A (Continued) Work In-Progress

It's been forever and I'm not quite sure where to start! Blame the lack of postings on busyness, laziness or maybe maybe just some reclusiveness. I've been processing a lot and I feel like I'm in the midst of, once more, delving into the depths of my heart and allowing the Lord to free and heal me - at a familiar, though much deeper, place.

For about the last six months, I've been carrying this intense feeling of lonliness - more real than I think I've ever felt before - even though I have a million people in my life. At a leadership retreat in January, my pastor asked each of us which of the following was easiest and which of the following was the most difficult:

1. Messiness with God
2. Messiness with spouse and close friends
3. Messiness with the people who lead me
4. Messiness with the people I lead
5. (Giving space for the) messiness of those I lead

(Messiness here is defined as someone in-process, being raw, emotional, weak, vulnerable, etc.)For nearly everyone else in the room, one of their easiest ones was #2: "Messiness with spouse or close friends." But, not for me.

Apart from the obvious inability for me to be messy with a spouse I have yet to meet, the reality that I really am closed off from my close friends hit me like a ton of bricks. I'm MUCH more comfortable messy with God, the people I lead or with those not very close to me. But, for some reason, the closer one is to me, the harder it is for me to be weak or broken around them. It's almost as if I'm afraid that I'll be rejected if I show them just how screwed up I really am.

I'm smart enough to have started putting things together and realized that my fear of being weak or messy around my closest friends and the overwhelming lonliness I've been feeling were linked. And, as I thought and prayed through it more, I realized that, once again, these things are results of growing up with a mentally (and now, completely physically) unavailable mother.

The realization was on one-hand a relief - to realize that I'm not just relationally unavailable and closed-off because I've decided to be or am some cold-hearted, closed-off moron...that there really is a reason I struggle with these things. Specifically, I realized that the reason I was afraid to be close to the people closest to me is for fear of rejection and abandonment - yes, because of my mother (that's where the wound began)...but more recently because, of the few people I had risked being messy and vulnerable with in the past few years, three of them are no longer in my life and have chosen to not have me in their lives. Although I can understand that they're also broken, etc and that some friendships just don't endure, it hurts - still, year(s) later - more than I would like to admit. It feels like abandonment; it feels like once they saw the real me, it wasn't good enough or scared them away.

But, honestly, more than the relief I felt for understanding why I was feeling and struggling the way I was, I was irritated and infuriated. I feel like I've been here so many times; like I've faced these issues, worked through them and experienced freedom and genuine life-change so many times. Yet, here I am again...as if no progress has been made, as if I've not done any work for the past 12 long years.

That's how it feels. And, yet, I know it's different this time. I know I'm different. I know progress has been made. As I processed a lot of this with my pastor, he said tons of encouraging and enlightening things. But, the thing that was the most impactful was: "Natalie, your weakest relationships now are far healthier than your best relationships were just a few years ago. There's been tons of growth and progress. Now, you're just going deeper (again)."

So, for the past few months, I've been doing a lot of self-evaluation - acknowledging and accepting how I feel in a certain moment or how a situation makes me feel. Then, I counteract what I'm feeling with the truth I know about something or someone. I've been praying a lot and learning to allow myself the honest freedom to be in process, to be broken, to feel what I'm feeling without rationalizing it away and I've been letting those closest to me honestly into the process, the brokeness and the feelings with me - without trying to package it up for or justify it to them. It's been hard...I'm not going to lie. But, it's also been liberating and freeing. And, I'm seeing a bit more progress every day....