Thankful

It's Sunday night. It's the end of a long much needed break.

I'm lying in bed with just a few lights lit that hang on the wall behind my bed. I can hear the trickling of rain drops just outside my window. There are owls hooting. Actually owls hooting outside my window right now. The smell of our newly cut Frazier Fern is already dominating the fragrance of each room in this little home.

As I went through my nightly routine, I already found my mind wandering into all the small crevices in my mind. These little crevices are the dark holes in my life that do not have an answer just yet. Some will have answers eventually, some I may never have the answer. My mind is like a constant game of frogger, just trying to make it to the other side of the road just to try and cross another busy intersection. It's constantly wandering, constantly searching for answers.

My mind wandered back to the holiday weekend. I thought about how everyone was talking about all the things they are thankful for. How it is the one time of year we try to focus on what we have and less about what we want.

I'm beginning to realize how easy it is to say what you're thankful for yet, to feel thankful is another story. Feeling thankful is the hardest in my opinion. It's one thing to say something but it's a whole other thing to say it and mean it.

I receive many compliments about my positive attitude and how I have this ability to put a positive twist to just about anything. It's an ability I have developed due to a few reasons. One reason: I hate how speaking negative makes me feel. Allowing hate and negativity outside of my mouth does absolutely nothing for me. I don't feel better afterwards, I tend to feel worse. Second reason: I speak positive because I don't always feel positive. I found that when I feel negative and speak negatively, well, I usually continue to feel negative. But when I speak positively, I don't always feel positive afterwards, but sometimes I do. Sometimes I feel better when I look at the bright side of a situation.

I find myself more and more focusing on what I don't have rather than what I do have. I get so caught up in my mind sometimes that I forget that I'm right where I need to be at this moment in my life. That good will continue to flow in and all I have to do is wait for it. I DO have much to be thankful for. I DO have a life worth singing praises over, yet my heart just doesn't always want to dance with that tune. It doesn't always want to believe that my life, as of this very moment, is enough.

So I have to continue to find ways to express my gratitude for what is laid before me. I have to find ways to do this daily, not just during Thanksgiving. We are all given one life to live and I don't want to get to the end of it and realize that I spent the majority of my life worrying about what the end would look like.

Brave.

About 2 summers ago, I was going through a really tough phase in my life. I would find myself waking up in the morning not wanting to get out of bed. 

Now, I'm not a morning person so I truly never want to get out of bed in the morning, but this feeling of not wanting to get out of bed was different from my normal "anti-morning" attitude. This feeling was heavy on me and I literally did not want to face the day. Some days I had the privilege of not having to, so I would allow myself in the morning to let the heaviness take over and pray it would pass. It always did within an hour or 2. I would finally find a way to get out of the bed and face the day.

The heaviness (that's the only way I know how to describe it) would sometimes hit me in the middle of the day. I remember one day in particular when I was babysitting that it hit me. The little girl I watch was 4 at the time and despite the joy and energy that rushes out of her constantly, I was struggling to keep my head above water for the day. 

I'll never forget one day in particular. I had taken her to the park or museum that day and she was able to entertain herself for the most part by making friends with other kids. I remember being grateful because I barely had the mental energy to engage her most of the day. We had come back to her house and she wanted to play with my hair. Again, I was thankful for this small act because it gave me a moment of calmness to help give me the strength I needed for the rest of the day.

We sat on her bed and she began to twist my hair, trying to braid it. We sat in silence for a while, I felt the heaviness on my chest. The little 4 year old, randomly, breaks the silence and says, "Be brave. Just like Sara Bareilles says. Say what you want to say and be brave."

She then continued to play with my hair and quickly jumped into the next thing she wanted to do.

It's funny how God can use the innocence of a child's favorite song to tell you exactly what you need to hear.

Be brave.

That little pep talk actually got me through the day. It got me through some dark days, the thought that bravery was needed to overcome the emotional hurdles I was having to face. Bravery was needed to face truths I had buried deep inside of me and to accept them as my life boat, not my demise.

I started reading Elizabeth Gilbert's new book "Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear". I wasn't 10 pages in before she resurfaced the word 'brave' for me. She speaks of a poet by the name of Jack Gilbert and she writes an excerpt of what his students had to say he taught them.

"...he asked his students to be brave. Without bravery, he instructed, they would never be able to realize the vaulting scope of their own capacities. Without bravery, they would never know the world as richly as it longs to be known. Without bravery, their lives would remain small- far smaller than they probably wanted their lives to be."

It took God and bravery to get me through that summer. I'll never forget the feeling of myself coming back to the surface. I'll never forget the vibrations of the laughs that helped the feelings come back to life. What I felt was only been a small taste of depression but it was enough for me to never want to feel it again, and to empathize more with people who struggle with it.

To be brave is a characteristic we forget to encourage people to be. It often goes under looked and neglected, yet it's the very thing we need to be ourselves. You truly can't live in the skin you're meant to live in without it. You can't live the life you have always longed for without stepping onto the edge of bravery and leaping into the unknown. It takes bravery to change. It takes bravery to walk away. It takes bravery to risk everything to live the life you have always imagined.

I'm already pumped about this book. Creativity lives within me but it's the one thing I'm the most insecure about. 

It takes a mountain of bravery to write these blogs sometimes. It takes a lot of encouragement from multiple people for me to step outside the box as my practice as a counselor. My fear with being creative can paralyze me at times, but it's apart of who I am and it would be a shame to neglect any part of myself.

Bravery resurfaced tonight. It came back, reminding me that I need to to move forward, I need it in order to grow as a person.

So I leave you with the same quote that Jack Gilbert left for one of his students, " Do you have the courage? Do you have the courage to bring forth this work? The treasures that are hidden inside you are hoping you will say YES."

You Don't Need to Know EVERYTHING

Thoughts are always accumulating in my head. I have a million different streams running all in different directions at different speeds. I really have to make myself focus when it comes to listening to long winded people. If I'm not careful, I'll dive deep into my head, getting lost in the familiar chaos. 

I haven't written a blog in a while due to the fact that my thoughts have been less focused and more chaotic. It's been a struggle to really narrow everything down and really identify what I need to get out. Instead I have been journaling my thoughts, doing a more streaming dialogue where I do not try and pay attention to what exactly I'm writing, I just write. 

Today I had brunch with a friend and something about our honest conversation calmed my chaotic mind and all of the sudden I could think a little clearer. The light that settled the dust was a simple truth stated in the conversation, "You do not have to know everything life has in store for you."

I'm intuitive, constantly plagued with feelings that tend to be extremely accurate. I have the ability to have an idea of what is to come, what the future might hold for me. But when my intuition has quieted down, when the present is not filled with the things that I am sure will come, I find myself getting lost in my head. I get lost trying to figure out what will happen, what will the future bring. 

It creates a massive amount of anxiety in a persons life when they decide to take on the role of determining their future. It takes you away from the present moment, with the present people who do nothing but pour good things onto you. 

After taking in and processing the truth that one does not have to know what their future holds, I began to see a bigger picture. I began to see that when you live your life searching for your future, you end up building this sense of entitlement. You begin to live with the attitude that you are entitled to know your future. You end up taking all the reigns in your life, bundling them up in you arms, and disconnect yourself from trust. Trust and faith slowly begin to fade and you put yourself into a god like position, saying that you are the only one worthy of control in your life. 

I currently have a student that I have been working with this semester. There is something about her that I'm drawn to. Despite the exhaustion she can bring into your day (and she does daily) I can't help but enjoy her. She wears her teachers and other staff members out frequently and this is because she's always working to have control in the situation. It's a constant power play. 

As I sat with the people I work with, discussing new idea's and interventions that would benefit her, I found the real truth behind her behavior falling from my lips. She goes into power play with teachers or other staff members because somewhere along the way, she has already learned that the only person she can trust is herself. She's really not intentionally being difficult. She has just learned at the age of 16 that the only person she can really trust to watch out for her is herself.

She's 16. I know and you probably know that she can't make sound decisions for herself right now. She does not have the wisdom or experience to truly take care of herself yet, she has decided to cut herself off from trust and faith in others. If anyone is going to be in control from now on, it's going to be her.

This girl is setting herself for a life full of trouble, yet I find myself doing the exact same thing with God. I pull the reigns from his hands and say, "You know what, I got this. I'm going to do this from now on. I'll let you know if I need help."

The lesson comes fast as the anxiety rises. I quickly learn that a life planned by me and me alone will not turn out as I had planned. It will not always go the way I want. And as my plans continue to come crashing down in front of me, I slowly begin to find gratitude in my heart. I slowly find that the plans I had laid out for myself were only a false sense of security. What I thought I needed was only a fraction of what I could have. 

You have to find a way to trust that God really does have things in store for you and that he really doesn't have to let you in on the plan. He says he knows what the plan is (Jeremiah 29:11) and promises that what he has in store is good. 

The more plans I make for myself, the more disappointment I'm going to find. The one thing that both my friend and I could agree on this morning is this: the BEST things that happen in life are the very things we did not plan for.