God Bless This Mess(24)

Why did I do that?

God isn’t like a “Dad” dad. He wasn’t gonna ground me. I know that God wants the best for me, which makes it so frustrating that the times when I’ve needed Him most are some of the times when I’ve pushed Him away; when I was so busy and under so much stress that I just couldn’t make time for Him, couldn’t take time to focus on my faith.

What a mistake that’s been.

I can tell you I’m trying to get better. I’m working on it. I’ve written down my goals and intentions in life, and improving my relationship with the Lord is right up there at the top of the list!

But as you’re about to see in these next few chapters, as I went through my pageant years, and figured out my relationships with my very first boyfriends, and fought a severe struggle with depression, and carried all of that straight into my time on TV, I had a hard time keeping the Lord anywhere on my list, let alone at the top. I struggled hard.

How crazy is it to think I might not have had to struggle quite so hard these last few years if I’d just let my faith be a part of my life, no matter where life happened to be taking me, or how embarrassed I was by the mistakes I was making along the way?

Why isn’t keeping the faith a much easier habit to maintain than it is?

Speaking for our generation, I think there are times when we push faith away out of this mistaken idea that we’re protecting ourselves by doing so; as if trusting in God and letting God in is something to be scared of.

That seems ridiculous, right? But hear me out: our lives move so fast, and we’re dealing with so much all at once, that if we slow down enough to check in with ourselves, we might just come to realize that we’re living in a way that doesn’t serve us. I think some of us (especially me!) put up walls, like a defense, to the whole idea of faith, because we know, in the middle of doing things that don’t serve us well, that if we listen to God (or Buddha, or the Universe, or whoever it is that you believe provides you with that inner voice you hear when you’re real quiet), we just might have to face the results of our own actions.

What I’m saying is that if we take the time to talk to God to check the alignment of our actions with the knowing that’s in our hearts—the right and wrong and inner peace that we all sense and long for, on some level, deep within ourselves—we might hear some truths that won’t be easy to hear. And we might decide we have to change the way we’re doing things. And change is hard!

Does that make any sense?

I know it’s confusing, because it’s been confusing for me.

I shouldn’t be guarding myself against the Lord. That’s exactly the opposite of what I should be doing. And I know that. I should let the Lord in to help guard me from everything else.

And even that can be confusing.

The whole question of who to let in and who to keep out in life is a big one.

I remember I took a weeklong trip to the beach for church camp in middle school, and at one point the pastor gave a sermon about “guarding our hearts.”

“Guard your heart in Christ Jesus!” he said.

I opened up my Bible and looked up that passage, and highlighted it, and put a sticky note on it. It’s Proverbs 4:23–27:

Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.

Keep your mouth free of perversity; keep corrupt talk far from your lips.

Let your eyes look straight ahead; fix your gaze directly before you.

Give careful thought to the paths for your feet and be steadfast in all your ways.

Do not turn to the right or the left; keep your foot from evil.

*

I still use the same Bible today that I took on that trip. It’s a pretty little Bible with a flower on the cover, but the spine is broken, and it’s tattered and dog-eared. It’s almost like this Bible is my relationship with the Lord in physical form.

I took that sermon to heart the moment I heard it, and right next to that passage in my Bible I wrote “Beach Blast ’10!” so I’d never forget where I first read it. But then, for some reason, I forgot about it. For a long time I forgot. Just these last few years, in my relationships with men both in public and in private, I’ve gotten mad at myself on multiple occasions—Man, you didn’t guard your heart! To be honest, it seems like whenever I’ve opened up my heart to people in recent years, they’ve destroyed it.

But how do we make sense of all that in the context of keeping our relationship with the Lord?

There are times when I’ve thought I never should have let those people in. I shouldn’t have let anyone in! But that’s not what the sermon was saying. I looked at it in black-and-white for a long time, as if we had two choices: guard your heart and don’t let people in, or don’t guard your heart and let them in.

When I was on The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, I didn’t guard my heart. I opened up. (And my heart was already broken at that point, which you’ll hear more about in just a bit.)

Being vulnerable and a little outside your comfort zone is where you find love, of course. Dating experts always tell you that. But what the Bible tells us is that we also have to move slow and protect our hearts against intrusion from the wrong people.

Think of the heart like a castle. There are guards outside the castle, but that doesn’t mean nobody gets in. The right people, the safe people, the trusted people are allowed in.