On An Alluding Lent, Identity In Christ, and Idols

"If you shut yourself away from life and the children, everything your heart is tied to, and you bang your head against the wall to write something beautiful, it won't work--your soul will be empty and you will have nothing to write about. But get outside with the children, live life, work, serve, and then it will pour out of you onto the screen."--Mr. Simmons

Here I am, laid bare. Sometimes it seems as if my writing life will take over everything, like the blob.

A couple of days ago, Ivy came to me at the computer, and in her run-on speak asked, "Mama, it's a beautiful day outside, and it's warm and it's really nice, and we're all dressed and our room is clean--can we go outside and play?"

"Shh...Mama's busy. Not now. Yes, we can go later. I'm almost done." I shoot her a quick half-hearted smile. I feel a piece of my soul snatched away, torn.

A while later she comes back, asks again. Shes does this a few times. Finally, she tells me, "You are going to be on there forever--you've been saying that all morning." Wow. Conviction's arrows pierce my heart, before I can let my soul be completely torn apart--God in His grace, steers me back to Him, to wholeness. I tell her yes, we will go outside. She dashes off like lightening.

The insides burn, how can I be so cruel to these little ones--just needing me, just needing freedom, just needing life? Just the other day, we were dancing, now here we are again--going over and over the same miserable lesson--when will I ever learn? Oh, I am not adequate to this task--someone better than me should do this job--that God gave them to me to take care of and to usher into His light--I feel so unworthy.

I feel the weight of my desire, my idol encroaching, crushing, pulling me down to the depths.

Maybe this is the perfect time for a Lenten fast, because I can't breathe and I can't escape this driving force to be more, to be good enough, to be better, to be validated, to have higher numbers, to be known and yet, the adrenaline surges and anxiety siezes and I'm scared to death, quaking in my boots to be known.

The dream to be a writer--that has always been there--seems to have come on full force now that I've fully entered my thirties--like an angry bull let out of a pen into arena.

That bull, he is really afraid--he doesn't like being cornered--he doesn't at all like to feel threatened--it makes him angry and a force to be reckoned with.

And here I am, getting older, and nothing to show for it--and I feel threatened--feel not good enough. And I am a force to be reckoned with--only this bull is not in the arena--he is in the china shop--and my sweet children, they take the hardest blows against their china hearts when Mama forgets to have a servant's humility pumping through her veins and wants to serve her own balloon-filled-with-helium-desires.

And I wonder, who am I?

What defines me? Being a mediocre writer, a dabbling artist, a not-good-enough-singer {who now only sings in the shower}, runner who comes in nearly last in every race, an almost nursing student, beauty school drop-out, mommy in pajamas with four children hanging about my legs? Is that me?

Which title says I'm good enough? Which do people accept?

Oh, the weight of my human sin. MY sin, and that of no one else. Mine is the one God whispers to me about--when I think on others' and not mine, it's someone else whispering. And what I hear God saying, is this sin of mine, how it bogs, how it drags me beneath the drowning, tumultuous currents, without me realizing.

My insecurities--which are really just pride with a mask on--they cause me to run hard and fast after things to fulfill my empty identity. And this idol of mine, my writing, it is exactly that for me.

And God is saying to me, "Daughter, my precious child, look to me. Don't pay any attention to what others say about you--keep your focus on Me--in Me, you will find all you need, all you desire, all joy and peace and yes, even peace with yourself--because in Me, wrapped up in Me, is the only place you will find your identity."

I read this on Robin's site, {hover over words and click to see her post} and it struck me: "He is my best form of identification – He declares my identity and legitimacy when the world is screaming about my lack."

Thoughts about identity and idols had been circulating in my mind, ever since a late-night talk with Husband and ever since a friend had asked me to write at one of her sites--and this friend is well-known--and this scared me senseless, and at the same time gave me all sorts of {false} hopes for the future--making me a balled mess of fear, rapture, anxiety, frustration, elation and gratefulness with a bit of daunting failure and accomplishment thrown all in at once.

I did not even write back at first--and what deep-seeted fears run so rampant in the dark caverns of me that I would treat this angel of a friend so rudely? I finally wrote and accepted, and tried hard at being gracious. All of this brought me to question: What am I--upside down blogger in an upside down kingdom with humility and aim only to serve and love, or am I  just another hat trying to find a hook on which to hang, hoping to gain numbers, get published and win?

Is this just a place to BE someone? To find a title that says I'm worth something?

Writing has pushed me, jolted me with electric current, said, "Wake up!", and God has used it to show me my real heart. And the answer that God has wanted me to find--not in my head, but in my heart--is this: my best identification is Christ, as my new friend Robin so cleverly wrote.

"Your true identity is as a child of God. This is the identity you have to accept. Once you have claimed it and settled in it, you can live in a world that gives you much joy as well as pain. You can receive the praise as well as the blame that comes to you as an opportunity for strengthening your basic identity, because the identity that makes you free is anchored beyond all human praise and blame. You belong to God, and it is as a child of God that you are sent into the world. "

Henri J. M. Nouwen
Nouwen Centre

"The truth, even though I cannot feel it right now, is that I am the chosen child of God, precious in God's eyes, called the Beloved from all eternity and held safe in an everlasting embrace... We must dare to opt consciously for our chosenness and not allow our emotions, feelings, or passions to seduce us into self-rejection."

Henri J. M. Nouwen
Nouwen Centre

"He has great tranquillity of heart who cares neither for the praises nor the fault-finding of men. He will easily be content and pacified, whose conscience is pure. You are not holier if you are praised, nor the more worthless if you are found fault with. What you are, that you are; neither by word can you be made greater than what you are in the sight of God."

Thomas a Kempis
Biography and Works

And this is how God fills the soul-holes, and repairs the torn away soul pieces that I myself have ripped, and He brings me to wholeness--this is how He fills my empty identity to the brim: He adopted me into His family, He has become my real Father, and has told me that I am His daughter, I am a co-heir with Christ, and I can call Him Abba, Daddy.

So through sickness going 'round this house relentless, and financial confusion, and Lent's plans alluding me, the big dreams I had for it unfulfilled, I ask myself, how can I best fast for Lent? With Easter quickly approaching, what one way can I truly, with everything I have, honor my Savior?

How can little hearts and big hearts alike best prepare for such a life-abundant event--how can we till the hard ground of our hearts and make soil ready to receive the glorious, beautiful promise of the resurrection power and all He has given, made rightly our's through His blood sacrifice?

And here is the hard part: for me, it is in withdrawing into Him, into quieter, more still moments of reflection. It is in fasting from the thing I love the most--my writing.

In giving more time to my children, in bending down and inclining my ear to their petitions, their requests, yes, their demands and their teasing laughter--I will be entering into the glory of God.

In allowing myself rest and recuperating from illness, I am leaning on Him, obeying and surrendering to the season He has called forth, and in stepping away from buzzing screens and outside into the marvelous light of His creation, I am bringing Him honor and praise with my time.

My prayer is that in my frailty, He can make something out of nothing in this Lent season.

{Just for a different perspective, I like the way The Message talks about identity in Christ}:

"But when the time arrived that was set by God the Father, God sent his Son, born among us of a woman, born under the conditions of the law so that he might redeem those of us who have been kidnapped by the law. Thus we have been set free to receive our rightful heritage. You can tell for sure that you are now full adopted as his own children because God sent the spirit of his Son into our lives crying out, "Papa! Father!" Doesn't that privelege of intimate conversation with God make it plain that you are not a slave, but a child? And if you are a child, you're also an heir, with complete access to the inheritance."--Galatians 4:3-7; The Message

"I am His by purchase and I am His by conquest; I am His by donation and I am His by election; I am His by covenant and I am His by marriage; I am wholly His; I am peculiarly His; I am universally His; I am eternally His. Once I was a slave but now I am a son; once I was dead but now I am alive; once I was darkness but now I am light in the Lord; once I was a child of wrath, an heir of hell, but now I am an heir of heaven; once I was Satan's bond-servant but now I am God's freeman; once I was under the spirit of bondage but now I am under the Spirit of adoption that seals up to me the remission of my sins, the justification of my person and the salvation of my soul."

Thomas Brooks
Brief Biography

I won't be gone completely, friends. I will still be counting 1,000 gifts, just giving less time to writing and screens and more to family, prayer, God's creation...

Some other posts by beautiful, brave women who inspired me to step on out and write on my ponderings...Dolly@Soul Stops, Jennifer Camp @You Are My Girls, Mary Leigh@ BlueCottonMemory, Michelle@ A Surrendered Life, Roseann@ Tuning My Heart, Michelle@ Graceful and Jen@ Finding Heaven...
You will be MUCH blessed to visit these ladies' posts--this, THIS is honesty and beautiful hearts reaching for HIM!


This post shared in community with:

sweet Ann...

whimsical Tracy...


the lovely kd...

and beautiful Jennifer...