It began rather by accident. Or maybe it's been building up for years and suddenly something had to give. Either way, I stopped trying to change the world, and I started living my own life.
It goes back to about a month ago when I began to realize that caffeine was taking a serious toll on my stomach. I said goodbye to my caffeinated love and switched from too-many-to-count cups of coffee a day to two cups of decaf herbal tea a day.
For two or three weeks there, life was brutal. The world was against me. I had no motivation, no energy. Stress was mounting because I wasn't accomplishing anything and my to-do list was growing.
I gave up on working out and took to "sunshine yoga" (a more fun, more productive-sounding name for "laying out") where I lay out in the sun, soak up the rays of warm Vitamin D, and breathe deeply. It was restful and rejuvenating.
I stopped wearing makeup. This was partially out of laziness (but seriously, it allows for extra sleep and/or time to eat breakfast in the morning), but mostly because I'm tired of society's definition of beauty defining the way we see people. I watched this clip and something snapped and I said, that's it. I'm done. I quit the makeup and accepted that my hair is an untameable beast with a mind of its own, and the world can deal with it. God made me this way, and He loves me, and His love is all I really want.
Once I made that realization, that His love is all I want, I determined to make Him happy. I went about it the wrong way, driving myself crazy trying to figure out how I can be like Katie Davis from Kisses from Katie. And love reminded me that I am just me. That the best way to make God happy is to simply be the woman He created me to be.
That doesn't mean ditching all of my responsibilities and moving to an impoverished country. It means living every moment of every day with purpose. It means going to work on purpose. Dealing with broken machinery on purpose. Helping customers on purpose. Drinking herbal tea on purpose. Eating my lunch on purpose. Listening to my little sister's chattering on purpose. Dealing with stress by tackling one simple task at a time, on purpose.
It's amazing how full life is when you look at it this way. The days that I seem to accomplish nothing special, I've experienced something extraordinary. I've lived each moment as it happened, and it's beautiful.
It's tricky. I still get caught up in the rush of life and forget myself, but then I remember, and I simply come back and pick up where I left off. I swallow my mistakes, nod in determination and keep moving forward. I'm being proactive. I'm learning a lot about myself, and I'm learning to see not only myself but others the way God sees us.
Sometimes I don't know what to do with myself, or I get overwhelmed with it all, or I wonder how weak and miserable me is going to get by in this crazy world, and that's when I pray. It's in those moments that I've been discovering a simple but very real truth: GOD IS.
He said, "I AM." And I believed that, but now I'm beginning to know it. I know in my heart, in the sunshine, in the rain, in the high maintenance people, in the coffee grounds that won't go away, in the early hours of the morning when I don't want to get up and write but do anyway--I know that He is. He never changes, He always loves. He is.
The world is a mess, full of confusion and superficiality and meaninglessness and brokenness, but He still is. And He still whispers to us, though we don't usually hear Him over our cell phones or Netflix marathons. He calls to us, for us to love Him for who He is. And He loves us for who we are.
And I don't just believe that anymore, I know it.
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