Stories from an Unemployed Newlywed

I quit my job about a month ago.  My last day was on a Thursday and by time Tuesday hit, after it had only felt like a long weekend off I started panicking.  I wasn't too sure what kind of stupid thing I had gotten Philip and I into.  Did I think I was married to Prince William who could support us on his salary and I could just walk around gracing people with my presence and having tea on the veranda?  Or was this a huge leap of faith that would propel me into a much deeper trust in God? 

I have worked since I was young and ever since then I have been obsessed with payday.  Not the candy bar, I am more of a Snickers or Twix gal and that sounds really good right now....anyways!  But seriously I have always been obsessed with the moment that check hits my bank account and the sumation for a moment makes me feel rich.  I have some nights stayed awake long enough to see it happen right after or woken up early, all sleepy eyed, only to make sure it was there.  Security.  I needed to know I was taking care of things and paying bills and maybe having enough for a night out with friends.  I always turned down fun trips or adventures because I didn't have enough of it.  If I did have enough left after life sucked me dry then I burnt it.  I am not really sure what I bought though.  Probably a lot of food because I truly live for a juicy burger and a Coke.  Anytime a sorry situation happened with my security, my hard work, I thought maybe God was upset with me.  "Faithful with little, faithful with much."  I must not have been faithful.  He doesn't trust me even with the tiniest amount that I have.  It was constantly this back and forth game between God and I.  He loves me on Fridays and hates me on Mondays when the well is bone dry.  I would pray and hope that something big would happen for me financially, like I would have an unknown aunt die and leave me all of her fortunes.  What would I have done with that though?  Probably pay for school without students loans but then I wouldn't have anything else left and I would be back wondering if God would bless me again.   

Tuesday comes and I am silent before God.  I have no idea what to do with my day so I pray.  I read the Word and I pray.  And all of a sudden I am excited about the peace that has come over me and the opportunity to stay home and be in the still of the Lord.  Philip comes home and I am full of joy.  I have made the budget for a year-and-a-half and put our work schedules and paydays in the planner but I am not obsessed with looking at it and waiting for it.  I just know that I have made a plan and God will take care of us.  Each day I wake up excited about the possibilities of spending many moments in books and the Word and being in the presence of a God who loves me.  He has unlocked dreams for me and purpose and I am feeling useful even without a set paycheck.  I am learning to live one day at-a-time.

Not everyone figures out or knows how to do that.  We are all in a mad rush to prepare for the next moment or be the person we want to be then.  I still do that, sure, but I have been catching myself in it and realizing that God is in control and I can trust whatever plan he has.  The days where I feel like I wasn't fully alive in him, I forgive those days.  Each day I hope that tomorrow I will see His mercies and live in them fresh, anew.  Yesterday we forgive, today we live, and tomorrow we hope.  We hope for that which is unseen.  We hope to be responsible people with both our hearts and our pockets and we accept that sometimes we just need grace to get us through.  I've been clinging to what Jesus told Satan, "Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God."  God is my one day at-a-time routine. 

Every day I wake up and realize I can only live fully by engaging in relationship with him.  All my plans and hopes, they are in His hands.  Sometimes I worry that if I forget about a desire I have that I won't do it or remember I had it.  But God holds onto those things and surprises us with them in the perfect moment.  I often tell friends and family that I know we're not ready to start a family but I so badly want to be there that I sit around and dwell on it.  I cannot rush the day or slow it down.  All I can do is be present to it, be present to who God is.  I've been reading a book my mother-in-law sent me called "One Thousand Gifts."  It's phenomenal if you love to read or even just need grace.  That book has been a God moment for me, teaching me how to thank God in all moments.  My freedom from living one step ahead of myself, trusting in security, has made me more generous and a better friend.  I've stopped to be able to see the people around me who are hurting and in dark, scary places.  God has done some open heart surgery on me since I am present to him in the now.  I'm not saying that we should all just quit our jobs and spend our time reading but if your life doesn't allow you moments in the present then you probably need to re-evaluate your situation.  God should be the first thing we think about in the morning and the last thought before we fall asleep.  As my friend Celia would say, "He is a blessing to us."  He really is the number one thing we should be thankful for.  I hope that you can "live not only by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God."     

Confession and other silly feelings

I did something today that I was quite nervous to do.  I told my pastor that I thought he was cool.  It was actually a confession, even though it seems simple and silly.  I have been lugging this admiration around for months. 

If you've read any of my previous blogs you'll uncover that I have spent a lot of this past year trying to impress people, trying to be what they wanted me to be so I'd be "in."  So in my thinking my pastor was cool, I've been trying to be low key, act like it's not exciting to me when he sees me at church and says hello.  But out of that I haven't quite been myself.  Normally I am pretty dorky and love to joke with people when I see them.  With Michael, I get quiet.  My husband laughs at me and so do my friends because they all know that I kind of want to be just like him. 

In our Lenten series, our pastors have talked about confession and being able to be fully ourselves.  Then I started thinking that Michael would never get to see the real me and that made me sad because I think he'd really like me.  Not this girl who wanted to say and do the right things around him and act like she didn't care whether or not she was acknowledged.  I think I'd be funny to him just like I am to my friends.  They love me so why am I so afraid to be myself?

So I confessed to Michael, just to get it off of my chest and say, "I haven't been myself and I want to free me from that."  It seemed silly and I don't even know what I said anymore but I feel a weight lifted.  Now I can be myself without wanting to be Michael.  I can just thank God for the giftings he's given Michael and how they've spoke to me and I can just admit my own silliness. 

Maybe I'll feel some embarrassment for this all later but I don't really care.  The reason I have three of my very best friends was because I just laid it all out.  I said, "I want to be your friend."  No honestly, that's verbatim.  Sometimes people don't need the mess we make of things, sometimes they just need a clear picture of how we feel.  This year, I'm just going to continue to live in who God made me to be and constantly hang on his every word to help me even more fully enter that.  I consider myself incredibly blessed for the group of people that I call friends and for a community led by people who want us to be fully ourselves.  Not everyone gets that side of God but I'm going to try to change that.

God is Love?

God is love.  Seems like a great slogan.  Something we might hold onto without really believing and it somehow having the ability to placebo us into feeling better about life.  God is love.  Hmmm. 

My pastor, Michael Hidalgo, gave a wonderful message this past weekend about how much God loves us.  I must have heard this message more than I have had birthdays.  But I have also heard the following messages about how we need to stand for what we believe in and who we need to vote for.  To be honest I have never fallen for the latter but I've never quite understood the former.  God is love?  I believe that but not with unconditional, perfectly, or purely tacked on it. 

I have always lived a life where love was manipulative.  Love was give and take, with this great rope to play tug-of-war with in the middle.  Love was never wholly giving yourself away to express your deep desire to love another.  Love was about who was smarter and wiser and could believe in and communicate their opposition better to get what they wanted.  And as I have been reading the Bible lately, I'm thinking there is no room for selfish motives.  God has greater plans and he isn't in the business of twisted grace.  God is love.  It gets easier to believe, to wipe away the manipulations and see it glaring in front of you for a moment but then life continues and it goes away again with our plans and intentions.  Until it comes back roaring and pursuing us personally.  God loves me?  An all new question.

Michael has been driving home this point that "God loves us too much to let us stay where we are."  In the past if I heard that I would think that meant I was supposed to work harder to get where God wanted me to be because I'm not good enough yet.  But Michael took it a step further and reminded us that we are not piles of garbage that he sent his son for but we are beautiful beings that he hates seeing destroyed.  Whoa, God loves me?  I don't want to be destroyed either.

After the service I was sitting there thinking about this past....life.  I think about how I have misunderstood God as a father, one who disciplines but does not love.  I think about how when I first believed and knew God's grace but only to begin a journey of being a better me not to get back to the garden.  I think about how if I were a parent I would never want my child to think I only loved them if they were well behaved and without mistakes.  I think about a friend who just recently shared the horror of childhood sexual abuse and how all I wanted for them was to know that they were loved deeply by my husband and I.  I think about how in the middle of handing out the punishment of the Israelites through Jeremiah, God stops and says "But you can still turn back" and how much it must have broken his heart to carry it out.  Yet he gives hope and I think, God loves me.  He loves me too much, in my beautiful mess, to keep me where I am.  For the first time I understand that God is love and that Jesus is Good News.

I wonder how many more people need to hear this and I feel like a new Christian wanting to tell everyone that God loves them.  I don't want to go and evangelize and convince people that God exists.  I am.  You can't dispute the most concrete words ever spoken.  Everyone knows that God exists whether or not they understand it or admit it, at least that is what I believe.  But what if faith just means believing that God loves you?  What if faith is that pure?  Now that my eyes have seen his love is for me I trust him in a whole new way because I know he is a loving father.  God is love.  Unconditionally, purely and perfectly.   

The Forgiving Fields

Lent is meant to be a time of prayer, fasting, abstinence, and confession, not just for giving up pop or Facebook.  I never knew that.  I've actually never celebrated Lent because I didn't get it.  However, I am friends with my pastor on Facebook and he posts daily about Lent, or really whatever he's teaching about Sunday.  So when he posted a link about 40 Ideas for Lent I was quick to read it.  The author is Rachel Held Evans in case you want to Google it.  She lists questions, books, prayers and disciplines.  Two of the questions hit home for me because of the type of year it has been.

I have written a little bit about this past year but in order to unpack how God has created a passion for Lent in me I'd like to share some of the discouragements and life-changers that have occured.  While I was in Ireland and then during our engagement I had a number of people who were close to Philip take either him or myself aside and express concern about the way I joked with Philip.  They claimed it could be hurtful and disrespectful.  If they had known my upbringing or my past, they may have had more grace or discernment concerning these conversations.  Looking back I understand it was probably done out of love for Philip but all that it spoke to me was, "You're not good enough for Philip.  Treat him right or you're out."  I struggled with that because I am not a people pleaser but I loved Philip deeply and I knew he loved these people so I felt the need to prove myself to them even though I thought they understood me already.  The thing is, they may have been right but I wasn't prepared to change at that time. 

If you know anything about weddings, you know that everyone has an opinion and you can't make everyone happy.  However, you should probably try because as much as we think it is "our" special day it is special to the people who have loved, supported and cared for us.  I will sadly admit that I was very selfish and looking back I may have done some things differently.  Our day was perfect but I don't know if I considered everyone involved.  Either way, in the midst of it I was entirely overwhelmed.  I had no idea who to walk me down the aisle (my parents are divorced) and I kept going back and forth about it, hurting some people in the process and having others hurt me.  It was a hard decision but ultimately I feel I made the right one for myself. 

When I started my new job I was not an instant hit.  There were a couple of people who wanted my job and others who just didn't like me.  Specifically one of these people was outwardly mean to me for their own anger and bitterness.  I can't say that I didn't understand, I have been there before.  Thankfully God has redeemed some of the hardships of that situation.

In light of all these things I felt that Lent was the perfect opportunity to release myself and others from the anger, frustrations, and hurts of this past year.  So I gave up all of my television shows.  Although that seems pretty cliche it isn't for me.  Philip and I love television and have our shows.  If I open at work, I get home just in time to watch them and if I close I Hulu them the next morning.  This leaves no quiet time for me with the Lord.  I desire to be more consistent in my relationship with God because life changes but his Word doesn't and we need that more than we know, or at least more than I know.  In order to be intentional about my forgiveness of others I have dedicated each of the five weeks of Lent to five of the people who in particular I have struggled with this year. 

God has been good to respond even in week one. He has given me His eyes and heart to see more clearly how I can love in the midst of pain.  I have been living off of Luke 6: 27-36 where Jesus talks about loving our enemies.  It isn't easy and some people aren't necessarily our enemies but they need the grace that we all need.  God has begun healing the wounds of this past year and reminding me of the truth about Him AND me. 

The two questions that Rachel Held Evans posted that put this process into motion were "When I wake up on Resurrection Sunday morning, how will I be different" and "Is there anyone in my life from whom I need to ask forgiveness or pursue reconciliation?"  On Resurrection Sunday I want to wake up feeling freed from the anger that I allowed to pursue me this last year and run, chains free, through fields of forgiveness because He died to forgive me.