Reset.

Have you ever had your worst fear happen at the absolute worst time?

That was this quarantine for me.

Let me explain- my worst fear actually has nothing to do with the possibility of getting sick. It has everything to do with being alone.

You see, when someone is feeling disconnected, the last thing that they want is to be confined to their home.

This was me. I had JUST realized how disconnected I was feeling from the close friendships around me and how much I thought I needed someone to fill a void of loneliness. It seemed like my most promising friendships were unstable, and that every effort I made to salvage them somehow ended up making things worse. And then, simultaneously, the quarantine hit.

I started to feel an unfamiliar emotion to me: anger. Anger toward the circumstances and at the things that I couldn’t control. Something was way off inside of me, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why I felt it so deep?

It’s funny how it always seems like the problem is something or someone else, until it gets removed, and we are still in pain.

I had been looking to everything around me to dictate my inner world- friends to make me feel more stable, peace in the house to make me feel more peaceful inside, and encouragement to silence the self condemning voice. So when I FELT like I had no friends (which I know now is NOT actually true), things felt tense around me, and there wasn’t much encouragement around me, I was left alone with… well… the pain of my past. Nothing to numb it, nothing to silence it. 

And that’s when He told me what was really going on. The Lord showed me that there were things inside of me that I accepted as a part of me that were actually breaking me down inside, and that’s why I felt so entirely desperate for stability to cling onto outside of me. It was the exact thing that was blocking me from experiencing the depth of His love for me, which has actually been available to me this whole time. In order for me to experience the fullness, He started the process of removing my subconscious voice of self doubt and self criticism inside, rooted in deep things from my childhood. Gently, He has begun to show me how damaging some of my own thoughts toward myself are, and how contrary they are from the thoughts that HE has of me.

Like a tender Father, He is retraining me to see myself rightly, to trust myself more, to stop second guessing, to stop blaming myself, to stop thinking that there is something inherently wrong with me. He is showing me how to trust HIM to bring up the things that He wants to work on and change inside of me, instead of taking the control of that into my own hands. We can spend all of our days exhausted, trying to search inside ourselves for all our blemishes. That, after all, is religion. OR we can trust a loving Father, a gently convicting Holy Spirit, to nudge us in our relationship with Him, to remove anything that could hinder us from experiencing Him in His fullness. He is the thing that makes us feel connected, after all.

I don’t know how to articulate it in the depth of how it feels. Because of the various things that Jesus has lovingly exposed in my heart, I’ve been able to see more clearly than I have in a very long time. It’s as though He showed me that I was looking at myself through the wrong lens this whole time. I have been able to see myself in a more whole way. I have enjoyed simple things more. I have slowly learned how to become more present. I have heard nuances in music that I have never noticed before. The world around me feels more vibrant as I slow down and breathe in the presence of God, knowing that He is fully pleased with me. I am waking up to a new redemption: and I have never felt so childlike and joyful inside. And now, joy just naturally bubbles up internally, and I don’t feel helpless to my circumstances anymore. I don’t feel like a captive to any limitations that my be put on me externally, because inside, He is setting me free. 

This is actually entirely vulnerable for me to say all of this, because it is still fresh and I’m still learning how much I’ve believed the lies of self criticism. But I am sharing this because I believe that there are MANY like me out there who have dealt with the same thing during this time. Maybe in different ways. But without the normal flow of life, without all the things we put in front of us to numb ourselves, I’m sure that most of us have had to face some pretty big things inside of us that have been exposed by the sudden stop of normal life.  

I want to tell you something. The things that are being exposed in you are not something to have shame over, or to be afraid of. God knew what He was doing when He decided to expose them. I know that at times, it can feel as though you are bursting at the seems and can’t take the pain anymore, but that pain isn’t who you are. It is being exposed for a reason: and that is to redeem it and to make you whole again.

There is always something beautiful that you can put your hands to in front of you. There is always redemption to be had somewhere. Wherever a door has been slammed shut in your face, there is a whole new world of color in the place you least expect.

Whoever first said that this time is like a reset was right. It’s more than a reset: it has made us re-evaluate almost everything we have thought life was. It has cornered us into the thing we need most: time with our families, and time to learn who we truly are inside. It has made us see the beauty in the things that are right in front of us, instead of looking somewhere in the distance for something to fulfill us. I’m not saying that circumstances are perfect right now. But what I am saying, is that He can use anything in our lives to make us more healed, more whole. In fact, that’s the gospel- Jesus has a way of turning back the worst of things and making it more beautiful than we could’ve ever imagined!