I know is true about the healing power of speaking our stories. This is where I’m going to drop down into deeper waters and give voice to the parts of my story I haven’t liked, and haven’t wanted to put into words. Two words need to be spoken…for my own healing, and maybe for yours.

Abuse and divorce.

I feel like I just dropped a heavy load. I could almost hear it hit the ground. There’s no way to lay those words down quietly. And no way to make sense of my story without them. Some will read those words and scatter. Some will be curious. Some don’t yet realize it’s their story, too. And some know exactly what I’ve been carrying. Abuse has been a part of my story for a long time. A lot longer than I realized. Divorce became a part of my story in the last year. My fear and shame are rooted in abuse and have been exposed more deeply through divorce. I’ve thrashed hard against these two words. I don’t like them. And didn’t want them to be part of my story. Sometimes I’ve visualized them in big, red, capital letters, stamped across my story like some kind of cancellation of God’s promises. As if to say there will be no restoration and redemption for me and my story. BUT GOD. He’s not finished. My story isn’t over.

For decades, I’ve carried the shame that abuse was my fault. And lived in fear that if anyone knew…oh, if anyone KNEW! For decades, I accepted the blame abusers placed on me and swallowed the shame the enemy heaped on me. I absorbed it down deep like every abuse survivor does. And tried to make my life look better on the outside than I felt on the inside. {Hello Houston house…meticulously perfect, clean and orderly!} Then I moved to a farm, started to embrace the mess, and could no longer keep up the exhausting performance it took to hide the pain and shame of abuse from myself and others. My body could no longer hold it, my brain could no longer forget it, my spirit couldn’t thrive in it, and my heart couldn’t heal in it.

Recovery from abuse felt hard enough. Then came divorce. Not at ALL the story I thought God was writing. Not the rescue I thought God was arranging when He spoke Psalm 91 over me in 2015. Not the outcome I imagined when we entered into a “therapeutic separation” in 2016, not the end I expected when he filed for divorce in 2017. I didn’t see it coming. A year later, I see things I couldn’t see then. Hard things I need to see to become all I’m meant to be. But I’m not here to unpack that story today. I’ve got two brave and beautiful daughters who are in this story, too. And I want to honor them, as well as their relationship with their dad, the best I can while also giving voice to my own story. Trusting God to direct me in the details, the timing and the sharing of my story. And to give me courage when I’m afraid.

I will say this: I dared to believe in the restoration of my marriage even beyond the signing of divorce papers. I wanted the miracle. I hoped against hope. Because that’s how God made me, and I like that about me. But in the last year, a veil was lifted. And I began to tell the truth to myself. I began to trust myself again. I stopped accepting the blame and started coming out from under the heavy cloak of shame. And while I’m still carrying a lot of fear and anxiety in my body, I’m doing weekly work to release that fear, partnering with God to heal my body through trauma sensitive yoga. {More on that to come. Feeling a very strong call to complete my certification and offer this kind of trauma healing to others along with healing prayer. Maybe even right here on my farm.}

My story isn’t the one I would have chosen. It’s not the one I wanted to write. I wanted my broken marriage to be restored. I wanted to love and be loved all the days of my life, by the same man I said yes to 20 years ago. I wanted to heal together, rock on the porch together, tell our miracle stories together. And I wanted my daughters to see the restoration promises of God come true right before their very eyes, while they lived under our roof. That was my idea of a good redemption story. But that’s not the story I’m living. And before you tell me anything can happen, let me tell you this: you are right, but some things don’t need to happen again. So unless it’s a whole new thing, I don’t want that old thing back. I’ve been rescued and delivered from abuse, and I know that one day, I will be rescued and delivered from the pain of divorce. So today, and everyday, my challenge is to show up for the story I’m living, the one God is writing. And to join Him in the kind of storytelling that brings healing to my heart and maybe even yours.

So here I am. Showing up. Being brave with my story. And hoping it will help you be brave with yours, too.

With all of my bravely broken and beautiful heart,