In Colorado... A Little Quieter Here

Hi my friends,

Greetings from the insanely beautiful state of Colorado.  Some dear friends who pastor a church out here in Littleton (the church Stan and I were a part of when we lived here) have invited me out to lead worship for their awesome ladies at their women's retreat this coming weekend.  Can I just say... I AM SO BLESSED TO BE HERE.

All of that to say... I will likely not be blogging a whole lot this week as I'm spending time catching up with sweet friends who I rarely see and showing Isaac the mountains and spending time just hanging out with Jesus, listening to His heart as I prepare and pray into this upcoming retreat.

For now... I'll leave you with a couple of sunset shots from Isaac's and my drive across Kansas... a reminder that all this beauty speaks of who He is...and the way He loves.

To The Perfectionist Inside Of Me (and All Of Us)

Look upward before you look inward.  And look upward MORE than you look inward.

I recently wrote this post about excellence and perfectionism - the dramatic differences between the two, but how they can look so similar.

Since I wrote it, the Lord seems to have ramped up this process of revealing to me more of the areas of my heart where I still wear that "perfectionism shoe."  It's been kind of a difficult week or so.

I've caught myself gazing inward more often than upward.  Double and triple examining my own heart and motives more than drawing near to His heart.  Living in fear over the propensity of my own heart toward sin.  Unwittingly entertaining accusations from the enemy that come disguised as my own thoughts... that I'm not good enough... as a wife, a mom, a leader, a friend... as a lover of Jesus.  

I might've even been a little depressed, subtly.  I, and possibly Stan, are the only ones who would've known.

But then a couple days ago, I was standing in the bathroom, and mid-makeup-application, the Lord suddenly ripped a veil off of my eyes, and out of nowhere, I saw all of this self-criticism for what it was: agreement with the voice of the enemy.  Buying into the lie of perfectionism: that it is within my control and ability to be perfect, or at least nearly so, and I'd better get my act together somehow.

Oh, how I've gotta let it all go.

And how often I need to be reminded that I'm not enough... and it's okay.  It's not my job to be.

So... in light of the truth that all of my broken places and inadequacy are simply signposts to point me back toward awareness of my need for Him.....

To the Perfectionist Inside of Me (and all of us, I think):

All your trying, striving, performing, all this cross-examining of your heart... I want you to pick it all up, run into the presence of Jesus, and fall, however ungraceful it may look, at the foot of the cross.  Confess your weakness.  All your gaps.  All your failure.  

Confess the depth of your need for Him.

And hear His voice... let it wash over your heart like healing balm:

You are precious.  You are beloved of My heart.  You are more than enough for me if you never succeed at anything, ever, EVER again.  My love for you and desire for you are completely separate from your performance.  The blood of My Son has spoken identity over you.  This is where your value to ME is found: in His sacrifice to purchase your life... and not in your ability to perform.  Remember, daughter.  Remember how precious you are to My heart.  How the mere turning of your heart and eyes toward Me overwhelms My heart with delight.

Now, leaving all of the heavy, draining self-consciousness at the foot of the cross... stand up... and lean in.

Lean into the One who carries and resources and supplies all your needs.  The One whose strength is made perfect in your weakness.  The One whose beauty is revealed as He fills in your gaps.  The One who is ENOUGH in all of the places where you'll never achieve that status. 

Trust Him to gently lead your heart into more and more purity and peace... this is not something you are asked to accomplish on your own.   

Keep your eyes on Him and all that HE IS instead of all that YOU'RE NOT.  Worship.  Fix your gaze on His beauty, your heart on His faithfulness. 

His leadership is perfect and trustworthy... and if your heart is after Him and your eyes are turned toward Him, He will gently reveal areas in your life, in His perfect timing, where He wants to bring change.  (See this post on differentiating between conviction - from the Holy Spirit - and condemnation - from the enemy.)

It is not your job to continually dig around in your own heart and discover these places on your own.  It is your job to surrender to His work within your heart when He reveals these things.

Introspection apart from His grace-filled conviction and leadership is destructive.  But as you focus on all that He is, He will convict and reveal and transform and draw you more and more into surrender to His Lordship. 

He who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it.  It's His job. 

 Allow Him to have His way in Your heart... and rest in the knowledge that He is committed to the process!  He is committed to partnering with you, to holding your hand as you continually walk toward holiness in the deep places.  Don't fear the dark corners.  He knows them intimately and holds you with grace.  Again, He's committed to the process... you can trust His perfect leadership.  And His heart bursts with affection for you NOW, dark corners and all.   

This is not sloppy grace.  His invitation is to wholeheartedly abandoning yourself to this journey of becoming more like Him ~~ doing it out of a place of trusting His leadership and resting in His commitment to you; not out of a place of fear over what's really in those deep places of your heart and whether you're "enough" or not.

You are His beloved.  Look upward before looking inward.  And look upward MORE than you look inward.  You can trust His process inside of you.

Guest Posting Over At (In)Courage Today! (God's Invitation In the Midst Of the Storm)

Hi My Dear Friends,

When I wrote this post a couple of months ago, I was deeply feeling the pain of a particular loss, the details of which I'm not really at liberty to share here in this space.  Suffice it to say, I was grieving fairly intensely.  Since this post was written, the ache of this loss has ebbed and flowed and I've mostly not felt the grief as deeply.

Ironically though, today as my post goes live over at (In)Courage, I am again in a season where the pain around this loss is at the surface. The ache feels like an elephant sitting on my chest.  And I'm finding that the timing of the Lord in this post being published today is no coincidence... it is fresh truth and life to me all over again today.

Praying you are blessed as you read, that God encounters you through it in whatever way your heart is in need of Him today.

God's Invitation In the Midst Of the Storm

Dear Friends,

I find myself lately in one of “those” seasons.  You know…when your heart is heavy over circumstances beyond your control… Maybe a relationship is failing; maybe your job is ending; maybe your child is not walking with the Lord….  And to be honest, it feels a little strange to be writing in order to encourage, while my own heart feels this grief so deeply.  

Yet, deeper than the aching, this truth echoes loud:  That when we do share, real, raw, and honest in the midst of all the messiness of life and relationships and hearts… the Father comes then and fills our hurting places… these chasms in our hearts… with His glory, His strength that’s perfected in our weakness… and His beauty pours forth out of pain.

And so… even with this heaviness of heart that feels so real and so acute lately, I want to share with you these things that I know…these truths that I hold onto, which are even MORE REAL than my earthly reality.....

To finish reading, click here ~~ hop over and join me at (In)Courage where I have the honor of guest posting today!

Core Motives: Excellence or Perfectionism?

Image Credit: thedailymuse.com

As moms, "doing" seems to be our full time job, doesn't it?  We cook for our families, feed our little ones, clean up messes, run errands, do laundry, clean up MORE messes, teach our children, discipline, clean up still MORE messes, mediate an argument, give baths, discipline some more, instruct little hearts, clean up again, read bedtime stories, pray for our kids, tuck them in.  And then we clean up again.  Go to sleep.  Wake up.  Repeat.

A year or so ago, a dear friend called me one day and spoke something into my heart that has changed my heart and perspective in all of these tasks that are continually before me.

The illustration was this: Me, wearing 2 different shoes.  One was labeled "perfectionism," and the other, "excellence."  He said he felt that the Lord wanted to remove my "perfectionism" shoe and replace it with another "excellence" shoe.

My friend shared with me these essential truths:  that perfectionism is motivated by fear... whereas excellence is motivated by love.

Isn't it interesting how similar these 2 shoes can look at first glance? But from God's perspective, they are as different as night and day.  

Perfectionism is our attempt to earn favor: other people's, or God's.  Excellence is operating out of a sureness that we already HAVE God's favor...and that's all that matters.  

And the RIGHT-NOW-ness of this truth FOR ME crashed in on my heart in that moment.  I knew the Lord and I were about to embark on a journey.

Ever since my friend's phone call that day, God and I have been in process together, Him often revealing to me areas of my heart where I've been operating ("doing") out of perfectionism instead of excellence.

What I Know Now...

In all of our "doing," what matters to the Father so much more than all our accomplishments... is the condition of our hearts before Him in the midst of our doing.  Are we motivated by love?  Or by fear?

Here are some symptoms that clue me in to places in my heart where my motive in doing has been perfectionism/performance/striving:

• I'm motivated by a subtle (or not so subtle?) fear.  Fear of failure, of not meeting people's expectations, of disappointing myself...fear of disappointing God.  Fear of people's opinions of all my running around and doing.
• I compare myself to other moms, rating myself as either inferior or superior in my performance.
• Feverishly working to achieve goals; being afraid to slow down and rest.
• OR... Being almost paralyzed by fear of failure, so much so that I almost can't get up and get ANYthing done.
• Possibly swinging back and forth between the 2 previous extremes... maybe even several times per day.
• I'm easily stressed out if I don't accomplish all that I had set out to do on a particular day... I don't trust God with what I'm unable to get done and let it go.
• After finishing a project or a conversation, I hash and re-hash what I could have or should have done or said differently... I have a hard time leaving the results to the Lord.
• I sometimes frantically grasp for control of my environment... Everything must be perfectly in order.  If it's not, it speaks negatively of me.

These are the warning signs.

And when the Father highlights one of these symptoms in my heart, instead of seeing it and allowing my thinking to move toward condemning myself for my failure, God asks me to see it as a gentle invitation from Him to once again allow Him to remove my "perfectionism shoe" and allow excellence to become my core motivation in yet another arena of my heart.

"Child," He says, "I long for your obedience and all of your "doing" to flow out of a confidence and a rest in Your heart, a deep knowledge that your status of 'beloved one' is not dependent upon what you do... or don't do."

And I want to live before Him as a daughter, confident in her Father's affections... so much so that the opinions of anyone else (including myself!) pale in comparison... don't you?

Here are some signs that I'm operating out of Love-empowered excellence:

• I'm relaxed as I go about completing the tasks before me.  I'm not stressed if I'm unable to accomplish everything on my to-do list for a particular day.
• I am secure.  I don't need to perform perfectly in order to prove my worth.  My value has already been determined by Jesus' sacrifice for me...His blood that "speaks a better word" over me. To the Father, I am worth the blood of His Son...and nothing I can do (or fail at doing) can increase or decrease my value to Him.
• My identity is in the Father, His heart toward me, and who He says I am....and NOT in how clean my house is, how obedient my son is, or how much I can "git 'er done."
• I can give genuine effort to a project or conversation (or blog post!) out of a place of resting in the Lord, do my best while abiding in Him, trust Him with the results, and then let it go.
• I am motivated and encouraged and empowered by my Father's "well done!" as He whispers it to my heart throughout my days... as opposed to being motivated by the desire to earn God's favor, or to impress people... or the fear of how their opinions of me might change if I fail to perform.

God... more and more, let me be found with 2 "excellence" shoes on my feet.  Would you let perfectionism and all my striving to perform in my own strength fall off of me as I am more and more deeply rooted and grounded in Your love...Your perfect love that casts out fear?  I choose right now to rest in Your commitment to completing this work that you've begun in my heart.  You will finish what You've started.  Come and have Your way in me, Father.  I trust You....

Be blessed today, friends... and could I encourage you to courageously allow Him to examine your heart today, to begin to remove your "perfectionism shoe" and replace it with excellence that flows out of your identity in Him?  He is so committed to the fully-alive-ness (if that's a word) of your heart...

...And you are so loved,

PS - Linking up over here this morning, at SarahMae.com. Join me if you have a sec?

One Step At a Time... LEANING

The other day, I was in a "funk" for most of the day.  Know the feeling?

Here's my [officially unofficial] definition - - 

FUNK (n):  The vague feeling that something's "off" in one's heart... very rarely connected to a specific event or cause... and almost always resulting in irritability and general bummed-out-ness.

Yup.... I definitely was in that place most of that day...  and it took me till evening to finally sit down with the Lord and figure out the root cause: that I was overwhelmed by everything that I'm NOT and all that I need/want to get done in the next week and all of the places where I feel inadequate.  

Bottom line: I'd had my eyes on my own weakness and weariness and inadequacy and all of the limitations on what I can accomplish within the realm of my own strength... instead of fixing my gaze on God's more-than-adequacy and the fact that I can do all things because HE is my strength. (Phil. 4:13)

And why is it sometimes so much easier to just STAY in that "funky" place than it is to get intentionally before the Lord and let Him sort out all of this ridiculousness in my heart?  Why did it take me all day to finally sit down and ask Him for insight into what was wrong?

Sometimes I think I'm just more comfortable being... uncomfortable... when God is sitting, waiting, holding out this perfect peace and rest to me, if I'm just willing to take hold of it. 

Anyway... so that night I finally sat with the Lord for a few minutes and realized I needed to re-read some things that He's spoken to my heart in the past.  

So I RE-reminded myself (or rather, stilled my heart so HE could RE-remind me) that:

•  in my weakness, His strength is more than enough, and He fills in my gaps.  
• in moments like these when my to-do list is overwhelming, I need to take a deep breath and allow Him to expand my heart to hold more of what He's wanting to accomplish inside of me.
• He is the Source of everything I need to do all that He's putting before me in this season.
• and that He rejoices in the fact that I have such a long way to go yet, because it's in the journey that He waits to encounter me intimately.

Image Credit: onyourwallsojerusalem.blogspot.com

And these truths of who He is, and how He pursues my heart ESPECIALLY when I'm so keenly aware of everything I'm not, and how He glorifies Himself when I lean into Him in my weakness... They're enough for me today.

HE is enough for me today...in all of the places where I'm so far from enough.

Bye-bye, funky funk!  Hello again, Peace and Joy and Rest!

Father, help me to rest in Your more-than-enough-ness today.  You are my completeness and everything I need for this moment... and the next... and the next... I find it all in You.  Let my roots grow down deeper today into You, my Everything.

Friends, today, may we take one step at a time... LEANING... and may we encounter Your heart deeply in the process... and see Your beauty displayed as You fill in our gaps.

Blessings to you today, dear ones... You are so precious to your Father.