God Bless This Mess(23)
Earlier I mentioned that I had the best babysitter, ever: Casey Rae. I also mentioned that she was going to school to become a nurse. Well, after watching me go through this cancer scare and supporting me as I went through surgery, Casey was inspired to change her focus. She decided she wanted to work in the oncology unit for pediatrics, and that is exactly what she is doing to this day! She spends her days saving children’s lives, and she’s a warrior for these kids. She’s the exact same wonderful caregiver she was for me for all of her patients now. She lives her life for other people and impacts people in so many positive ways. Who would’ve ever imagined that something as scary as cancer could be something that inspires another person to change their career, and then touch so many people because of it?
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After going through all of that, I basically became our family’s spiritual leader. I tried to get them to say grace at every meal. I got my mom to take Patrick and me to church regularly on Sundays, and Wednesday nights, too. My mom started teaching Sunday school, and eventually my dad started coming along with us.
In middle school I attended youth group and started carrying notebooks into church, writing down what the pastor said and my thoughts about the sermons, and how they lined up with what I was feeling or what I was going through at home. I guess that’s really where I first started journaling, even if it wasn’t the standard kind of journaling, like keeping a diary, that people think of when they first hear the word.
But keeping church as a regular part of my routine wasn’t easy. The older I got, the more I got into competitive dance, and a lot of those events started happening on Sundays. That cut into my church routine. Wednesday practices would become much more important, and that would cut into my youth nights, too.
Pretty soon dating, and beauty pageants, and the self-imposed pressure to keep my grades up, along with my dedication to winning and projecting the image I wanted to project, all seemed to get in the way of my devotion to God. Praying and writing down sermons seemed to take a back seat to everything else.
Given some of the troubles I had in my high school years and beyond (which I’ll talk about in the upcoming chapters), I wish I had put my faith ahead of all that other stuff. Maybe it would have given me more peace, like it did when I was eleven. And that’s something I’ve thought about more and more in these last couple of years.
How much easier would all the difficult periods and circumstances of my life have been if I had walked into them with the simplicity of knowing that Jesus had me?
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It’s hard to stay there, isn’t it? It’s just so hard to hold on to that.
That sense of peace that my faith brings is so great, and yet, as a teenager and even more so as a young adult, I’ve found that I’m only able to get waves of it. I struggle to give in to it and fully trust it.
Why?
Why is it such a struggle, when I know that I’m better off when I feel the peace of the Lord on me? Why do I struggle to remember the power of faith when I’m freaking out and going through all sorts of things in my life that are painful or uncomfortable? Even in the middle of those moments, I know way back in the back of my mind and deep down in my heart that I’m going to be okay—because Jesus has me. But it sure doesn’t feel like it sometimes!
Oftentimes when I need faith the most, I find myself turning away. I get so busy with all the craziness of life that I sometimes just plain forget to spend time with the Lord. Or “I’m just so tired,” I’ll tell myself. “I haven’t slept. I just want to sleep! If I did a devotion right now, I wouldn’t be all in.”
In life, I know I’m an all-in kind of woman. So if I can’t be all in, I think, I’m just not going to do it at all.
I do that even though I know it’ll cost me.
The thing is, ever since middle school I’ve had this relationship with the Lord. It’s real. I can talk to Him, like a dad or a friend. And to have a personal relationship with Him is something a lot of people struggle with, especially if they were raised in the structure of a church. A lot of people don’t even know what it means to have a “relationship” with the Lord. For me it’s always followed that simple, almost childlike faith that I mentioned. In this case I see the Lord almost like a second dad.
Viewing Jesus as a father-figure presence in my spiritual life was just so powerful to me—a father figure I could talk to, and share my feelings with, and pray to, asking for help, asking for forgiveness, and receiving his grace and warmth in my heart.
It seems like it should be such a simple thing: to spend a little time each day with God, either reading the Bible, or praying, or just listening; not listening for some booming voice from the sky, but trying to pay attention to the inner voice that tells you what’s right and wrong.
Yet there are too many times to count when my relationship with God has taken a back seat or just fallen off my radar for no apparent reason. There are times when I’ve gone and silenced His voice, too, when I felt in my heart that I was doing something I knew wasn’t right, but I told myself, I don’t have time to listen to that. I just need to do it and get on with it!
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve done that and wound up going through something really hard, only to be afraid in the aftermath to go back and even pray about what’d gone wrong. Almost like I was embarrassed that I ignored Him, and so I just didn’t want to bring it up. Like, “Oh, can I come back? Or is he gonna be mad at me?”