Confessions

This year I will be 21 years old. But that is another 8 months away.

I was flipping through my journals that I kept in high school today. To avoid sounding cliche, I will not say how crazy it is to look back and see how much I have grown up. I thought I was such a different person than who I really was. 

It's confession time.

I started playing on worship teams the summer before my freshman year.  For a solid four and a half years, I was a scheduled piano player/singer/leader for one church or another with not too many "off" Sundays.  Sometimes I would play on a worship team in the morning at one church and then go help another at a different church. I helped out occasionally with leading worship for Raiders for Christ (student-lead Bible study at school) my sophomore year, and by the beginning of my junior year and then through my senior year, I gradually took over all of the worship leading and a lot of the organization of the Bible study.  I led worship nights for the school, as well as for my youth group. I was highly active in my youth group, went on two mission trips a year, attended church regularly and, besides a short "rebellious" stage, didn't listen to too much secular music.

I don't know how people saw me back then -- if I were known as a spiritual leader or, hopefully, just a regular girl who loved Jesus a little bit too much.  But for those who thought I "had it," I'm sure they would take it back if they knew that I wrote this [and several similar entries] in my journal on Christmas Day of 2008:

"I've been doing a lot of thinking. About life. The cause? Twilight, The Matrix, [insert boys name;)], college, piano, random church services. Family. How pathetic I am. How dirty, snobby and disgusting I am...I feel as if I'm trying to cheat God. I don't know if I'll be able to come before Him and feel a deep peace. I pretend to be loyal by throwing up prayers every now and again. Don't get me wrong, I love Him. I believe in Him and I want to give my life in service. But it's as if there is a distance that is unfathomable between us. I try to bridge it with prayer and Jesus, but it still remains.


I know it's me. I know it's my selfish waste of time and focusing on temporary "important" scandals and things....I am so young with life, all of life, before me. Exciting, yes, but also gray-filled. Empty. I do know that if I seek Christ and follow Him, He will bring and give me life. Life abundantly. Yet I seem too far away to grasp on to that. I live in between the fields of hope and despair. I can't seem to pull myself into the field of hope. I always fail. I know His grace is enough, His mercies are new every morning, His love endureth forever. I know i could drown in His love, for it is so deep.


But I can't grasp it. It's too far from my heart, I think. I don't know what to do to get it back.  I feel like a hypocrite. A big, fat, judging, failing hypocrite."

I was only 18 and was burnt-out and ready to quit. Ha. Tired of doing the same old thing, over and over again. Tired of being the spiritual one, tired of leading worship, tired of running after something that was always just out of my reach. Sick to my stomach of the emotional roller-coaster that I liked to call "My Personal Relationship with Jesus." I was a public leader but, on the inside, I carefully hid a confused, lonely heart.

Thankfully, I kept on trudging along, hoping that something would happen. I knew that God was real, that He was powerful. I had experienced Him in powerful ways before, both in worship and in other times. But my problem was not knowing how to sustain our relationship in between those times. I was always grasping for that same emotion I had felt previously and, when I didn't feel it, believed I was doing something wrong or God was upset with me. 

It wasn't until the summer of 2009 when the Lord gave me a "break-through" revelation. After a youth group worship time on a missions trip in Costa Rica, God "confirmed in my heart that I don't have to be feeling an emotion to know He is working, that He's present and that we are loving each other. It just needs to be a sincere heart."

Believe me, I'm not saying from that point on, my relationship with the Lord was all musical notes and butterflies. In fact, the Lord didn't really start hitting me with the deep stuff until about six months after that. But it was the beginning of something big, something true, something real. This revelation freed me to go in to quiet time with Him and hold on to a bright hope that something was happening, even when I was slightly bored and trying not to fall asleep.

And as I steadily set my heart on searching Him out, He began to get inside of my heart. He began to slowly soften my heart, expose lies and wounds I had hidden in my heart and started to work out and erase the big-worded, flowery, confusing and mysterious ideas that I had heard by whole life about Him. Yes, I knew A LOT about Him. But I didn't know Him. I didn't understand His heart towards me or His character.

Of course, once the Lord starts speaking to you in the quiet places of steady devotion, you can't help but want more. You see, once you start to come honestly before the Lord, He answers. Jesus exposed His heart on the cross and, simply, asks for you to do the same thing. Honesty.

I think about what my high school life would have been like if I didn't try living from emotional-high to emotional-high. It could have been powerful. But it's ok. As my friend says, it's good to grow.