It has been a crazy couple of years for me but I can only assume for all of us since Covid. I can’t do it anymore, I can’t do the fake niceties of daily experience that used to be the norm. You know, “How are you doing today… good”. “How is the family … great.” “Hello sister, how are you doing this Sunday? Blessed and highly favored.” No, I just can’t do it anymore. I want nothing but real, authentic, transparent truth! I want a great awakening!
Now, don’t get me wrong-it still scares the …. out if me but it is the only thing that actually satisfies. I know that puts me at risk for people thinking I am crazy. People don’t actually wanting to hear how my day is. They look at me like a deer caught in the headlights when I stop and really want to hear how they are. But that is alright with me.
Sleep Walking
I feel like I had a great awakening after a 40 year dream! A dream where everything I thought was important, was not. And what I thought was not true, actually is. My life has quite literally been turned upside down in the last 3 years but in the most wonderful ways. It started with what I would call the waking up, ‘the dark night of the soul’. That it certainly was.
I was a sleepwalker, living a lie and didn’t even know it. A pretty, big house, nice car, 3 kids in the suburbs kind of lie. Church every Sunday- but a lie nonetheless. I was believing what my mind was telling me. Yes, all the inane things I believed, felt and then responded to. And in many cases, quite ridiculously, looking back. I believed a lot of things I was taught by all the different entities without so much as an inquiry. I did not even know I was miserable and making a lot of people I loved miserable as well.
Waking Up
It all turned around in a moment when someone I loved dearly was taken from me, but not in a way I could have ever imagined. The relationship was severed. I was devastated and went through a year of the most immense emotional pain I had ever experienced. I needed help, like the kind of help that no one wants to ask for because it feels so overwhelming. But I knew that I did. Over that year, the beauty of the people God put in my life still blows my mind. So many real, honest, and unconditionally loving people walked me through this difficult time.
I woke up from my own unconsciousness to a life that I now am consciously awake to and actively creating.
Change
The second year of my storm, I got such a sense of peace that it would all work out, I could viscerally feel it in my body. I went from having daily anxiety and insomnia to feeling joy again and sleeping like a baby. The situation had not changed, but I did. God used to the situation for me to change. Like most of us, we don’t change willingly unless the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change.
One by one he changed the different areas of my life, starting with my thoughts. How I thought about God, myself, my abilities, my family, the world, and everything in it changed. How I responded to life changed. My health changed, drastically, for the better. My job changed. I started the business I envisioned years before. My relationships changed. Many new people were brought into my life and many old were removed. I don’t think there was one area of my life that was not changed by this awakening and changed for the good.
I believe what I learned to live and am still living is referred to in Luke 9:23 where it is said “you will have to die to self daily, and by dying, you will actually live.”
Restoration
Last but not least, God has brought the person back into my life. That has been the biggest blessing. But we are both different people getting to know one another for the first time. Now that I am awake, I can truly see them, not my story of them but the real person.
I have learned a lot over the past few years. If I could boil it down to a few fundamental points. I know longer believe the stories my mind creates, but I wake up and question them. I don’t believe that I need anything or anyone to be happy. Happiness and peace come from within me not outside. I am learning to let go of outcomes and just know that everything works out for my good— always. Lastly, there is only one power in the universe and it is not me. So I let go of my illusion of control and lean into trust.
When I focus on these things, I actually can be real. I can feel joy and peace and know that whatever happens in life will all turn out and I can rest in that truth.
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