I was also starting to feel selfish about my fitness journey because I've never taken that much time to work on myself and it felt vain and shallow and not like I what I wanted anymore. I wasn't prioritizing my time well and was dropping the ball on other things. And although it may not be directly connected, I lost someone who used to be a close friend. We may have just grown apart, but I felt very guilty about not seeing it sooner, and not doing my part to reach out. I miss her every day. And I think she's done with me. And it hurts. Things have just been out of whack for awhile and I needed to make changes again.
So in a spectacular chain of decision-making, I quit working out. I quit going to church. And once that spiral started, I quit reading the personal development as much, and I quit eating clean, and although I didn't feel BAD, I didn't feel as good. Once you lay down those good habits, they're hard to rebuild.
And then it was like, okay, well... Shouldn't at least something feel easy and fun? The whole point of my starting Beachbody was to feel better. I didn't want to quit coaching though because it felt like another failure, but I was already not doing it. So I finally let it go. And it felt amazing. I've become a Scentsy rep instead and it IS fun and easy. It makes me HAPPY. I can stay up working on it until the middle of the night, and think about things to do for it, and smile. It's not work. It's exactly what I needed for a job boost. So that helped a little.
But God. God, who sees my innermost thoughts and knows where I am? He scares me. I'm terrified of disappointing Him and making Him mad and being found wanting. So I went back to church last week, because feeling this way is really just not okay with me.
The sermon series right now is entitled #everydayJesus and it's about finding God in your life outside of the church hour. The pastor was talking about finding hearts everywhere he looked and knowing that they were sent from God as a sign to him. I internally rolled my eyes and thought to myself that God doesn't work like that. And the next words out of his mouth were, "DID YOU THINK GOD DOESN'T WORK LIKE THAT? What kind of limits are you putting on your God? I mean really, are you gonna tell him he can't do something? He's Jesus. He can do whatever He wants, and if this is what you need, it's what he's gonna do."
Oh. Well maybe.
It turns out that if you are asked to look for hearts and think about how much God loves you every time you see them, you realize that lilypads are heart-shaped.
Then this weekend I went to the Belong tour because Jen Hatmaker. I didn't really know much about the other ladies but I knew they would be good if she wanted to hang out with them. Shauna Neiquist has become a new favorite of mine. She showed us her new heart-shaped tattoo she just got to remind herself every morning how much God loves her. Maybe there's a theme here, ya think?
And then she said, "You have made God into your own image if He sounds just like the meanest voice in your head."
And I realized that is what I've been doing. I feel inadequate and guilty and depressed and like a failure, and so I told myself that God feels that way about me too. I forgot He loves me, and I was scoffing at the hearts He's been trying to put in my path to remind me.
It's hard to change those mean voices in your head. I've never been good at the "Just Do It" philosophy. But another thing they said this weekend was "Do it, afraid. Fear is not your boss, and you are not a victim."
The mean voices tell me I will never be good enough to please God. They tell me I was solely responsible for ruining that friendship and that I wasn't good enough for her either. They tell me I'm half-assing my job as a mom, and a wife, and that I don't deserve to take the time to do the things that would make me happy.
And those voices are WRONG. First of all, of course I'm never going to be perfect. My mom always says you can never even be perfectly wrong- you would mess it up and do something right by accident even if you were trying, because we just can't do perfection. We can't. But God doesn't love me because I do things right. I got so off-track with that. And the friendship, well, I don't know what's going to happen there, because quite honestly my heart is still broken over it. But I am able to feel more peaceful with perhaps things reconciling in God's timing. If they don't, then surely I am learning hard lessons that will help me later. And the mom and wife gig is hard some days, and easier some days, and I'm doing as well as I can, just like everybody does.
In the meantime, I'm going to be looking for hearts, and working on healing mine, and using it to love people hard. Connections are important. Jesus is important.
