The withering and the wild: a love letter to hunger.
Honesty hour:
I have been trying to write this post for days. Probably even a couple of weeks at this point. But I've never felt fully satisfied with the words that showed up on the page. They felt awkward and forced and not necessarily true. The reality is that I am struggling, that I have struggled for years, with the performance trap. I want to write you a beautiful, flowing letter about a life lived wild and free, but the overwhelming majority of the time, I don't feel wild and free. More often than not, I feel withered and trapped. What I can tell you for certain is this: I am hungry, and I am learning more than I ever anticipated I would when I started my journey with the word beloved.
I wish I could tell you about the first time that I ever felt like too much or not enough, but the truth is, I can't. Not because the memory is too painful, but because rather, it simply isn't there to recall. Sometimes I wonder if I have just always been that way. I am the oldest child, a good girl through and through. My standards have always been high and I have held them with little regard to what other people might think. My entire life, I have tried to portray a stoic exterior. I wanted everyone around me to think that I was a finished product.
A year or so ago, I started to see a couple of my favorite bloggers writing posts to track their monthly goals. It was something that I had never thought to do in all of my years of writing in an online space. Really, I have never been much of a goal person, anyway. January 1st would come and go, and rarely would I give resolutions a second thought. The whole idea felt very optimistic and romantic, and while those things seem really attractive and positive, to me, they felt dangerous. Living a wild and free life, a life that was characterized by strength and dignity and laughter, well, that was for other people. I would rather stay safe and maintain my aura of finality rather than dare to share a bit of optimism with the world and then fall short.
Another writer shares about how she is finding her way through the woods. More than once, she calls it a process, and acknowledges that nothing worthwhile and beautiful happens overnight. She shares, post after post, month after month about how there is no map for this place. The woods don't work that way. But I want them to, and I am often angry that they don't abide by my own rules.
All this to say: I don't know if I can actually say that I've hit rock bottom yet, because nothing has really changed. I'm hungry, but I have yet to actually begin to feed myself, because I'm too afraid to get messy. Wild and free still seems like something I'll never be.
Except, of course, the truth is that I already am.
Wild is the nature that was given to me in the garden, my original state of being. There was no fear, no anxiety, no worrying about the numbers on the scale or the bank statement or the stats page. I knew my Father, and my Father knew me: the real me, the naked and messy and unashamed version. The one He said was good.
Free is the identity given freely through the work of the cross. Freedom to return, freedom to run into the Father's arms, even after all this time, even after I exchanged my wild nature for sin and decided to walk away. I am free to rest in His sufficiency, in spite of my own lack.
I feel like God is waving, pointing, jumping up and down to try to get my attention, and I'm the girl dressed in uncertainty who keeps looking around to make sure that it really is me that he's looking at.
Who, me?
Yes, you.
What I'm learning in this space, slowly but surely, is that there's really no magical equation. There's not an elusive right answer, and the only wrong answer is to let fear be the boss and keep me from moving at all. What I'm learning is that when I am at my worst, my messiest and most vulnerable, God has things to say to me.
And perhaps for the first time, I am trying to listen.
A Prayer for the Hungry
Help us to admit our hunger and give us grace to not treat it with resentment. Help us to embrace our messy, especially when it is the very last thing we want to do. Help us to not dread small steps, small beginnings.
It is scary to ask that You would make a withered and trapped but seemingly safe life become uncomfortable, but it is what we're here for. Inside, we desperately want to move. We know we need to move, even when we say we're okay and everything is fine. We don't want to settle for fine anymore.
Help us to make bold statements, to ask courageous questions, and not immediately want to take them back.
You never offered an easy way out. When we asked for bread, you gave us your body. When we asked for wine, you poured out your blood. Help us to take you at your word when you promise that you know exactly what we need before we ask for it. Give us the faith to ask for it anyway -- to ask out loud in the car, in the grocery store check out aisle, in the shower, in our cubicles.
Help us to practice the discipline of no longer taking our cups to things and people that can never fill us up. And help us to have grace for ourselves when we slip up, because we will slip up.
Silence the voices that whisper the lie that we have to be a finished product in order to go out into the world. You made the world, and you made us, and you said everything was good. We want to believe that.
Help us to simply decide to walk wild and free, in this moment, and in the next, because sometimes we will have to choose it that frequently. We're quick to forget.
We want to get well, but we're afraid of what it might require of us. Remind us that your perfect love drives out all of our fear.
Take our hands, lead us in the way of the wild and free.
I was graciously given an advanced copy of Wild and Free as part of a launch team. I was not required to write a review, but I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Jess Connolly and Hayley Morgan are two truly beautiful women who make me more hungry for Jesus every day, and this book is their love letter to you, an hope filled anthem for all the days when you feel like we are too much and not enough.