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Tag: inspiration

Let It Go (and I don’t mean Frozen)

We’re nearly two months into the school year, and I’m sure for many of you, things are piling up. Homework, projects, extracurricular activities, work . . . not to mention that relationships take time, and so do hobbies (for myself, that’s writing and blogging). We complain that life is busy, and it is. When is it anything but? I know, I know, some seasons of life are busier than others, or they’re a different kind of busy, but the fact remains: there is always something going on.
Some of those things we have control over. Many things we do not. Things like school and work are musts. Relationships are the biggest things in life, and so we don’t want to sacrifice time spent building them. And if we neglect recreation for too long, we burn out. So what in the world do you do when life gets crazy and there’s just nothing you can cut out?*
*I would first examine if that’s really true, because chances are, there is something you can minimize or eliminate or postpone. Really.
Most of the time . . .

We. Get. Stressed.

And we blame the circumstances for our stress. But actually, those things that keep us busy, those deadlines and requirements and must-do activities, are just stressors. How you react to them is completely up to you.
Stress is actually low-level fear. It’s not a red-hot explosion of panic, but a constant drone in the back of your mind. It’s the constant nagging, the to-do list digging its claws in, the underlying buzz of thoughts saying, “Can I do this? Will I make it? I don’t know if I can. There’s this, this, this, and this to do today, and all of THIS to do tomorrow. I don’t have enough to give. I’m going to disappoint people. I’m going to disappoint myself. I’m failing. I’m buried. I’m overwhelmed. I’M STRESSED.”


Something I’m learning is that I need to let go of the things I have no control over. Sure, there’s a lot I can change–I can adjust my schedule, I can work on my beliefs about a situation so that I don’t stress out as easily–but there’s always lots in life that I just have no control over. So there’s no point in freaking out about those things.

So what if there’s an accident on the way to school and it’s slowing down traffic, making me late for class? That’s an extenuating circumstance. If I gave myself sufficient time to get to school, and something like that makes me late, that’s not my fault. So in the middle of the backed-up traffic, I don’t need to panic.

So what if a customer issue comes up at work and I don’t have time to finish the cleaning project my manager gave me? A more important issue came up, so the project will have to wait for another time. And that’s okay. I don’t need to feel guilty about it.

So what if you have to go to school or work or any other number of obligations? Yes, it limits your free time, but you’ll just have to accept it and work around it. Don’t put needless pressure on yourself to accomplish more than you have time for.

When you brush all of that aside, your mind is suddenly a lot freer to start focusing on what you can do, and what you do have control over. It’s a lot less stressful. A lot more freeing.

So relax, friend. Life may be full of stressors right now, but it doesn’t mean you need to be stressed. Shift your focus, release what you can’t control, and just figure out what the next step is. That’s all.

You’ve got this.

Escaping the Shame Storm

In the last post, I promised I’d share the high ropes story. So while the memory is still fresh, here we go . . .

Last month, my college classmates and I (sixteen of us in total, plus our two teachers) went to camp for two days to solidify our team and get hands-on experience in working towards goals and taking leadership. This took the form of a blind follow-the-leader activity, trust falls (eeek!), and getting the entire team through a “spiderweb” of rope without touching the web.

That was just the first morning.

During the first afternoon, we took turns climbing the climbing wall and going ziplining, which I mentioned in my last Subplots and Storylines post. Climbing up the fifty-foot ziplining pole was a little freaky, but sitting up on the platform while the facilitator clipped my harness to the zipline was worse. I was sitting on the edge, legs dangling over empty space, and the tops of the trees looked too close.

one of my classmates, the first to go up

I took a deep breath and tried to push off, but froze. I tried again–same thing. “Can you push me off?” I asked the facilitator.

“Do you want me to?” His voice sounded mildly amused. “I think you can do it.”

I guess being reminded that I was capable was what I needed, because I took another deep breath, squeezed my eyes shut, and launched off, an unbidden scream bursting out of me. Half a second later, my eyes were open and I was zooming down the line, having the time of my life. The end came too soon.

After ziplining, I conquered the climbing wall. Like I mentioned in the S&S post, I managed to get halfway up the difficult side–after slipping off and dangling by my harness a couple of times–but by then my arms were sore and I was ready to come down.

But I didn’t want to give up, so I then successfully climbed the easier side, though I did slip once more on the way up. Thank goodness for the person belaying me.

So you can imagine I was feeling pumped and proud of myself and ready to take on the world!

That night, my room’s heater was blasting way too high, leading to a less-than-restful sleep. The morning before camp, I had woken up early, so all in all, I entered day two of camp with low energy levels.

After breakfast, we all headed to the high ropes course. There were different challenges, such as the Giant’s Ladder, a series of wooden beams with each one spaced further apart than the one before. I helped belay for a team of four taking on that particular challenge. There is no way I’m going up there, I thought to myself, content to hold the rope, keep an eye on my climber, and ensure her safety.

An hour later, after the team had reached the top and come back down, everyone who hadn’t had a chance to participate in a challenge course yet was rounded up, including myself. A facilitator told me to join the Giant’s Ladder team, but I said no, if I had to do any of them, I’d rather do Team All Aboard: a pole with a small, square platform on top, where three or four people had to stand, link arms, and lean backwards all together.

So I harness up and started climbing the pole. Some of my teammates, having seen my reluctance, shouted encouragement from below. My belayer instructed me to climb around the pole once I got partway up, in order to keep my line from tangling with those of the two girls already up there.

So I climbed up the ladder. Onto the first few staple footholds of the pole. I looked up at the platform above my head. I adjusted my grip. I closed my eyes. Suddenly the thought of reaching the top was overwhelming. I could barely think of taking the next step. It’s just like climbing up to the zipline, Tracey. This shouldn’t be hard.


I’ve climbed a high ropes course before, about three years ago. It was terrifying and a lot harder than what I was currently embarking on, but I’d made it. Logically, this one shouldn’t be a problem.

“Is it okay if just two people go up instead of three?” I called. “Can I come down?”

The facilitator looked up at me. “Why do you want to come down, Tracey?” he asked.

I fought back irrational tears. “I’m just tired. No motivation.”

“It’s okay. You did well.”

And so I climbed back down. Taking my helmet off with trembling hands, I avoided gazes and nodded when classmates told me I had done a good job, I had stepped out of my comfort zone, way to go.

As I walked away, one of my teachers approached. “Hey, no one’s disappointed in you.”

“Yeah, except for me,” I said, and started crying.

My other teacher joined us. “Tracey, what is excellence?”

I wiped tears away and tried to tamp down another wave. “Doing the best you can with what you have, I know.”

Later on–after a hug and some encouraging words–everyone gathered for a debrief to share what we’d learned and accomplished. As classmates talked about conquering fears and depending on each other, another wave of guilt washed over me. You could’ve pushed past it. You could’ve taken one more step, and then one more, and one more, and made it to the top. Why didn’t you?

When it came to my turn, and I forced out a few brief words that did a poor job of veiling my guilt, the female facilitator debriefing with us had something powerful to say.

When things don’t go as planned or we fail to accomplish the goal we’ve set out for ourselves, it’s easy to give into a “shame storm,” to beat ourselves up about it. But we can’t do that. It’s damaging. It’s not true.

I tried to quell the storm raging inside of me, but my teacher (the first one) saw the look on my face as we headed back to the main lodge.

“You heard what she said?” he asked me. “Don’t give in. Don’t give in to the shame.”

The whole experience stuck with me long after we left camp. I do tend to be hard on myself, to replay my failures, to beat myself up for making a mistake . . . or even just for doing less than I expected of myself.

[source]

But it’s time to stop thinking that way. Those thoughts are whip lashes, they’re chains. Destructive, imprisoning. It’s time to stop giving in to the shame, time to realize I did the best I can, and that’s all I can do, and that’s okay. I can learn from those experiences, yes, but then I need to leave it there and walk away. I don’t have to carry it with me.

I’m sharing this story because I’m pretty certain you have your own storm of shame, thundering in your ears and lashing you from the inside. Others may not see that you’re bleeding, but you know it. You suffer that barrage of thoughts saying, “Why didn’t you make it? What’s wrong with you? You could have, should have–didn’t. You failed, therefore you are a failure.

You know what I say to that? Yes, I failed, but that means I’m a tryer.

I’m still trying to believe that I did not actually fail at the high ropes course, that I really did do the best I could with what I had. What I had was not much, but I strapped my harness on. I climbed the ladder. I started up the pole. So I didn’t reach the top and complete the challenge. I still challenged myself. It’s not about completion.

Listen to me, friend. Whether it was a true failure or you simply did the best you could with what you had, and it wasn’t enough–it does not define you. Accept that, learn from it, and move on. It’s the moving on part that’s really hard, but please try.

As I slowly worked through the tangle of thoughts and feelings after the ropes course, and I began to let go of the guilt, I was surprised to feel lighter. Surprised that I was still having fun and enjoying my day, when hours ago I’d been crying. And I started to feel guilty for not feeling more guilty. But I shut that voice up. Not perfectly–some whispers got through–but I will always look back on that day as my battle against the shame storm.

I hope that one day I can say truthfully that the storm comes less often. That when it does, I can let it go and see the waves calm. I want to walk on those waters a conqueror, with my identity anchored not in my successes or failures, but in the One who loves me through them both.

Is Our Writing Needed? (a response post)

I’ve never written a response post before, so today will be a first. The lovely, spitfire authoress Jenny Freitag (who penned Plenilune, a book I want to read one day) over at The Penslayer wrote a post the other day called Why NOT Being a Prolific Writer is a Godsend. Now, I agree with/am inspired by a number of Jenny’s posts, but something she said in this one burrowed under my skin and stuck there. So I’m pondering it in the form of a blog post.

The Lord doesn’t need you + you don’t know what you’re talking about. If you possibly think you know enough to “write” for the Lord, you know nothing of the smallness of man nor the immensity of God. Do as Job did, and put your hand over your mouth. Be humble. God has left his written witness. My fiction – your fiction – none of it is necessary.

I confess, I blinked at my screen and did a double take at that first phrase: the Lord doesn’t need you. I won’t presume to know all the thoughts and intentions behind Jenny’s statement, but I’m bothered enough to want to unpackage and sift this for myself. Cool?

God is infinite. Infinitely complete, infinitely self-sufficient. So of course He doesn’t need me. Need is felt only by finite beings. He has and is everything. The creation of the world and of mankind was not done out of a vacancy of God’s. It was not because He was somehow lacking. No, He spoke creation into being because He wanted to. It was what He desired, and it brought Him pleasure.

But the Lord I’m spending my life getting to know does want me. After all, He brought me into existence. And every page of the Bible is evidence that He wants to love me, wants me to love Him back, and basically wants to have every piece of myself. And He shows me the way to live a life that builds His Kingdom. One way I can do that is through my writing.

If you possibly think you know enough to “write” for the Lord, you know nothing of the smallness of man nor the immensity of God.

Maybe this is just arguing semantics, but by “writing for the Lord” do you mean “writing in service of the Lord” or “writing because He can’t speak loud enough on His own?”

“For the Lord” in the sense of a lesser being serving a higher one–or in the sense of fulfilling someone’s lack? I can bake muffins for you because I like you and want to give you something that will bring you pleasure, or I can bake muffins for you because you can’t/are too busy/don’t know how/don’t want to.

All it takes is for me to look up at the stars on a dark night to recognize the smallness of man and the immensity of God–only a scrap of it, you understand, because my finite mind cannot truly comprehend the infinite. But if I say that I write for the Lord, I don’t say so under any delusion that He somehow needs me to. As if His plan would fall apart if I didn’t.

And yet! And yet . . . one of the greatest mysteries of all is how a God so indescribably powerful would choose to give such a measure of authority to earthen vessels, human beings. How He would choose to do His work not with a bang and a flash of lightning and an instantaneous solution, but through the slow, painful process of moving in and through mankind. Through flawed, limited people. Yes, through me.

Does He need me? Isn’t He capable of accomplishing whatever He wants no matter what I do? Yes. And also no.

This mystery confounds me. It’s like prayer. He doesn’t need us to tell Him what we’re thinking and what we need, because He already knows. But for the purpose of relationship and the maturing of our faith, He wants us to pray. There’s a big difference between needing and wanting. I don’t think we realize the full extent of our prayers’ impact. Prayer is needed.

None of it is necessary.

 I see where you’re coming from–you’re speaking to those of us whose heads have gotten too big, those of us who pressure ourselves to write, write, write, because there are SOULS TO SAVE. Those of us who stagger under the unrealistic pressure we’ve heaped upon our own shoulders. I get that.

But every mile of road has two miles of ditch. The opposite swing of the pendulum is one which causes us to throw up our hands and weigh our writing too lightly. If my writing is not necessary, then why do it? It’s too much work and pain and bloodshed to press on if it doesn’t matter anyway. (But there’s the rub–maybe it really is unnecessary, and yet it still matters. Maybe it’s something I don’t have to do, but when I do it, it makes a difference. Or maybe it is necessary. I’m not 100% sure.)

This post is all over the place . . . But that’s the shape of my pondering, so I won’t apologize.

I think this has become more of a spinoff than a response post, because Jenny’s aim was one thing and my thoughts have veered off on another that’s rather tangential. She was speaking to relieve the pressure we place on ourselves to produce copious amounts of story, and here I am talking about the necessity-or-not of writing and whether God needs it or wants it of us. (Sorry, Jenny.)

For me, writing falls under the umbrella of living well, of making use of everything God has given me. For me, writing is one means of discovering Him and in the process, sharing His light with those who may read my words. Do I feel worthy of such a task? Not at all. But God seems to have a penchant for using the unworthy. If I can be an instrument in His hands, that’s incredibly humbling and brings me such joy. If He can shine through the chinks in my stories, then I will keep penning those tales.

A Monument of Praise

Times of high emotion imprint us with our strongest memories, good or bad. I don’t know about you, but the hard times of life leave a lingering aftertaste. Perhaps it’s an unfortunate human tendency to gravitate toward the negative, and so we have to work at focusing on the positive.

Remember Old Testament stories of how God came through for His people? Whenever He delivered them, they would build an altar to commemorate that place and time.

So Joshua called together the twelve men he had chosen–one from each of the tribes of Israel. He told them, “Go into the middle of the Jordan, in front of the Ark of the Lord your God. Each of you must pick up one stone and carry it out on your shoulder–twelve stones in all, one for each of the twelve tribes of Israel. We will use these stones to build a memorial. In the future your children will ask you, ‘What do these stones mean?’ Then you can tell them, ‘They remind us that the Jordan River stopped flowing when the Ark of the Lord’s Covenant went across.’ These stones will stand as a memorial among the people of Israel forever.” (Joshua 4:4-7, NLT)

This is just one of many examples of God’s people doing something to celebrate, honor, and remember miracles He had done.

What do I do when He comes through for me?

When light bursts into my dark valley, do I merely gasp in relief and proceed to move on with life, or do I pause to thank my Father?

I know He has answered prayers. I know He has pulled me through storms. But if someone were to ask me what God has done for me, I would have to stop and think.

What if I were to consciously celebrate those times? What if I were to play them over in my mind as my soul sang its gratitude? What if I did that daily?

It’s so important to encourage ourselves in the Lord, as David did. Life presents us with many difficult times. There’s no way to sugarcoat that. But in those rocky places, we can proclaim our Father’s faithfulness by remembering how He has delivered us in times before. We can build altars, not with stones but with thoughts. Not in religious recitation, not out of bondage. It’s taking the time to pull out those memories and smile at them again the way we smile at the knickknack on the dresser that reminds us of that wonderful vacation or the letter that reminds us of a dear friend. The edges are frayed from handling; it is a frequent gesture.

What if I made this a habit? A habit of praise–how beautiful would that be? How much peace would that bring? It would build faith and confidence like nothing else. “I know I’m facing something hard right now, but look what God did for me last time and all the times before. I was never abandoned, I never went hungry, He was always on time.”

Every time we ponder His faithfulness, it’s like adding another stone to the altar. The more we rejoice, the higher it builds, and the more naturally our thoughts will turn to this goodness again. This way of life is one of overflowing peace. I want that.

What we habitually think about affects our entire perception, which in turn determines how we experience life. I know that when I start a day mulling over the problems and negative things going on, my day will follow suit. But how wonderful would it be to enlarge our experience of God’s greatness and love? To focus on that instead, and begin to recognize it at every turn?

Let’s begin today. Let’s begin right here. If you feel comfortable doing so, please share something God has done in your life. There’s nothing so encouraging as realizing that what He did for someone else, He can do for me. For you. For any one of His beloved children. I’ll be adding a few comments of my own.

And let’s not stop here. Let’s begin to form a habit of thankfulness and praise. Let’s build altars and return to them again and again.

Oh, magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt His name together. (Psalm 34:3, NKJV)