I've got the joy joy joy joy down in my heart....

Today I realized that I am happier than I have ever been since coming home from Africa in 2007. It’s as if I’ve been waiting for a confirmation about my future…well, maybe I’ve always had the confirmation, but my faith has wavered a few times in the past couple of years and that has led to doubt and dare I say it, unbelief. Not unbelief in God. I have always believed in the love of Christ. I’ve just stumbled in my walk with Him. I’ve allowed my own issues to cloud what He had been doing in my life.

I continually wished for God to get me back to Africa. I prayed that he would hear the wrenching cry of my heart and bless me with another opportunity. I thought about Africa every day. It made me so incredibly frustrated when I felt like I was getting no answer. Little did I know that God was answering my prayer…but not in the ways I understood.

I went into therapy to deal with issues of abandonment, anger, fear of failure, overeating, rejection, guilt, and shame. I had struggled with most of these for many years, but only decided to really give therapy a try when my baby sister suggested I talk with her therapist. I reluctantly went in and told Rachel that I didn’t really want to be there. I was only there as a favor to my sister. Rachel said she understood and then we began to talk. Or should I say I began to talk. Rachel encouraged me and interjected when needed, but mostly allowed me to get some things out. 50 minutes felt like 5 and the session was over. After that I began to realize just how important it was to really focus on my emotional issues. I needed to be able to vent and discuss things with someone who wasn’t directly involved in my situations. Rachel and I have had a therapeutic relationship for about three years now and it is amazing for me to see the changes within.

While I still have issues with my health and still have a lot to talk through, I am beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I’m beginning to see that I’m not alone in this and that God has been holding my hand every step of the way. I am much more emotionally stable than I have ever been. I am able to recognize triggers and deal with them in a healthy way. I feel that I am now emotionally ready to deal with the physical stuff. And this is where Africa re-entered my life.

I got the distinct feeling that I needed to start looking for a mission’s trip in September of this year. A friend of mine had worked for and raved about Visiting Orphans. I went to their website to check it out and before I knew it I was emailing them for information. I was signed up for the trip a few short days later. It was an exhilarating, but weird feeling. Was this really happening?

The day I was scheduled to leave to meet up with team in DC, I had a slight panic attack. I all of a sudden realized I was going to be meeting up with 23 other people who had never really seen me before. My body image issues sky rocketed and I basically cried the entire way to the airport. What if the way I look shifted the way they thought of me? I always hate being the big girl. It is an awkward thing when flying. I’m worried I’m taking up too much space. I’m worried I’m going to get weird looks. It is just a hard thing for me sometimes. My parents prayed for me and hugged me before I decided to walk into the Tampa airport. They both told me it was ok to walk away from the trip if I felt like that’s what God wanted me to do. I wanted to see it through, but had to hold back tears the entire flight to Cincinnati. My next flight was from Cincinnati to DC and my anxiety hadn’t reduced. I sat down in my seat and did what I normally do: Made myself as small as possible by basically hugging my own body. I probably looked ridiculous. The woman sitting next to me looked over and said, “Hey, would you mind if we put this arm rest up? Would that be more comfortable for you?” I could have cried right there. That was such a sweet gesture. I gladly accepted and thanked her. She couldn’t have been more gracious. Then a guy sat down across the aisle from me. He looked at my shirt and asked if I was Claire (I was wearing the shirt Visiting Orphans had given us). I told him that I was Claire and he and I began to talk. Slowly but surely whatever had triggered my anxiety started to release it’s grip on me. I began to settle down. Gene was an incredibly nice father of two and made me feel so incredibly comfortable. This is how it was with every single person on the team. They were sweet and loving and pretty much some of the most amazing people I have ever met. The trip was a total success. I really feel like I will stay in touch with my amazing new friends. They are worth getting to know. They are worth every minute I get to spend with them. Each and every one has incredible stories and only God could know how much they all truly blessed me.

God knew this trip was right. He knew that I would see Him move in every step that I took. He knew that as I returned home I would spend time in prayer. In that half an hour, God told me to “Be Still and Know that I have Plans for you here. Just wait for me. Wait for my timing.” I have never felt such a peace in my entire life. I know that God will bring me back to Africa, but in the meantime, I want to follow His plan for me with no hesitation. As Francis Chan demonstrated, I want to stop clinging to my balance beam. I want to stand up and walk with confidence knowing that God is going to be there when I stumble. Where He Goes, I’ll Go. If that means doing what I can to support others on their journeys to Africa, then so be it. God is going to use me and it may not always be in the way I expect. And I am ready for whatever He throws at me.

Check out Francis Chan’s Balance Beam Video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LA_uwWPE6lQ

The West Wing is Forbidden

Last night my amazing roommate went with me to see Beauty and the Beast on the Ultrascreen in 3D. It was amazing just as I thought it would be. I bring this up because it made me think about two very specific things that I would like to share with you today.

First: while I adore Disney movies and have held on to the magic of them even as a 26 year old, I still see the movies differently then I did as a kid. At some point between childhood and adulthood a teeny-tiny thing called Skepticism creeps into our brains. As kids it is absolutely normal for someone to talk to a horse and simply know that it will answer. As adults, we know that is just silly. We question it and start to ask more questions from there. How on earth could an entire village wake up and sing in perfect harmony about a strange new girl that lives up on the hill? They all know the melody, the words…and while in my perfect world things like that would happen every day, this is not a “real” experience. It simply doesn’t happen (apart from flash mobs).

“What moments! What Holy Moments! To be in the presence of God, frightened and amazed at the same tiem! To feel as if you are in the presence of life itself, yet with your soul shaking in both terror and gratitude.”

So at what point do we start to look at God skeptically? At what point do we start to question the things that were so real to us as kids? Mike Yaconelli wrote a book called Dangerous Wonder a few years back. I have read it several times and would highly recommend it to anyone. The book deals with us losing the wonder of God at some point and talks about how we can get back to that moment. God is an amazing and complex being. He is to be loved and feared. We will never even begin to comprehend everything there is to know about God. I personally believe that if we knew everything, we wouldn’t need to have faith. There would just be facts and statistics about a God who created the entire Universe using only words. I would rather not have all the answers and stay in the world that means I have to let go of what I know and allow God to lead me.

“There is hope for me yet, because God won’t forget, all the plans he made for me. I have to wait and see. He’s not finished with me yet.”

The second thing I observed while watching the movie was that God doesn’t back away when we’ve disobeyed. We, of course, deal with the consequences of our actions, but God will never simply be done with us. This came to me as I watched Belle wander into the West Wing of the castle even though that was the one place she was specifically told not to go.

Something about humans makes us want to do the exact opposite when we are told we can’t do something. Maybe we are trying to prove ourselves or just want to rebel, but the instant the word NO comes into the picture, we want to say Yes. We could be told that we can eat anything in the world except for Brussel Sprouts. Anything else is ok, but Brussel Sprouts are forbidden. We may not even like Brussel Sprouts, but our first instinct is to go to the grocery store and buy as many Brussel Sprouts that we can find. What I love about God is that He doesn’t abandon us in our moments of weakness. He is still there when we stray. He is waiting for us when we wander from Him. He never closes his door. We have to deal with the consequences of disobeying him, but ultimately He welcomes us back to Him with arms wide open. That, to me, is true Love.

You Put The Light In Me

“My life before you, I was a flame burning down. I was burning out.

But you knew me better. For you there was never a doubt. Not since you gave me life. Something was different. I knew it the instant you put the light in me.

The spark the shot to the heart.

You are the hope that leads me out of the dark

You let your love shine down, so that the world could see you put the light in me.

The light, you put the light in me

The light, you put the light in me.”

I have spent a lot of years wondering what I am going to do with my life. I have so many ideas of what I could be doing in ten years. Maybe I’ll be a famous photographer. Maybe I’ll be married and have the 5 or 6 kids I’ve been dreaming of. Maybe I’ll be back in Africa. These are all definite possibilities. Why, you may ask? Because these are the desires of my heart and I have only recently understood that God not only knows the desires of my heart, He is the one who gave those desires to me.

I used to wonder why every single day of my life I thought of Africa. This has been happening ever since I moved back to the States in 2007. A huge part of my heart never returned with me. It will always be in Africa waiting for me to come find it again. This was such a hard concept for me to grasp because even though Africa filled my every thought, I knew God wasn’t telling me to go back. It wasn’t the right time. That frustrated me. Why would I think about it so often if I wasn’t supposed to be over there? Why did the thought of adopting kids keep popping up? Didn’t that mean I should do it right then?

I have had to spend a lot of time in therapy and in talks with God to really be able to even begin to grasp the concept of God’s timing. Most of the time I am frustrated by it. IF God loved me things would happen now. IF He knew what was best, why did I feel lost most of the time? I consistently put God in a box telling Him what he could or could not do. At the time it seemed rational, and now it seems silly.

I can now look back and see God was doing a work in me. He was giving me time to understand myself. He was waiting for me to understand that He truly has my life in His hands. As I sat in Kenya waiting to be picked up for my flight back home to the States, I prayed that my heart would be at peace. I had been worried that I wouldn’t want to come home; worried that I would abandon my responsibilities here. But God knew better. He knew I was ready for him to say, “Be Still and Know that I have plans for you here. But You must wait for Me. Wait for my timing.” And I was. The minute those words infiltrated my soul I felt completely content. I was ready to fully trust God and know that He had my life in his hands.

It is Well With My Soul

“Tragedy always comes. If it hasn’t come for you, it will. Not the losing-your-homework kind of or the having-to-flush-your-goldfish kind, but the kind that leaves you stripped. The kind that tears from you all the ideas about living you once believed untearable.”

My moment of tragedy struck in eighth grade. In a matter of three hours my life changed completely. I had never experienced death until that point and this was not your typical death. My youth pastor, a man I had been quite close to and who had been my example of Jesus, had killed himself. To make matters worse I later found out that he had been accused of molesting several boys within the youth group I attended. I couldn’t comprehend what was being said. How could this be true? Wasn’t God supposed to be good? Wasn’t he always with us? Didn’t he love us? I couldn’t even imagine how any of the things I had been taught about this God could be real. If they were, Dan wouldn’t have died. I wouldn’t feel alone. And bad things wouldn’t happen.

My parents tried to talk to me about it, but nothing would help. I had been a vibrant part of my church community. I was a part of the acting group, Kings Kids, for a year or so, I was always at youth group, and I had a fairly solid group of friends there. After this, I wanted nothing to do with church or with God. At the time I thought it was only Elmbrook that I didn’t want to be a part of, but as time went on I realized I wanted nothing to do with the whole Christian world. God was not who he said He was. I was finished.

I was forced to continue going to church. My parents would drop me off at Sunday School, but the minute they turned the corner I bolted up the other set of stairs and sat in the bookstore or library until it was time for me to meet up with my family. The only Christian influence I allowed to infiltrate my soul were the messages within the Veggie Tales series. I laugh about that now but at the time it’s the only the thing I paid attention to that had any mention of God.

This is the point of the story where most people will say they began to find things to fill the hole. Drugs, Sex, Smoking…etc. That is not how my story went. I didn’t find anything to fill the void. I didn’t think there was a void. It was surprisingly easy for me to just shut that part of my life down. For about a year, it felt like nothing was missing. And I was ok with that. I lost contact with a lot of my friends because I no longer attended youth group activities, but it didn’t seem to matter. I had friends at school. God wasn’t a factor in my every day decisions. He didn’t matter.

“When good is found and we embrace it with abandon, we embrace the Giver of it.”

A few months after everything happened, my parents decided they wanted to leave Elmbrook and try out a new church. At that point I didn’t care what we did. Leaving Elmbrook seemed to be the best option at the time. The memories always lingered and a fresh start seemed good. Honestly I didn’t think anything would change.

We arrived at Woodside Community Church one Sunday morning and to my horror, my large family of seven made up roughly half of the church. The one benefit to Elmbrook was that within the thousands of people who attended it was quite easy to hide out. You didn’t necessarily have to talk to anyone. This was not at all true of Woodside.

God had a different plan for me. While I had given up on Him, He never stopped pursuing me. He placed my family in a church filled with strong Christian Women who not only knew, but believed that God was good.

Two women in particular, Jeri Stupar and Donna Dixon, paid attention to me. At the time Jeri was teacher in Children’s ministry while her husband preached in the main service. I never wanted to sit in the service, so I escaped to children’s church even though at that point I was 14 years old. I listened to story after story week after week about God and while I adamantly believed it wasn’t sinking in, God was moving in my heart. The walls were slowly beginning to crumble. That hole that I had never felt became more of a presence in my life. Something was missing. All Donna had to do was make sure to talk to me each week. I don’t know if it was intentional, but I usually saw her and said hello. She would ask me about my week and I would probably mumble an answer. Little did she know how important those few words were each week.

I don’t remember exactly when it happened, but I know that at some point it finally hit me. Not only did I feel as though I was being pulled into the loving arms of God, but I felt like He was going to use me to do good in the world. I wrote a letter to my pastors and told them my story. I told them that I was ready to come back to God again. I was ready to cling to him, because nothing else seemed to work. I told them I was not sure how it would work, but I was done with being finished with God. I embraced the good of God and in doing so embraced Him.

“This is the Praise Habit. Finding God moment by revelatory moment, in the sacred and the mundane, in the valley and on the hill, in triumph and tragedy, and living praise erupting because of it.”

Since the death of Dan, others have passed away and I have struggled with many different kinds of tragedy. And in the initial moments of it happening I start to ask the normal questions….but then I remember what God has done for me. I remember that He is doing a work in me to help make the world a better place. He has such big plans for me and while tragedy is hard, it is in those moments that he holds us tighter. He walks next to us and holds our hands as we persevere through the darkness into his warm and everlasting light.

He is there in my tears as I hold special needs kids who are most likely ignored in Africa. He is there in my panic attacks as I begin to take a test. He is there in sickness, sadness, weariness, and pain. He is there always. And that is what is so amazing about my God. Today I leave you with the lyrics to a song and the link to an amazing instrumental version of the song. This is my prayer. That as I walk through life, good or bad, I will remember that God is with me and It Is Well in My Soul.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUFDGKDjiXI&feature=endscreen&NR=1

When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou has taught me to say,
It is well, it is well, with my soul.

Refrain:
It is well, with my soul,
It is well, it is well, with my soul.

Though Satan should buffet, though trials should come,
Let this blest assurance control,
That Christ has regarded my helpless estate,
And hath shed His own blood for my soul.

My sin, oh, the bliss of this glorious thought!
My sin, not in part but the whole,
Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more,
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!

For me, be it Christ, be it Christ hence to live:
If Jordan above me shall roll,
No pang shall be mine, for in death as in life
Thou wilt whisper Thy peace to my soul.

But, Lord, ’tis for Thee, for Thy coming we wait,
The sky, not the grave, is our goal;
Oh, trump of the angel! Oh, voice of the Lord!
Blessed hope, blessed rest of my soul!

And Lord, haste the day when my faith shall be sight,
The clouds be rolled back as a scroll;
The trump shall resound, and the Lord shall descend,
Even so, it is well with my soul.