Dear friends and family in Christ,
The year 2019 was the craziest, most life-altering year of my young life to date. Not only did I have the opportunity to travel overseas for the very first time, but I was also diagnosed with a very rare autoimmune disease, experienced God's call on my life to the mission field, and got married. None of these were necessarily expected in any way as I woke up on the morning of January 1, 2019 of that fateful year. But as I sit here now, four years later, on the other side of what seemed like absolute chaos, I can only give praise to my good Lord for every single part of it.
You will often hear people say, despite having walked through the most difficult and traumatizing of circumstances, that they would not change it for the entire world. As a young girl in my teen years, fighting my way through the twists and turns of a failing career in gymnastics, all while suffering with family problems and physical ailments often brought on by myself, I have to admit, I did not see how that could ever be possible.
You're telling me I have to let go of the pain? Let go of the hurt? Let go of everything I've ever known to wound me and somehow call it good?
At the beginning of 2019, I would have told you there was absolutely no chance of this. Even while on the mission field for the first time, I was somehow doubtful that God could ever bring anything good of my troubled past and the pain I somehow refused to let go. Letting go, after all, is impossibly hard at times. Letting go of broken dreams that once consumed you. Letting go of people you once saw as heros, and learning how to trust all over again - one day at a time, one minute, one second.
What changed for me was a strong conviction, eating at my heart like a form of relentless cancer I couldn't ignore. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't rest. I couldn't even seem to function the way I had always forced myself to in the past. I was a month and a half into my first ever journey on the Australian mission field, living with a family I hardly knew, and all the struggles from my past were heigtened to three times their usual weight. I felt buried, useless, and stuck in a relentless cycle of doubt that I couldn't quite escape.
But it was during this time that that the Lord began to tear me down and build me back up thorugh the realization and the dire need of a lost and dying world. All my life I had wanted nothing more than to make a differnce, and here I was with a chance to do just that, held back only by my own insecurities and pain.
"I can't be a missionary because I'm not good at speaking."
"I can't let go of my past because it's all I've ever known."
"I can't get married because I'll never be good enough."
"I CAN'T MOVE ON."
The thing about false ideas is that they don't always seem false at first. They have just enough truth hidden in their deceiving lines to keep you enslaved just a little bit longer.
It's true that I am not good at public speaking. It's true that my past is all I've ever known. It's true I will never be enough for my spouce, and it's true that I cannot move on by my own, faulty human will. But what false ideas tend to leave out is the power of God in a person's life. The power He gives us to move on, to let go, to change, and to burn the ships of our dreaded past and make way for a brighter, more fruitful future.
So, whatever pain you're holding tight to today, I pray you would understand that your struggle isn't truly the end of your story. As a song that came out the very year I walked through the majority of these issues says, "You can rise up from the dust and walk away. You can breath once again." Because it isn't the Lord's will that you stay buried in the darkness of your past no matter how oddly comfortable it may sometimes seem. He wants to walk with you through it, so that He can bring you into the light and help you share it with others who are struggling just the same.
It is for freedom that Christ has set us free - stand firm then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.
Galatians 5:1
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