{Be Real} Stay
It’s been a long and busy season, and that day my heart needed a release. I found myself driving down the same road. I felt it like a homecoming; a fresh wind falling on my face through the open window. I walked down the same path, and with the swift movement of my feet, the rhythm came right back. The scenery of the lake trail was familiar, and my heart sighed into the scenery, it fell right into His peace. I looked at the lake and I saw the remnants of the end of summer, waterlilies in bloom.
It had been so “busy” for months – that I couldn’t help but long for the coming season, when everything would slow down like my heart did in that moment. I started anticipating what’s ahead – but who ever really knows what’s ahead?
It’s easy to start living not in the season we’re in but in the one we wish in, the one we dream up.
And faithfulness whispers to us, stay right here. Stay on the path.
As the road stretches ahead and we start to move, we’re also called to stay.
It’s only in the staying and in the resting that we know what God is working in us and through us. It’s only here that we see the purpose He’s yielding in our hearts.
Sometimes that process is painful. Sometimes the season you’re in feels like it’s mucky and it’s showing you who you really are underneath – all of the scars and the fears and the brokenness, the things you wish were different about yourself – come bubbling right up.
And fight or flight – we want to run. We want to leave and move on. Time for a new season.
But if we let Him touch us with His gentleness, God whispers into those deep crevices in our hearts, understands us deeper than we understand ourselves.
“O LORD, You have searched me and known me.
You know my sitting down and my rising up;
You understand my thought afar off.
You comprehend my path and my lying down,
And are acquainted with all my ways…”(Psalm 139:1-3)
I have read those verses a million times, and found so much comfort in the fact that God knows us, so deeply. He knows our ways. But He also knows our path. It says here that God comprehends it.
We don’t need to be any other place but right here. Here is the place where God wants to meet us. Right in the mess.
It’s hard to stay in the mess sometimes, whatever that may look like for you this season. For me, it’s been the notion of being “busy” all the time – caught up in activities and work and feeling like I haven’t had time to breathe. Feeling like all the busy is distancing me from God’s still voice at the center of my heart.
It’s been easy to buy into the notion that when the season is over, it will all feel better. Better in the next thing.
But God isn’t in the next thing, He’s right here with us in THIS thing.
And messes – what if we decide not to run from them, but embrace them instead?
One of my favorite quotes about messes comes from Anne Lamott:
“What people somehow (inadvertantly, I’m sure) forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here.”
Messes are the canvases where we meet our truest selves and God.
It’s easy to wish away the mess, but to take time to investigate it, dig deep, and see beauty there? This takes work, grace, and compassion. It takes a gentleness that our hearts desperately need.
If you’re a cleaner-upper type person, like me, it’s easy to be hard on yourself about your mess and your season. It’s easy to wish things were different or you were more equipped or had more time or more _______ (you fill in the blank). But know this today:
Where God is, there is always MORE.
There is more for you this season. More grace, more favor, more joy, more peace, more hope. You don’t need to move one step for that deeper knowing of the more He has in store for you.
Let’s keep being faithful to God and gentle with our hearts this season.
Stay the path, sweet girl. There’s more.
“My foot has held fast to his steps;
I have kept his way and have not turned aside.”
-Job 23:11
