...so that we may delight in your will, and walk in your way, to the glory of your name...

i know, i know. it's been forever since i've written anything. i have more unfinished posts in the que than i can count right now. but today i find writing necessary to survival, so here i am. a lot has changed since i last wrote in here, but recent events in particular have laid heavy on my heart and i am finding it an almost hourly struggle to breathe out what needs to be, what needs to stay at the foot of the cross.

isn't it humbling to find that you are more broken than you ever thought you were when given the choice to honor God, or intentionally ignore him? my knee jerk reaction in the midst of humility is to say "this isn't me! i'm better than this." but the truth is i'm not...at all. these are the places we find ourselves in our most raw form. the one we'd rather not look at in the mirror. the one that causes others to hurt. the hope though is that i desire more than this, painfully so. i don't want to admit to the apple in my hand, but i make a mockery of my salvation and the grace afforded to me by beating myself up with it.

it's so much easier to pretend that we are competent, self sufficient, independent when we are not actually faced with denying God. i have been coming to realize the pride in these false senses but attempting to balance that with God's truth. that i am called Beloved by name. i am His daughter. that unconditionally His love is waiting for and surrounding me. that grace radically abounds for me when i put my trust in Him. that i am not defined by my mistakes, and what He desires for me is to confess, lay it down, love Him and move forward. sometimes, on days like today, my heart actually breaks for how much i desire to follow in the way of Christ, how much i love Him, how much i desire to live into the purpose He has for me, how much i want to honor Him with every breath He's given me and knowing i will fall short and knowing that is life. our broken and redeemed lives in all their messiness.

the good news is though, that it is in these places of rawness, humility, dependence, 'at the bottom of the well' as patty griffin says, that Christ is able to come and fill the gaps, redeem the past, and grow us into the children of God He desires us to be. i spend a lot of my free time babysitting for a 9 month old little boy named nicholas. he has started to be able to, if i hold his hand, walk little steps, sometimes stumbling. if my hands weren't wrapped around his he would surely fall. but with my support, or his parents, he's given the hope and encouragement to make another step, and then another after that and slowly he will learn more about how to walk. this is how i see myself stumbling towards Christ. as anne lamott says, the pace of most things in life, especially as a follower of jesus looks a lot like clumsily learning how to waltz.

slow..slow..quick.quick. slow..slow.quick.quick.

somewhere in the middle of that, grace moves in.

and assurance of that is what i'm praying to rest on today, and wake up with tomorrow.

amen.