Knowing yourself, where you have come from, and what has shaped your character is essential to a healthy mental, emotional, and spiritual life. It is also gut-wrenching. It takes more time than you think, and much more effort and honesty than you’ll ever truly be comfortable with. And you can’t rush it.
It goes easier if your mind is wired to look at the same situation or memory from several different perspectives and hold them all lightly in your mind’s eye at one time, to let the truest one rise. To let God point out that the one way you WANT to remember a situation is probably not the whole story, and the way you think it happened is probably just the version that paints you in the most flattering lighting.
Conversely, some memories that carry shame don’t tell the story of how you were manipulated there by someone else, and all you can remember is how YOU were culpable in that moment, without remembering how someone else was off to the side, either knowingly or unwittingly adding to the situation that blew up in your face, and you thought was all your fault.
For both these situations, there is grace in the arms of a Father who’s Son died so that our hearts could live freely and breathe lightly. He IS the abundant life He offers.
We can forgive and also let ourselves be forgiven. This makes heavy hearts light. I often find myself reliving past bad decisions, awkward or hurtful conversations, ridiculous mistakes, and wrapping myself in a straitjacket made up of past regrets, even if I’ve already dealt with them and given them to God. I keep trying to yank them back out of His hands. It’s a temptation especially now that I’m writing more, and delving down back into situations that I need healing in, and realizing how I need to see myself and my own weaknesses in truth. Thankfully, God’s good at sifting that out and making it clear. He says “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him…” (James 1:5, ESV) and then believe He has given it to us, and actually USE that wisdom. Furthermore, He’s the only one who can do it fully, honestly, and with grace and gentleness, so that what needs to be removed or rearranged isn’t ripped out of your heart, but surgically removed and your heart stitched back up to heal completely. The scar left? So we don’t forget the lesson and the growth.
Thinking about all this in light of what and how I want to write, I could feel the struggle in my soul of “Why even figure out an audience? Anything you’ll say is just going to be second hand information that you won’t say as eloquently as the first person who said it, anyway.” followed closely by, “You can’t possibly think, in the MULTITUDE of women writing, that you have anything that would stand out or speak to anyone as anything but white noise,” and it’s easy to forget that even though I’m looking at my areas of growth and journey right now in light of what kind of audience that could serve, I really am not going to be writing JUST for them… if I’m not writing to step up into my own soul and also to lean into the arms of Jesus, then I’ve lost the plot. If I look at the waves, or even the other disciples surrounding me, I’ll sink like a stone and be useful to no one.
So I will keep going. I won’t stop writing publicly. I won’t stumble over the vast array of information that tells me that if I pursue writing seriously, a lot of it will be out of my control and throw me into work that is NOT writing… I will take ONE step at a time. I won’t worry about what my scribbling will look like in a year, a season, or even a week. I won’t worry about if I should switch my web hosting or blogging platform in this moment. I will just write the next blog post. I will craft the next Instagram post. I will think about what God is whispering to me through his Word and through the Holy Spirit and through people beside me.
Eventually I will find the right tune, the right note, and someone, somewhere, will respond to what I’m playing in a way they couldn’t to anything anyone else was saying. My melody will find sympathetic resonance with someone else’s thoughts and start them humming, too.