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My life has felt like a really crazy roller coaster for the last four months. Every day has seemed to bring a new twist, turn, up or down to the front of my mind, and it's been really hard to handle my everyday responsibilities with some semblence of sanity. A while back I had lunch with a close friend, and as I explained to her the circumstances of my life, she just reveled at the fact that "I was doing so well". As she said that, I had to step back and realize just how faithful God has been in the last 16 weeks, truly showing me he is trustworthy to provide the strength, peace and hope I need exactly when I need it.
God is growing me in so many ways right now, stretching me into a deeper level of trust and intimacy with him. I wanted so much to focus on my physical health during this time, especially with my wedding coming up. Weight loss was the core reason I started to blog. But God has shown me that I've had my priorities out of whack. I've been placing so many things above him in my life, including my appearances, and am just now beginning to realize how increibdly destructive it's been to have anyone or anything besides him at the forefront of my mind. Everything just seems to fall apart when he's not the thing holding me together.
I'm beginning to understand exactly who I am in this life, for the first time in almost 20 years. My purpose in being alive is to bring God glory. Everything I do has an underlying purpose, and I think for a long time I've thought that purpose was to find happiness. I'm beginning to understand, though, that the only true happiness I could ever find is in Christ Jesus. Everything I need is in him, everything I am is in him, and its only in him that I can ever truly live. I am enough as long as I am in him, because he has called me as his own.
Lately, though, I've been dealing with a lot of shame, around my body and my work life and my education, not to mention around my blog. Posting this is terrifying, because I honestly expect to get an email from every person that reads this telling me how terrible I am that I haven't posted in 4 months, that I haven't been to the gym in 4 months, that I've bee eating terribly, that I'm a failure, etc. etc...you get the picture. But thats shame talking, and God has been showing me in the last four months that how he sees me is exactly the opposite of what shame says.
God loves my body exactly where it's at right now, just like he loves me regardless of my shameless addiction to chocolate, my people pleasing issues and my deeply seeded anxiety, insecurity and depression. He looks past the Katie that hasn't done her laundry in three weeks, texts friends back never, and eats ice cream as a meal. He sees my heart, so I don't need to be perfect to approach the throne of God and pour out my love and my soul to him. I don't need to change a single thing about who I am in order to have intimate conversations over coffee with my king, or beautiful worship times in the car with him. Because he loves me right here, in the middle of my mess. And honestly, thats the best thing. Grace is simply the best thing.
Last week when I sat down for my scheduled appointment with my therapist, I began to pour out all of the ways I had messed up, all of the shame I had been holding onto about all of my sins and failures and frustrations. And like she always does, she helped me work through some of the root issues, showing me my life from a different perspective. At the end of our session, when my therapist normally prays for me, she stopped before she began to pray and told me that she was proud of me. That I've been tackling huge issues and facing giants that tear lives apart, and that I am strong, and I should be proud of myself too. This all coming in spite of the sins and failures I had just expressed to her not 35 minutes prior, in spite of me feeling like a failure because I definitely bombed a final exam and haven't done my laundry in roughly three weeks and haven't posted to my blog in 4 months...funny how grace works, isn't it?
Her grace for me in the midst of my mess was just the reminder that I needed about who God is, and how he sees me. So often it is really easy to get stuck in the mindset that everything I have done wrong in the last day/week/month/life carries so much more weight than grace ever could. But every time those thoughts go racing through my head, Jesus comes knocking gently on my heart to pull me out of that destuctive pathway an onto the road of freedom again. I'm so thankful for him and his endless love and grace.
I don't know when I'm going to really get started on the Keto diet I've been wanting to try. I don't know when I will make it to the gym next, or if I will ever do my laundry. But I'm beginning to believe that no matter what I do or don't do, God's love is going to be there for me, and that is enough. Jesus's arms are already outstretched to catch me when I am bound to fall. And I can live in the freedom of grace every single day. Hellelujah.