perfectionism

January 9, 2018 Listening to God:, Motherhood, Noticing (Everyday life)

Let Go and Welcome the Light. For Sheloves Magazine.

A gentle whisper in my ear broke through my early morning dream. I sat up quickly when the sunlight filtering through our red paisley curtains cast a crimson glow across my son’s face. The unwelcome light accused me and immediately my self-berating thoughts began:

"I did it again. I promised this day would be different. I would get up while it was still dark and spend time with God. I know I need it and it is a new year. I can’t do anything right."

“Play with me, mommy?” My six-year old's big brown eyes danced with hope as I was caught up in my inner dialogue of despair. My first instinct was to decline his request and send him on his way. My husband and daughter’s snores told me I could hand my son an electronic device and still have time to hit my yoga mat before they woke.

In the split second between his request and my response, there was a war raging inside my head. I thought back to the previous day when I sat at the dining room table with papers scattered all around. My half filled out bullet journal from last year sat there mocking me. You failure, the uncompleted to-do lists said. The daily gratitude page was half filled out, telling me I was ungrateful. You're lazy, said the books I intended to read but hadn’t. The pieces I needed to have already written because deadlines were looming, calling me: Procrastinator. And worse of all, the scriptures I hadn’t memorized, the devotional I was reading that I was weeks behind on said: Bad Christian.

I ripped out the accusing pages one by one. I stared at the crumpled mess on the floor and wanted to shout at them, "You don’t define me. I am going to change. This time will be different." After over three decades of living with this inner dialogue, I know my tendencies by now. I’m all or nothing. If I can’t follow through with every stroke of my schedule, the whole plan is abandoned. If I say I am going to get up and workout, read my Bible, and pray every morning and instead oversleep (again), then I will go the whole day without doing any of those things. I’ve already failed, so what’s the point in trying?

All those stories so ingrained in my early upbringing in the faith run through my mind. Meant to encourage us towards spiritual disciplines, these stories set a bar of perfectionism I have been trying to attain every since. There was the one about a certain man of faith who never once missed a day reading his Bible. When he got sick towards the end of his life, his wife sat by his hospital bed and read it to him each day. There is the man praised because he didn’t miss a single Sunday of church even when his child was sick in the hospital or the woman who showed up to rock babies every weekend for decades. I was always told faithfulness to a task proves faithfulness to God…thus I am unfaithful.

This bent towards perfectionism has been killing me for years, snuffing out a fire of intimacy with God that used to burn brightly. And I’m so tired of it...

Do you have perfectionistic tendencies that get in the way of what matters most in your life? Join me as we learn to let go and welcome the light instead...

April 25, 2017 Books to read

He Is Enough. {Deeply Rooted and Transformed Series}.

I am honored to have my voice included in the release of Everbloom {Available TODAY from Paraclete Press}. Together we are journeying through the book's sections: Roots, Trunk, Branches, Blossoms. The beautiful thing about this book is that it is not meant to just be read. Become part of the story. Journey with me. Read along as I share a piece from each section, respond, and ask you to respond with me....

{Read} Encasing My Fear by Johanna reardon (click the title to read the excerpt)

{My response} he is enough

Though it has been fourteen years since I graduated college I still have the same frightening dream on occasion. I'm back in college and a few weeks into the semester, I look again at my class schedule to find there was a class I missed. It is too late to drop the class but I have missed weeks of lectures. I enter the class to find everyone else chatting and laughing and I feel naked, exposed. I know there is no way to catch up. I have let something drop and it's too late to fix it.

The feeling in that dream creeps into my everyday life all too often. The tightness in my chest, the air feeling like it is being wrung from my lungs, reminds me that I fear losing control. Dropping something. Letting someone down. Not being enough. The feeling became all too real last fall when the responsibilities were piling up like a stack of bricks on my chest. Two jobs, two kids, and getting ready for an international move crowded my schedule and overwhelmed my spirit.

I remember the moment I knew I couldn't run from it anymore. Between work and church, kids scrambling for my attention, the to-do list a mile long—there wasn't a moment to stop. But I physically couldn't keep going anymore. I laid on the bed staring at the rocking back and forth of the ceiling fan above me, willing my breath to find that same regular rhythm. I placed my hand on my racing heart, begging it to slow down. Each inhale felt like a knife turning inside my chest, my lungs like a leaky balloon that spurted the air out as soon as it entered them. I had spent years saying I could handle my own anxiety and it felt like a defeat when I admitted I couldn't anymore.

***

"I find myself doing things out of character these days," I told her as I took another sip of overly sweet tea, feeling the sugary film build up on my teeth. The conversation at those monthly dinners with my oldest friend who has been a counselor and Myers-Briggs practitioner always find their way to personality or anxiety. Knowing her has made me think about who I am and how I relate to others and I tell her how I feel different than I used to. Orderly, structured, a planner to a fault. That has always been me. So afraid to drop something, I make sure to have a plan and follow it to ensure everything gets done.

Last year when I had two international trips only weeks apart, those traveling with me couldn't believe I had two sets of bags packed weeks in advance and a detailed list of all I had to wash and repack in the two-week window between trips. A year later, after my realization that fear had overtaken me and I needed to do something about it, my husband looked at me with disbelief.

"Your flight leaves tomorrow," he said in a questioning tone. "And you're not packed?"

"No, I have time in the morning, " I shrugged and laughed when he said, "Never in twelve years have I ever known you to do that."

I told this kind of thing to my friend, explained to her how I've changed and I didn't understand how I could go against my nature like that. She looked at me and said something that changed the way I saw who I am: "A lot of what you think is your nature, is actually your nurture. Did you do those things you always used to because they were who you really were or because you learned them, felt like you had to do them? Could it be that you are finally becoming who you should be?"

***

I have always known fear is a problem for me, that my anxiety had deep roots in feelings of control and perfectionism. But I never really dealt with it, felt more comfortable running from it and pushing it deeper. If I could just keep everything calm, could just act like it wasn't there, then everything would be okay. As I read JoHanna Reardon's No More Fear each day I saw myself in the pages and God showed me just how deeply rooted this sin of fear was in my heart.

I saw the way I have taught myself over the years to be in constant motion, bought the lie that there is no time to rest. My fear of not being good enough had made me try hard to do it all and, like a juggler, keep every ball in the air all the time. When one drops, as it is going to do sometimes, my perfect world shatters. Not that planning is bad. I will always be a schedule maker. But the obsessing over the plans is the sin of not trusting the God who tells me to come to Him and rest. Jesus rested and modeled the holiness of just doing the next thing the Father asked of Him but I have to do all the things, all the time. And it was tearing me apart.

I have been intentional about resting and practicing sabbath over the last few months, of letting go and trusting Him for just the next step. I have felt like these things are so out of character. But I am seeing that they are who I was meant to be all along. My fear was defining who I was, making me twisted into something God never intended. As I am slowly finding freedom from the fear, I am finding ways to bring my burdens to Him and trust that what I have to offer is enough. For Him. For my family. For myself. The strong arms of God are holding me up when I choose to take a break and let myself rest on them. I can let go every now and then. They will be there to sustain me. It isn't about me being enough after all. It is about Him being enough for me.