Invitation

This past Wednesday, we were gathered at Geri and Dave's house for our weekly small group gathering and as we settled in post-dinner in the living room, we started to look at the first chapter of Colossians. I'm not sure how we got on the topic of fatherhood, but Dave started sharing about his children and how he loves when his children come to him to ask him for help or ask him for something. As we all listened to Dave speak, it was pretty obvious that he took fatherhood pretty seriously, and that his heart was one of extravagant love towards his children. I tried to be discreet; I tried to avert my gaze and look down; alas, something in me shifted and I was caught off guard by the influx of emotions and tears that overcame me. Tears started to fall down my face and pretty soon, it was pretty difficult to hide that I was dissolving into a puddle of emotions in my corner of the living room. Geri looked over at me and gently said, "what's going on, Grace?" and I confessed to the group that I was caught off guard by my own physical response. In that moment, there was this realization that dawned on me that I had never seen my dad express that kind of fatherly love towards me. In my life, he remains inaccessible and he is the last person I feel that I can turn to in a moment of need. Instead of being able to depend on my dad, I found myself time and time again disappointed and hurt and what Dave was expressing to the group was something that struck me as foreign in my own relationship with my father. 

As I shared these things to the group, Geri compassionately replied that it wasn't fair that I had never experienced this kind of love from my own father and that it wasn't fair that the world is broken with such broken familial relationships. 

This instance is, among other instances, a reflection of what this season holds for me. There is an invitation from the Lord this season to experience deeper healing and deeper communion with him as things arise to the surface. Indeed, the Lord allows aspects of the past to resurface because he wants to touch those areas and restore those areas of deep woundedness. 

My big ask this season is to experience deep healing and restoration within myself, and to experience the Lord in and through it all. 

Things I Know To Be True

1. Surrendering to the Lord and proclaiming him as Lord over my life is what I want to do daily, or attempt to do. I proclaim that my finiteness and inability to forecast my own life is overshadowed by his sovereignty and ultimate goodness and love for me. 

2. I believe that all relationships are not an end in and of themselves. My relationships are conduits where I can express God's love to others and experience his love through others. At the end of the day, I choose to be satisfied in God's presence and in doing so, I am able to better see relationships for what they truly are: a fraction of something better. A gift and something to not take for granted. 

3. I can have grace towards myself this season. I can be gentle in moments when I experience physical symptoms of PTSD like inability to concentrate/raising heart rate/low-grade anxiety. I am not the person I was before, and I will come out of this season stronger. 

4. I am a healed person, and am in continued need for healing. There is an invitation this season to be ushered into greater and deeper levels of wholeness. That being said, the Lord provided me with an amazing (AMAZING) therapist this season and I know he is providing the tools and resources that will allow me to address things of the past in order to continue the process of healing in this present-time. 

5. There is a community around me that loves and supports me. God affirms my belovedness in and through a community of believers. His invitation to me this season of life is to come before him with great anticipation and faith in his goodness and faithfulness.