Category: Identity (Page 2 of 2)

I’ve always been intense. People tend to assume that my son Kaden is a mini Jason, but the truth of the matter is that my act first/think later, wear his emotions on his sleeve son is really a mini-me.

When I was a kid I neither understood the intensity nor recognized that I often absorbed the emotions of people around me. Without the outlet of recognition or expression I was often left with a stomach ache.

Is a child in your life exhibiting the symptoms of anxiety? Have you ever considered that the anxiety might actually be high intuition and empathy?

During high school and college my intense nature was most often expressed in anger, which was actually acceptable – especially in sports. The intensity fueled a drive to achieve. Life was something to conquer.

Do you cheer for high-achievers? We’re all impressed that they’re able to accomplish so much. But have you ever wondered what drives them?

At age twenty-one —      Life.    Slowed.    Down.

I graduated from college, got married, took an office job, joined a women’s ministry leadership team, and essentially stepped into a quiet, suburban life.

Have you squelched an aspect of your personality because you think it doesn’t fit your current role or season of life?

Oh, I tried to force my intense nature to disappear. I focused on productivity, practiced spiritual meditation, and sought satisfaction in my good(albeit routine), suburban life.

Here’s what I learned — when a strong emotion such as intensity/anger lacks an outlet it WILL release itself either by making you physically ill or finding some unhealthy expression.

This created three major problems:

1) Frequent headaches.

2) Consequences that required clean-up.

3) Space for lies to enter my heart. (The biggest lie… one that I still battle from time to time… is that I am “too much” for people.)

Have you ever noticed how lies have a way of weaving themselves deep into our core?  One of the best things we can do in terms of ‘self-care’ is to ask God to show us the truth about our identity and allow that truth to work like a salve pushing the deep slivers of lies from our core.

What lie haunts you? Don’t assume it will disappear if you just ignore it.

Lies must be combatted with truth.

When I reflect upon that season of suppression and lies, the ironic thing is that simultaneously, through speaking, writing, leading, and counseling I was modeling authenticity – creating safe environments for people to take off their masks and practice being real with God and friends.  I was practicing (and teaching) authenticity while all the while suppressing an important part of my God-given personality.

God knew what I was doing.

Ephesians 2:10 says we are his masterpiece.  The word for masterpiece is a priceless work of art.  By suppressing part of my personality I was essentially dimming his work of art.

One day I ‘stumbled’ upon an amazing little book – Yes by Ann Kiemel, a dynamic evangelist and activist, a strong leader during the ‘Jesus Movement’ of the 1970s.  Ann’s words prompted a domino effect, unlocking my intensity by attuning it to a new drum beat – my Good Dad’s heartbeat for humanity.  The drumbeat has led me to a deeper, richer life.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. urged us to use our anger as a transforming force towards change.  I believe Jesus modeled this type of passion (dare I say, intensity).

Today when my insides churn I try to put that anger to good use.  This is by no means a perfected practice.  I still have to build time in my schedule to run some of the energy out.  And I will forever appreciate my husband who sees value in the intensity and my friends who understand it and can handle an occasional vent session.

Overall, I’d say that I am finally living life the way my Good Dad designed me to live it:

Observe.  Absorb.  Take courage.  Move forward.  Be a change agent.

How can you live differently? Are you allowing him to use all of you?

Is it time to be made whole?

Laura

Kelly Stewart is an amazing woman of God who we are so excited to share with you all today! She is a true southern girl…so it helps to read her post with a southern twang! 🙂 You can also read more from her on her blog, www.kellystewart.org

Enjoy!

Six years and one month ago, God wrecked my heart.

He held up a very big mirror that revealed the condition of my heart….and I was shocked. You see, I had spent years striving and building a the most awesome Christian life. I went to seminary and got a degree. I went to grad school and got another. I was married to an amazing man, I had three young children that I got to stay at home with each day. I was remodeling our seventies rancher and working part time to get “out of the house.” We had a yellow lab for crying out loud.

My husband, Jason, was a pastor, so we were at the church constantly. We had surrendered to ministry years ago and we were climbing the church ladder. We had amazing friends, with whom we did life, and small group. We vacationed, had extended family living nearby and filled our days with private school, soccer, church activities and family outings. We spent our days saying we wanted to build the Kingdom, but if you looked at our calendar and our checkbook, we were building the next great soccer player and Target.

We were living the Christian family dream.

So as a part of our desire to live out our faith, my husband and I traveled to Africa on a mission trip, because let’s be honest…is there any other place on the planet that represents the “send me Lord” act of sacrifice more than Africa? Nope. We were even hard core in our choice of where we would spend a week sharing the Gospel.

In all honesty, we didn’t set out to build our own life and fit God into in a way that kept us comfortable and safe…it just kind of happened.  We really did desire to build the Kingdom, we just somehow built our own kingdom and then worked to keep it running.

We were displaying the character of Jesus,or at least we thought. It just became somewhat skewed. For example…

Hospitality= working all day to make sure my house is spotless, my meal is 100% home-cooked, pinterest worthy decor and still look effortless before I would extend an invite to friends.

 

The problem with this is the minute your friends don’t comment on how nice your home looks or how delish your meal was, you strive harder and harder the next time to get that praise and compliment.  And your identity becomes more  wrapped in the praise of Man and less a reflection of the identity you received from Christ at salvation.

So Africa…changed me and began a shift inside me that was both tragic and beautiful at the same time.

We were in a remote village in Guinea, telling stories of Jesus and visiting with the women and children. The missionary we were working with had a 9 year old daughter who had asked to hold a baby adn her Mom warned her the baby had no diaper. Here is an excerpt from my blog….

“Their daughter asked to hold the baby and she warned her, that it could have an accident on her since they don’t wear diapers.  She just had a dress on.  Sure enough, 5 minutes later, she peed on K.  She was not happy.  I took her and kind of held her out in front of me.  This was my first conviction of the day.  I held a little baby away from me.  Why?  Because I didn’t want to be teeteed on, I didn’t want to hold a baby with no diaper.  I am not proud of myself.  It was in that moment, in that village surrounded by children, that the story we had just told, pierced my heart.  I was just so overwhelmed.

Completely overwhelmed and I felt totally alone in that moment.  As I have had time to think through this, because all these emotions just flashed through me then, I can say that I was afraid.  I was afraid of germs, I was afraid of the dried snot on their faces, the dirt on their hands, the feet with goat droppings caked to  the bottoms of them.

But more than anything, I was afraid of opening my heart too much, of thinking through the reality that this is their life,  and of what the Lord would ask of me.

I mentally began to shut down at this point.  This is not something that I write easily.  I think how you think you will respond, is often different when you are in the moment.  Sometimes, the Lord reveals your true character, He breaks through some well built walls and reveals your sin.  He did that with me, in that moment.”

And thus began the journey from living “arrows in” to living “arrows out.” It began the journey of God ripping apart every notion I ever had that living for Him somehow meant comfort and easy sacrifice. Because for us, those days were done.

God took that “Baby away” moment to haunt me, to continually wreck me and finally lead us to a place of adoption. Three years after that moment, we brought our son home from Ethiopia. Our son, who was being knit together in his mother’s womb across the continent of Africa, while I was sitting in a remote village rejecting another child.

Judson Obsi came to us as a scared, traumatized little boy and God would once again use a mere baby to prune and break and reveal more areas of our hearts that were not reflecting His heart. Parenting Judson, grafting him into our family, brought me to a place of complete and utter abandonment to my Savior and gave us a new lense of seeing the world.  I could no longer pretend I had a clue to what it meant to daily surrender to Jesus because I was in desperate need of Him every moment! The easy, safe, comfortable Christian life we had built felt more and more like a pair of shoes that had grown too small. We knew we had to make some radical changes in how we spent our days.

During this time, we were given the opportunity to move from our home in Nashville to spend a year in Seattle. Our church had a campus in Seattle that they asked us to go be apart of and we leapt at the chance.  God gave us a year with more margin to begin to assess what He was saying to us and what we were going to do about it. We began to study how Jesus lived and how He made disciples. We looked at how He spent His days with the Father, His disciples and with the crowds. We prayed about how we could live as a FAMILY on MISSION. We began to get super focused in how we spent our time, making sure we incorporated times with the Father, time with family and time investing in those around us who were far from Christ.  We filtered our family decisions through the lense of living UP, IN, and OUT.  Not just saying it, but having to make it intentional, like going to the grocery store with A list, because it was not coming naturally. We started incorporating predictable rhythms into our life that reflected our desires to live Up, live IN and live OUT because it was too important to miss.  We began to look at what areas of our life we were clinging to, believing they would give us our sense of worth and identity and then, release them back to the Father for His use and His purpose. We repented of the idols we had made out of good things, believing they were the work of our hands, instead of a gift from the Father. We turned off the tv, spent hours in the Word, and communicated the hidden places of our heart. It was grueling, yet gloriously freeing. We finally released our story, our journey, and our identity into the hands of our loving Father.

And, we opened up our hearts, our minds, and life to where the Father wanted us.

Sixteen months ago, God moved us from our home in Nashville, our family, our friends, and all things familiar to be apart of a church in the Sacramento area.  We have determined AS A FAMILY that our heart is to make disciples of Jesus, who make disciples of Jesus, who make disciples of Jesus. For us, that means we are investing in the parents of our kid’s friends, the other soccer moms, the neighbor down the street and those who want to live like Jesus did.

The reality is to live and love like Jesus, you have to be investing in those who are far from Him and daily surrendering your self imposed boundaries and those things you feel entitled too.

Living missionally, for me, means being continually broken over those areas of my life that do not reflect the heart of God and begging Him to let me see the world around me with mercy and grace.  And then actually being around people, inviting them into my less than clean home with a good enough meal. It means getting messy, vulnerable, and giving up my idea of how my time is to be spent. It simply means investing in people.

We all want our lives to matter….now I just want my day to matter for my Father.

-Kelly

This post kicks off a series we are really excited about here at Revealing The Story!

We will be publishing a collection of posts that reveal some of what God is doing around the world. Posts that reveal what it looks like to live on mission.

There are many different definitions of mission. You’ll see that our definition is the daily choice to keep our eyes and hearts open to the practical and emotional needs of those around us. To try (as best we can) to imitate the incredible love our Jesus has to offer all people.

We hope you’ll be encouraged by this series.

I remember, quite vividly, when I told my mom that I thought God wanted me to be a missionary. She smiled encouragingly but jokingly told me she couldn’t bear the thought of me living so far away from her! I was only 8 after all. I can’t really fault her for feeling that way!

I had just finished reading an autobiography on Amy Carmichael, a missionary in India who rescued child slaves during the early 1900’s, and my young faith was inspired. A fire was lit in me to help others and I was passionate about this new direction. I was certain that this was my purpose.

Then the years piled up and that calling collected dust.

Like a book on a shelf, it was pushed behind other dreams and desires and was all but forgotten.

In college I went on a short term missions trip to Ecuador. My team spent 10 days going into schools to spend time with and speak value to the children there. We cared for them, played with them and told them of our belief in a Savior named Jesus.  While I was there whispers of that original purpose and dream began to swirl once again in my heart.  I considered joining a long term mission to serve the children of South America. Although the desire was there, something about it just didn’t ever fit. And so life marched on.

Years later when God called my husband and I, together into vocational ministry, I pulled that old dream off the dusty shelf and thought, “ah, here’s the purpose of that.” This must be what God had in mind when He spoke mission into my little girl heart.

But I still didn’t fully understand. Somehow, something unknown still didn’t quite fit.

It wasn’t until recently, after looking back on the years since we stepped out in that calling, that God revealed something to me. In the 7 years of full-time ministry we, as a couple, have had many different titles. Mike has directed Christian camp programs, done church relations, worked construction, cleaned pools, pastored, and dealt with unemployment.  Every step along the way we have followed Him. But when things get difficult, it’s so easy to feel like we are wandering.

This last weekend I attended the IF:gathering, a conference intended to gather and encourage women to fulfill God’s calling in their lives. It was amazing. As I sat there listening to the message about our command to “Be Strong and Courageous” {Joshua 1}, I wrestled. Wrestled to figure out what it is He really wants for my family.  In the midst of those tearful moments with my Shepherd, He reminded me I’ve always known the purpose He placed in me.  Our title and place make no difference…but our identity does.  Job or no job, my identity as a Christ-follower means I am called to live out this purpose of caring for anyone around me. That’s always been the point.  Mike and I are together on this ‘mission’ wherever He places us.  Living on mission doesn’t mean you have to move to South America, or get the perfect job in ministry…but to deeply care for people wherever He places you.  That is something He has been showing me over these last 7 tumultuous years, and this weekend reminded me of that simple truth.  I am called to live on mission.

It looks different than I thought. It’s not to a far off country like my 8 year old self envisioned. At least not right now. But when I allowed the Holy Spirit to pull that dream off the shelf again and turn it upside down…or right side up…I saw how it fit finally. I see now how despite my incomprehension, my Creator was always shaping me for this purpose.

I am a follower of Christ, and He commissioned me, alongside you, to live on mission.  This mission doesn’t come with a title or a paycheck. It’s a freedom mission, a healing mission, a peace-giving mission. The mission is the same for all of us; to be a reflection of Jesus to a lost and hurting world. To care. To love. To pour out our lives.  The how and where of that is going to look different for all of us. Where and how are you on mission friends?

For me, right now, I’m on a mission to reflect Jesus in my home so that the sweet little hearts He placed there will know Him. I’m on a mission to offer healing to hurting hearts that cross my path, because I know what hurt feels like and I have found the antidote. I’m on mission to this city He has me in for as long as He wants me here. I probably will be fiercely opposed by our enemy. So will you.

It’s not going to be easy.  Completing a mission never is.

But it will be worth it.  Victory always is.

-Kallie