Dear Girl,
Yea, you know, I…catch myself too.
When I am longing to escape from my ordinary moments; when someone else’s highlight reel makes me feel just a little smaller.
The everyday chores, and routine work can make us feel like there’s someplace we haven’t arrived at yet. We’ve become the runaway brides in our wanderings into the other girl’s story; searching, thirsting for what is not ours. Because where you stand today is yours and truth is: what you are looking at, thirsting after, is not promised.
So what do you do when everyone else seems to be living the life you’d choose, and you get the life, you’d change in a heartbeat?
What do you do when you want something so bad, and God says: “but, it’s not yours?”
Why does it feel easier to love another girl’s story and not yours?
I’ll tell you why: because your life is not comfortable. And you somehow believe that hers is.
That she’s arrived someplace you seem to be headed, and you’re not quite there yet. Well hear this: no one ever arrives anywhere. Everyday we are all wading through pain, fighting for joy, grasping for love, and living another day. No one gets to arrive anywhere. Not you, not me, not her.
Soon you begin to realize that the rooms you get to visit along your way are: hurt, pain, rejection, loneliness, seasons that will bring you discomfort and in those moments your only destination will be joy. That’s the only place we all get to arrive at: joy. That’s what is promised.
When you begin to see that God never calls you to comfortable. That He calls you to live dangerously, to get your hands and hair dirty, by unearthing yourself from comfort zones, and getting even more dirt in your nails. That you are wired to rise above your fears and here’s one that social media misses: that no matter how you look, sound, where you are from, who you are and who you are not, you’re called to run towards burning bushes and “play with fire”.
You are called to change something. And change everything all together. Do you know who you are?
See, I have come to know for sure that I couldn’t grow without pain. I couldn’t birth without a pressing. I couldn’t know who I am, until I know Whose I am. I couldn’t be comfortable in my own skin, look away from highlight reels, be present in my own story, if I don’t remind myself daily that: God is weaving my everyday, my mundane, my pain, my joy into His Glorious story.
That comfortable is not an option for Kingdom-living. You and I, we are meant to live upside-down, not-meant-to-make-sense-kind-of-mess. And that’s where the real beauty & glory is.
Girl, the one way to live your one life well is to stay in your own story. To fall in love with the story God is passionately writing with your daily life. Don’t look to the left, nor the right, look up to the Cross-. Because that’s where you are headed; and here’s what you must remember: at the Cross; there’s pain, but there’s also redemption, restoration and that joy-destination.
When you are daily tracing your life along the frame of the Cross, something shifts inside of you. Your focus changes. Then God lets you in on a secret: no one has it together. We are all spinning clay in His Hands: one season, there’s pain, the other, there’s a wait, and in His molding, there’s our growing. You cannot miss that.
Who knows maybe it’s the mundane that produces the most glory. Maybe it’s your mess that is most magnificent. Maybe it’s your one-of-a-kind-beauty, one-of-a-kind-story, one-of-a-kind-calling that makes the all-of-a-kind difference in our broken world. Don’t miss your story, girl. It’s all you have. It’s all you’ll live.
And please remember this: when it feels like you’re not seen, known or valued by people, know this one: you are fully seen, fully loved, fully known and fully wanted by the One that truly matters.
Love,
Rayo.
