I feel a bit like a fraud right now.
I say on this website:
“I write to empower another voice to speak, to be the helping hand to others laying face down in the arena of life, to help lead someone bravely past the “Travel At Your Own Risk” sign, even if there is pain on the other side. I write to encourage you to do what sets your heart on fire, and all the hard things it will take to follow through with it. I write because hitting “post” on the vulnerable places of my heart is a hard thing to do. I write because we have a commitment to our children to do hard things…”
But the reality is that when I’m weary, face-down tired and confused, I don’t hit post on anything. There are hurdles that my pride just can’t seem to get over.
Years ago, I saw the weight of being “Pinterest Perfect.” Recognized the discontented feelings of inadequacy it stirred up in me and abandoned the platform. Facebook serves as means of connecting with friends from far away, but for the most part, I rarely find myself scrolling through posts anymore. So much hostility, anger, contention.
Then there is Instagram. This happy little bubble where people still seem to be humane. My Instagram feed is full of beautiful photos, empowering words, kind-hearted people, a hint of Pinterest-perfectness, with a mild dose of reality. While the feed tends to be filtered photos with great lighting, Instastories crack me up. People drive around talking to themselves on screen and then share it with people. And I love it. It’s somewhat whimsical, happy and carefree.
But sometimes life isn’t whimsical, happy or carefree.
So I stop sharing.
Rather than writing through exhaustion or being real about my struggles, I turn inward. Turn to silence. Turn toward isolation rather than “hitting ‘post’ on the vulnerable places of my heart.
If you’ve read my rope-climbing post, you know that a year ago I had a shoulder injury, acquired what we thought was poison ivy, persevered through our annual Spartan race and came out on the other side weak, itchy and with a nice Staph infection as my grand prize. The feeling of climbing that last rope carried me through much of last summer on steroids, antibiotics and rehab for my shoulder. It was brutal physically, but the whole mess of my broken body exasperated the brokenness of my hurting heart.
I’ve learned a lot about myself the past year. I’ve learned that a lot of the time the voice in my head is chanting “you’re only as worthy as you are useful,” and “if I can make them happy, I’ll be happy.” So, when I’m healthy physically, I can do, do, do, to make others feel cared for. I often get so caught up on my hamster wheel of “all the things for all the people” I inadvertently, but pridefully none-the-less, fail to see that I’m trying to fulfill a role I wasn’t created for.
What we all need is a Savior, and hello, that’s not me.
But I am a forgetful people.
Two weeks ago we had a flashback to last spring and once again, I found myself covered with a bizarre “poison-ivy-like” rash all over my arms. Like the kind of rash that you’re afraid will come up when you do a Google search. It’s a little suspicious that it would come back roughly one year to the date of getting it last year, and it probably means that it is something in my yard and not in the mountains that I’m allergic to, but the result is the same.
Insane itching, open sores, little sleep. My kitchen counter has become a dispensary of naturopathic and conventional pharmaceuticals and no matter what I take, my sleep is intermittent at best and most days last week I got up at 3am for the day because I couldn’t sleep anyway. Because itching.
But this isn’t a sad story about my rash. This post is about how in the midst of even something as temporary as poison ivy, I can lose sight of who I want to be, my convictions on what it looks like to walk in community with other people.
Ultimately, I forget that my worth is not in what I can do for other people, or how happy I can make those around me. I forget that my identity is in a perfect Savior. The Savior I need. Not the savior I try to be for myself and everyone around me.
I have a dear friend who was once told that it appears that she walks alone through her problems, processes them internally, and then only when she comes out on the other side, seemingly wraps up her former struggles in a neat little box, ties it with a ribbon, and then offers in hindsight the heart lessons she learns when walking through hard things. But it’s neat. It’s tidy. It’s why she’s committed to a few deep relationships--to call her on all her tidiness.
Social media gives us feigned, false comfort in our relationships. I can post pictures of the hard days, ask you to share in my dirty laundry piles and breaking up of bantering kids, openly be transparent about the things in our lives and never once be vulnerable. I can trick you with my transparency into thinking you know my heart. But there is huge chasm of difference between transparency and vulnerability.
To be vulnerable means to risk.
It’s an opening up of oneself and being exposed. It’s not just saying “here is all my stuff…”
But rather, “here is all my stuff… now what? How do I grow? What am I missing? Help me find Truth and see Love.”
Vulnerability is not wrapping up all our issues with a bow after we’ve learned from them and then sharing them with others.
Vulnerability is walking with a few people who will wrestle with you, for you, through hard things. It’s walking with people who don’t just say “sweet, you fail, we all fail, let’s drink to failure!”
True community happens when we open the vulnerable places of our hearts to God and allow others to help us wrestle with all the good, bad and ugly that is exposed.
True community happens when we open up our boxes, dump the contents out, enter into each others mess and without blinking at what we find, persevere with one another, walking together to the foot of the cross.
We won’t find true community unless we're transparent, vulnerable with a trusted few, and committed enough to press in when someone doesn’t have the capacity to communicate their struggle.
May we be a community who bears with one another in love, listens through the silence to hear that someone is hurting, and offers each other the only One who can heal.
…
I’m tempted to wait a week until, Lord willing, this itching stops, or I have answers from a biopsy, or I’ve had some consistent sleep. I'm tempted to wait until I can wrap a bow on this box.
But I’m going to take a gamble and practice what I preach.
I write because hitting “post” on the vulnerable places of my heart is a hard thing to do. I write because we have a commitment to our children to do hard things. And ultimately I write because the Truth found in doing hard things sets us free.