Grudgingly, Hopefully, Trudging Towards the New Me

Here is the ugly, beautiful messy story of this new version of me.  I am six months into one of the biggest transitions of my life.  I hate it and I love it. 
I would have never chosen this, but it is what it is and so it means transition. When I delivered each of my babies, during transition I always threw up.  Seriously got violently ill.  I don't like transition, my body doesn't like transition but here we are...body, soul and spirit transitioning.  However, something great came after those times of transition...my babies.  So transition is painful, messy and sickening but necessary for the next great thing.



I watch the sunrise every morning and am reminded that all the earth is transitioning.  It is spinning, days are coming and going and weather is transitioning.   Truth is God designed us with transition in mind.  We weren't meant to stay stagnant. From glory to glory is what scripture teaches us.  We were created for transition, for change, transformation, whatever you want to call it....most of the time it is gradual and we are hopefully, joyfully changing with little or no intention.  It is just happening as we grow older and wiser.   

Not this time.  I am grudgingly, hopefully, trudging.  I am forcing myself to believe that His purposes will be seen.  That one day I will just suddenly be able to see the why, in all of this.  It's weird that it is so painful still six months later.  That my life had been segmented into before Justin died and after and now it is segmented again....before I lost my life and after. Both traumatizing. Both life altering. 

I know you have to lose your life in order to find it.  The scriptural principle.  I get it.  I lost my friends, my job, my spouse, my life literally was stripped away.  And I loved my life.  I loved being a pastor's wife, loved my church family, loved my home.  But it was sadly coated in a beautiful lie and untangling from that meant transition.  In order to survive it meant transition.  Difficult, painful, gritty, truth telling, ugly transition.  To stay in that other world, would have destroyed me and I knew it.  In the very core of my being I knew it and so I began transitioning to a new version of me.

Sometimes this transitioning to a new home, a new job, new friends is actually beautiful in a haunting kind of way.  In that way where your heart is shattered and you are holding the pieces together with duck tape but no one can see that. They are kind and loving and you could see being friends with them but the ghost of your past are just lurking there.  You can laugh with them but inside you are thinking about all the history that they don't know.  I miss the friends that know the whole story, that love you even when you laugh to loud, or cry to easy.  It's history that cements people together and I don't have history here with these new friends. Not yet anyway.

And yet, history is always unfolding, transitioning.  New history happening every day.  I have new people in my life, I am gradually making new history.  They will never take the place of the history I have had, but they are part of the history I am making now.  It is difficult and vulnerable this transitioning and creating a new life.  Nothing feels safe and stable (including myself).

There is a rumbling and a shaking in order to create real change....all great things are preceded by chaos.  There is a great thing happening, but the transition is painful, ugly, lonely, messy and I want to rejoice in it....I really do.  

It's just sometimes I want to throw up.  Sometimes I want to scream and cry and shake my fist at the maker of the universe.  I am terrified, vulnerable and  strangely out of my element.   Then it passes, the Lord gives me a sweet comfort.  He reminds me that I have survived, that I made it through another day, week, month.  He reminds me that I laughed, that I made a friend, that I have a purpose,

So I throw myself into the transition, the new job, the new learning curve, the purpose, the passion of helping these women on the other side of the world.  I seek to make new friends, find a new rhythm, stay close to family and I go to church.  I go to church, where I am just a member not a pastor.  I listen to the word, I pass by hundreds of people and wonder what the future holds for me.  Will I get to know them, will I love them like I loved my church family before?

I will rejoice in the truth.  I will rejoice in this transition.  I will rejoice in the fact that no matter where I am or where I go, I do not go alone.

Stripped of it all, except Jesus who will never leave me or forsake me.  Now, I am becoming a different version of me.  Transitioning excitedly into someone I sometimes don't even recognize.   I am braver and stronger  and at the same time more broken and humbled than ever before.  This new me is dependent on Christ,  not my own strength and way out of my comfort zone.
My strength has left and in this transition, in this push to the new me....it is all Him because I just want to throw up (Okay, maybe that is an exaggeration).

But seriously, my own ability is not enough for this new me....it has to be all God.

I know what you are thinking, didn't she already learn this?  

Apparently there are different levels of this kind of learning.  Don't judge.

Anyway that is my story for now....my messy, vulnerable, crazy, exciting new adventure.  I miss my tribe, my friends that I call family(framily) and I think I always will, but I am making room for new friends.  There is room in my heart for the new and the old, and the world will eventually quit shaking, the chaos of emotion, the shaking of transition will eventually lessen.  Le't be honest this was an  "8" on the earthquake scale. 

Thank God, He has kept me through it all,  close to His heart and set my feet upon solid ground. True,  everywhere I look in my heart it is shaken and crumbled but He is the resurrection King!