Returning

How long?

How LONG…

I don’t know where to begin.

It seems many people have been projecting ideas about me. About who I am, what I’m like, what I want. Past friends, family members, even myself. There is this idea that I am… decided. That I know what I want.

The truth is I have been of many minds for the last 8 or so years. And how can you know who I am, what I want, what’s best for me, if I don’t even know?

I have been running. Running from my heart, from my dreams, from my own fears. I have believed a lie about myself. Well, I have believed many. But one lie, one narrative has resounded louder and more clearly than any other:

“Not good enough”

Everything I have done has been under this guise. I have believed in failure and not success. I have believed that others would win, others would be chosen, others would have their dreams come true. But not me.

No longer. I have had enough.

I was born in one of the most beautiful places on the planet. Vancouver. Yet I have been running from that city, thinking I did not belong. I do. I know now that I do belong on the West Coast of North America in the city where I was born. But this is a scary revelation and many people do not seem to understand it. The returning… it is complex and a long time coming. I need to return to where I began so that I can find my true self. I have been lost, forgotten inside my own self. I thought I could find myself and my joy elsewhere… in Scotland, in England. I could not. I have also been running from my own dreams and desires.

I am a storyteller. This is my core, truly. It is the one thing I do know about me. I ache for telling stories. When I am not writing scripts, stories, and creative tales I am not fully alive. I shrink back and shrivel. I haven’t been writing properly, full, and with all my intention and heart for years now.I have been afraid and sheltered and living in apprehension of failure.

I am now anticipating success. I was born to tell stories. I was born to create. No more soul destroying jobs that have me write nonsense and drain my soul and self worth. In a few months time everything will be different. I declare it. Success. Joy. Happiness. Wholeness and home.

I don’t know how… but I believe it is time for me to find a new narrative to replace the one that told me I was never going to be good enough for anyone or anything.

I am MORE than enough!

Re-emergence

It’s been a while.

Smoke and ashes waft through valley. I walk through these woods where we have met for years. I see the last remaining cinders breaking off trees that are now little more than black narrow skeletons crumbling in the wind. The last remnants of heat and embers burn away. I cough. I begin to fear. It has been a while since we met here and now the forest is gone. Have I lost my chance? Is He gone from this place? Have I left it alone for too long?

No.

He meets me on the other side and takes my hand. He walks with me to the cliff edge where we’ve sat before, where He has told me many things and encouraged me, often inspired me. I ask about the burning trees and devastation.He puts his hands on my shoulders and says simply:

“The past is gone and all that went with it: the doubt, the fear,
the loneliness, the hope deferred…”

He points. In the distance, I see the shape of a city rising out of the haze. When I look back, He hands me a baby girl wrapped in white linen. I start to question but He doesn’t want to answer. He kisses my forehead and starts to walk off.

I call out to him: “What about my writing. I feel like I am fighting against a barrier. When will a breakthrough come in my career? “

He draws a TV in the air and drops it at my feet. On the TV screen is written, scrolling… “soon”

I stand in this firey haze holding the baby and looking between the burnt trees and the city feeling like some kind of a mystical warrior, and very strange.

For a long while now I have been in mourning for my faith, a result of many changes, a new relationship, and starting from scratch. But in the past month I have discovered a renewed joy in the power of prayer, a wholeness in my relationship with my future husband and new friends in England, as well as an awakening and awareness of a new season about to begin. I don’t know what this entails but one thing is for certain.

It’s going to be new. And it’s going to be bold.

I’ll keep you posted.

I am a heretic; I am loved

I’m standing naked on the lawn, my heart in my hands pumping, blood spilling over, between my fingers and dripping down to the green grass and my toes. Some people tell me I am lost… conflicted. I am (apparently) lost to the carnage of my own actions, to the decisions I have made of late, to the questions I have asked and continue to ask.

I am not conflicted or lost. I simply cannot settle. Not now. Not here.

For too long I have been comfortable to be reigned in and contained but the time for this containment is over.

It hurts. It hurts to hear the voices of friends cutting in, telling me I am lost because of my questions.

I walk a tightrope but my heart is exploding with love. Too long have I held myself back like a thoroughbred contained when I am meant to run wild, free in open plains (where the streets have no names).

The blood drips. The heart pumps.

There is no sorrow here but for the lament over things past and friends who cannot walk this way with me. I want to know that God is with me and I do. I do when I stop to take a deep breath and when I feel Him touch my heart and put it back inside me where it’s safe, where only the trustworthy can touch it. I can bring it out again for the needy and the broken, but the sure do not need to see it right now.

I am done. I am finished with the simple answers, and conformity that held me and hurt me. I am naked and gaping on the lawn with a smile on my face. I am here with red stains on my fingers and words on my tongue.

I am ready to keep being surprised. By love.

I cannot stop asking questions. I cannot stop here on the edge and jump to safety, not yet. Not now. I have to keep going. Because the way is where I discover beauty, truth, freedom… and all that has been hidden by rules wrapped around me.

I cannot stop.

“The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.” – Helen Keller

for freedom

I think what really baffles me is the fact that I feel like a rebel, or like a blasphemer or something, pushing my doubts to the furtherest and most dangerous fringes of exploration and questioning

… and…

in the midst of this seeming rebellious thinking God tells me to widen my perspective, to stop limiting myself and to fully embrace freedom.

Paradox.

Limitless, limitless love. Limitless freedom out of love.

I try to be my best…

I have so many questions.

I am standing with a pile of fabric in my hands, a mass of ill-fitting, wrongly coloured fabric I’ve known for too long. There is a bright light flicking from red to blue to green to yellow to purple. I squint when I look up.

From here I can see the future; it is not what I knew or planned and yet it is exactly that.

I am standing, with the fabric in my hands, covered in white paint coloured by the lights,  constantly changing.

And here there is freedom when I hear the words: “Put on your own cloak. Stop putting on the cloaks of others.” But I am uncertain how to move with the cloak that’s made for me, or even how to step into it.

How is it so easy to live in a lie and so difficult to put on what’s true?

I do not know this cloak of mine. I do not know how to dance with the rhythm inside me instead of the rhythm I thought you wanted me use. I feel used and abused and torn down but my body tells another story. When I stand I stand taller. When I sing, with my fingers at my belt loops, curled by my hips, my toe tapping the beat and my voice rising, I feel free. I feel alive. I feel loved.

But the old ways are comfortable and the new are unknown and stepping into this at almost 30 makes me feel a little bit like a child on her first day of school excited for the journey, excited to learn but scared… of the unknown, of how things will change…

And yet when we drove past the fields of green and gold with Jon Foreman wafting through our speakers I felt my love’s hand on my knee and knew I was free and that so much has changed. SO much change since just a little over two months ago. I was in Vancouver still waiting for the miracle. Now I am in England, well into my MA, so far with distinction, and I am so in love my spirit aches when we are not close. I don’t quite know how to take it all in.

When you get that feeling, that niggling little voice in the back of your gut so deep down you can’t even find where, you should listen. That voice is probably right.

I’m off to the first day of something.

I’m in the middle of the best days.

I am excited and I think when I find the courage I will like the cloak that’s custom fit for me much more than the ones I got from others.

The fabric in my hands is weighted and so I put it down, watch the lights dance rainbows over my painted hands. And from behind me someone comes with my custom-fit cloak. I feel it slide over my shoulders, the arms waiting for my moment to reach into them and step fully forward.

Transition is hard. Transition is good. Transition is necessary.

“Your shepherd’s staff comforts me… surely goodness will follow me…”

It doesn’t make sense!

My heart and my spirit are exploding simultaneously. The supernova within me is mid-explosion and I can feel the waves rippling out in time and space.

It’s so ridiculous that I should be in a place like this. Any other time in my life if you told me I’d be here now, living as I am, feeling as I do, I would have said you were crazy. I would have said that would be impossible and perhaps even… ‘wrong.’ Certain things don’t connect. I mean… God isn’t as big as THIS is He? How is it possible that I can feel such a paradoxical love, grace, and wonder?

I’m precariously on the edge and keep trying to find reasons to feel guilt and shame but finding them ill fitting, inappropriate.

Love is abounding. Grace gives wings and I feel so free in the kind of way only someone who has known true captivity, fought, wrestled, shouted, and leapt beyond it could know. And the best thing? In the midst of this rebellious glory God is using my life and my journey to influence others to question, ask, seek and change and run with God into deeper and more dangerous and more free places.

I am in absolute awe and absolutely bowled over with the ridiculousness of it all. I wish I had better words to describe it.

It’s 2010

Freedom is something I had not quite understood until it struck me down and kissed my face, a joyous rebel yell and eyes like stars.

in the final days of 2009

I’ve been thinking about change. And healing.

It’s amazing how a year ago I could not imagine life beyond my circle of friends and existence in Edinburgh. Now… returning to Edinburgh has been a process of healing, and completion in realising that God knows much more than I about what I need and want. I’ve also, in talking with friends I haven’t seen for 10 months found evidence/proof really of how much happened in me spiritually, emotionally, and mentally, and how much changed in me, how much more I am myself since I left Edinburgh, and also really I have been confronted with what about Edinburgh is bad for me. It’s a very beautiful but oppressive place.

I feel so free in England, in Bournemouth. Sure part of this is because of love, part of this is because of the change that came from life in Vancouver and rediscovering my roots. I am more solid, more rooted, more centred. Thank God! Also, I am light because I have entered this amazing year dedicated to polishing my skills as a writer.

But it’s also just that the atmosphere and feel of where I live now is lighter. And my friends are giving and we give and take equally. There’s just more life beyond the walls of this city. I feel lighter because I am more whole and because I don’t live in this city of the dead as they call it. I didn’t realise that when I was living here, it does have a feel of death. I hope and pray that God can reverse that one day.

I guess as the final days of 2009, and this decade comes to a close I am reflecting on all that has been this past year and this past decade. I’m nearing the end of my twenties and the end of my days of being single and the beginning of a new phase of life.

So much change. So much healing. So much good.

Edinburgh may have been the city of my heart once, but it is no longer. My heart has a home elsewhere. My path has weaved its way to brighter places. And I cannot wait to see where the journey goes from here.

Best Christmas present for our family

Despite odds against her, my sister is out of hospital and is recovering/has recovered much better than expected. Thank you, God!!

extravagant paradox

God is paradoxical. The more I learn, stretch, push, ask, question, grow… the more I realize this.

My life has arched dramatically in a different way than expected and God is completely in every step. He (God) is so gracious and loving and giving and contradictory even to what we think is His ‘final line’ on a subject. He really is like a good Father, the best Father. He sees each person as an individual child/being. Circumstances are different. Still I know that truth is truth, just as love is love and you can’t bend it to your will.

I just feel like scripture is constantly open to interpretation and it was written at a specific time in history. And I just don’t believe anymore that God is totally bound to our human rules and doctrines and certificates and nor does he remove blessing because of non-conformity to such things. It’s ultimately about the heart and if the heart is pure and good then… well… there it is. This baffles and amazes me. Because HE is bigger than the book we penned about Him. He is constant but changes His mind. He is paradoxical.

I don’t have answers, only more questions and more certainty of His love, His paradox, His grace, and freedom in His will.

I will not take on guilt from others or fear from others anymore. I have been given a great gift and I am so happy and so totally in awe.