Month: November 2020

Envy

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As I look back on most of the ways I’ve grown in 2020, I am actually astonished. There have been so many. Whereas a year ago I felt like I was drowning and didn’t even know where to start with “working on myself,” now I’m treading water, floating some, and splashing some for fun.

As it turns out, it’s quite clear what area God’s calling me to work on for next year, and I have the capacity to go after it (not being depressed really helps with that). It’s envy. Whether it’s achievement to be the envy or for praise from others, or being envious of others, or even being envious of sharing love–I know it’s something I have to work on. I’ve been married almost 3 years, and it’s still so easy to compare the worst parts of me to the best parts or features or differences of an ex-girlfriend and go down a spiral. I try to pray for those who I’m envious of, but it’s hard to celebrate people that hurt you sometimes. And that’s exactly who I tend to be jealous of, despite my best attempts at forgiveness.

God has not often called me to any kind of extreme fasting (the most is a month to eat meat 2x a week and sweets 1x a week–and I couldn’t do that while nursing…Peeps literally got me through those late night feeds!), but I feel like he is asking me now for a 1-2 week fast in a similar way to seek Him and growth/healing in these areas.

My husband grew up in a home where humility, relationship, and sharing without envy were really celebrated. I did not. But it has affected my happiness and can affect our salvation if we’re not uprooting sin, so here I am. Show me the way, Lord.

Pray for Humility

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This is the thing that could take me down. Pride. It comes before a fall, God tells us.

For awhile everything was hard/terrible (except my marriage): my old job, my new job, my lack of friends, my OCD, my lack of place, my lack of purpose, my lack of joy, pregnancy insomnia and the rough, rough newborn phase (those first 6 weeks are killer).

And then, everything turned around. I feel like a travel comedian with my home health job these days, and many have said I’m their favorite (one even said, “as far as all the girls go, you’re the only one who has been gentle and delicate with my testicles. Thank you!” bahaha. You know. Treat other people’s testicles the way you would want yours to be treated? If you had testicles?). I received great recognition and leadership from my boss after three years of feeling unappreciated.

I lead this FB group with about 60 Pandemic moms. We meet and hang out outside. We have ice breakers and encourage one another. During the week, we have conversation starters two days a week, where there will be some 40 comments. I see the fruit in several peoples’ lives, and definitely in my own.

I’m enjoying many things. I’m learning Armenian and it’s taking. My OCD is mostly well-managed despite coming down off my medicine and I will be discharged from therapy soon.

My son loves me. My husband thinks I’m funny. I feel relaxed around my friends.

The temptation here would be to slip into a mindset I’ve had in the past: “Of course this is all wonderful! It’s because I _____.” You know…am so wonderful, so funny, so inclusive, so intuitive, so much trying to show the love of God, work so hard, am smart.

But as I learned in the past, I cannot find my joy in these things. I need to focus on finding my joy in serving God, because if he takes these things away again, I can still find some comfort and joy. And also, I am believing a lie that I am responsible for things that really God is. His new mercies, though more abundant, are still His.

So I find myself praying daily for humility. When I slip into “Wow. I talked to the doctor and caught that thing,” I remember “God cares about this person and sent me out there today.” It is an effort right now, but I pray it becomes who I am. I pray I break generational and ethnic pride, and put my pride in my Heavenly Father, creator of all things in the world and in my head.

Jennie Allen once wrote (Nothing to Prove) that if the Devil could not tempt you with failure and destitution and hardship, he would try to lure you away from God with success and ease.

I want to be like David. I want to be steadfast in the highs and the lows with Christ.

Lessons of late

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I’m learning a lot lately.

How to cope with feeling hurt and angry, because I don’t tolerate it well, and in an effort to “feel better”, I feel a need to “speak my feelings.” Or seek reassurance. Or obsessively rehash.

I’ve been learning that in my (pretty rare, but nonetheless passionate) arguments with my husband, there’s a point where I am burying him in a case. I used to be pretty good at cross-examination and rebuttals. God convicted me tonight that unity in my marriage is more important than winning an argument. What that means is–for unity–it is okay to say what’s ticking me off, but to do that with a heart of unity for that situation and not extending it back to every remark that’s ever been made.

I’ve been loving how God’s hand is just on the group of mom’s that I coordinate right now. It is exploding without my effort, and all the ladies are people I’d be friends with even if we didn’t have babies the same age. I feel like God is using this season I’m in for my good and for the good of them, too. The last of the mom’s who got pregnant not knowing about the pandemic are delivering now, and there has been a special kind of trauma/isolation for all of us to process through when in the “brutal” stage (first two months). It has been such a blessing to encourage them through friendship.

I have been learning how living my life small in this season doesn’t mean that it is unfulfilling. Honestly, I am probably more fulfilled than I ever have been–because I’m learning it’s more important to Be holy than to Do holy things. A small life lived of ‘being’ well is more important than a life of “doing big” prematurely or to my detriment. If God calls me to do, I want it to be out of being. My pastor shared a phrase once from Billy Graham: God rewards faithfulness, not fruitfulness.

I have been learning to let my insight into the future be a guide, but not rule me. It’s funny. How in March I told my counselor that I was afraid that another Armenian genocide could happen one day with Azerbaijan propaganda. I didn’t know much about it. I just had a sense, just like I’ve had a sense with so many other things. But I learned how to not let it rule me, and to temper my empathy into constructive channels for others…and for me.

This world is a little crazy, and the darkness of another COVID isolation is creeping in, but I’m enjoying finding new and creative opportunities in the midst of that, whether it’s nightly walks with my husband, bible studies with best friends far away, this mom group determined to bundle up babies and meet as we’re able, and dancing to worship music with my son.

It really is ironic. The thing that I felt most depressed about in August was that the best time to make new mom friends (when you’re a new mom) had passed me by and it now felt impossible that my hope that that would be my social salvation with the challenge of moving here was not too much for God. He literally did the impossible in my life. I even have two friends that live in my neighborhood to run/walk with! It was a hard 2.5 years of loneliness, but I marvel at what God has done.