Meditations from the heart

You are totally accepted. You are extremely valued. You are eternally loved. You are completely forgiven and now that you know who you are it is time to take that step and begin to live as you are accepted, to live as you are valued, to live as you are loved and to live as you are forgiven. You have been chosen and set aside for a special calling. To show the ones put on your path Gods acceptance. To show them that they are a treasure. To show them Gods love and forgiveness. It was the Sunday before my world changed as I knew it. I didn’t know it but God did. I was sent on a special mission to be love but I didn’t know it. I never felt like anything special. Growing up in a dysfunctional home will do that to you. It leaves you craving for all the things you should have received as a little kid but you just grow up feeling so empty so insignificant. It was a Sunday like any other Sunday or so I thought. We were being called to be the love where we lived. I had recently just moved to a new home in a new city. I was trying to adjust to all the new changes but just felt so alone and lonely. I still missed my old home with all its familiar sights and sounds. It was still home to me. I felt like a nomad caught in between the place that felt like home and the place that didn’t. I imagined I probably felt a little like Abraham when God called him away from his home. So the call to love where I lived was a challenge to me. In hindsight it took years to feel at home there. But that day as I walked forward to be anointed I never could have known that I was being called to show others a different way to live. But God knew. Then the pandemic hit and I was on lockdown. These were challenging days. Challenging to new couples and old alike. But here I was and I was going to make the best of it. It was a divine time for me where I drew closer to God and found my way back to Him and also a time that showed me that I was no longer the person I use to be. Recovery had changed me and recovery lived in me and began to change others through me. For me the pandemic was just the starting point of what God would do through me. To bring serenity and calmness and healing. You are called to. Close your eyes. Take a calming breath and think about where you live. Picture those you live with. Now picture where you work. The people you see day in and day out. Maybe they have become an extended family to you too. Where you live and work and walk and shop and go to church this is where you are called to be love. You are capable and you can do it. It doesn’t happen overnight. It happens when you create space for God to work and to move and breathe in you. When I first moved I started going to Community Christian and one of my first Sundays there I heard this song that has stayed with me and created an open space for God to begin to move in my life. . As I listened to it a longing to draw close to God began to flicker once again. The song says I will make room for you to do whatever you want to and slowly over the next three years I began to make room. One thing God used to draw me close to him was loneliness. Partly because when I moved out to Lemont I didn’t have very many friends in my life and also because I was living in a new place I didn’t know anyone. Compounded by the fact that for the next two years we were in the middle of a pandemic. God had made me lonely so I could make room for him and that is what I did. One of the things God did during this time was draw me close to my sister. Growing up we were never close. My mom had always said to me “I had your sister for you. Growing up with mom was hard. We had our own struggles and pains and spent most of our early adulthood trying to heal from it. God had us on separate paths. As children we suffered silently not knowing we both felt alone insecure and not accepted. It seems Looking back now that we could never be close as sisters as long as my mom was around and it was no wonder because she either pitted us against each other or was jealous. About a year after my mom passed away I realized I never really knew my sister and I was seeing her through the filter of the past. So one Sunday I prayed that God would draw me close to my sister. God used that empty space to draw me close to her and to Him. And now she is my best friend. I believe that in my late 30s when God began to heal me He brought many wonderful women into my life to love me when I couldn’t love myself and to heal my mother wounds. These women will always nestle closely into my heart and I think of them often and am grateful for how they helped bring healing to my life. I needed this before God could bring my sister and I close together and to walk this path side by side. In this room God grew my heart when He gave me my dog Daisy. Before I met Daisy I was still struggling with loneliness and my heart still felt numb most of the time. But God has a way of using the most unlikely things to open our hearts. I was never a dog person. Honestly I didn’t like dogs and I would actually cross the street if I saw a dog coming. I never planned on getting a dog but God had his plans and my life was about to never be the same again. It was Father’s Day and I went to visit my dad. While I was there I went out to the barn to look at his dogs. This was something I normally did when we visited him. But on this day there she was the dog that would open my heart. With her warm soft eyes she pulled me in and I haven’t been the same. I fell in love instantly and she came home to live with me. I can’t explain how it happened but my heart began to open again. This decision to get Daisy changed the course of my life because I began to ask myself what do I really want to do with my life. I knew it wasn’t working retail anymore. I made more room for God to guide me. In this room God whispers. 1 Kings 19:13 says “After the fire died out, there was nothing but the sound of calm breeze. And through this breeze a gentle, quiet voice entered into Elijah’s ears” God quietly reminded me of children. When I was young I always knew I loved young children and felt a calling to become a teacher and along the way I became disillusioned and lost my dream. God opened the door and I began to work with toddlers. My heart opened even more and God brought affection into my heart once again. I just love those moments when you feel like you’ve come full circle. Recently I was sitting at Community Christian. Pondering these last 3 years in my heart and remembering the song Make Room and all God has done in my heart because I made room for Him. I’ve experienced His presence in the lonely places. His favor through Daisy, through His purpose in my calling to love and nurture toddlers, through His people in my relationship with my sister and through His Spirit that’s with me through the loneliness and long nights. As you walk this path with Jesus and begin this journey and you begin to stop listening to those voices of the past and begin believing really believing who Jesus says you are in Him and make room for him to move in whatever way He wants to. Maybe it will be through music, through scripture, through people, through dreams or visions you will begin to be more accepting, more loving, more forgiving.Recently God has been moving me deeper and showing me in my own life even though many years ago I began this journey of discovering and loving and accepting who I am. I still was believing the lies and still living it out in my life. Recently I buried my mom’s ashes. It was the morning before and God whispered to me “Your thoughts are lying to you.” It was true I did believe everything I thought. I believed no one liked me. I believed I was never good enough. I just could never believe that I was loved and accepted no matter how hard I tried. In that moment my eyes were opened and I believed. I believed I spent my life listening to the lies of the past. Instantly I believed who God said I was that I am loved and accepted exactly as I am. I decided in that moment I was done. It took me a lifetime to get there. It was time to stand up. To stand tall and believe what God said to me. The promise He gave me so long ago that He would change my name. That I would no longer be ugly but beautiful. No longer afraid but fearless and no longer insecure but confident. I was stepping into who God made me to be. So the next day I stood up and I walked. As we stood at the gravesite and watched the hole being dug where my daughter would place my mom’s ashes. I thought about my life and how buried I had been by all the lies I believed for so long. It was a darkness that penetrated my mind. We stood there and my aunt asked would anyone like to say anything. Silence. Some moments require no words. This was that moment. I watched as my daughter placed the ashes down into the darkness and I felt more liberated than I ever have in my life. I watched as dirt piled up around her and with her it was over. I was done and the lies were buried and I was free to be who I was always meant to be. Happy, joyous and free and it was through this time of making room for God to move that I really began to walk in the freedom of the truth of w am. So take the time. Make the space and just sit back in wonder and see what God will do in you and through you.