Honestly, very few days do I simply want to be me. Very few days do I feel satisfied with the mediocrity to which I've grown accustomed to feeling. These past few years, I have spent far more days in dissatisfaction with this Natalie person than I have in contentment with who I am.
Oh, but that's not what this post is about. I mean...it is, but only indirectly.
I went on a missions trip to Chicago two weeks ago. The people in my group who went on the trip were amazing. I dearly love every last one of them. I consider all of them good friends and I would never want to do life without them. But despite that, I felt alone. I felt isolated from everyone. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't see past the individual friendships around me. I couldn't disregard the fact that I felt like I was the only one who wasn't seen or valued.
God gave me a word for this trip: Quiet. Ooh, now there's something that I don't do well. If you know me at all, you know that quiet is almost not even in my vocabulary. If I'm quiet, people start asking me what's wrong. Nevertheless, God gave me the word "quiet" and told me that that week, I needed to become okay with fading into the background. And fade I did.
Honestly, every part of me was protesting this. I was utterly miserable. God was truly teaching me to be okay with the background and I was not handling it even remotely well. From Sunday till Wednesday, I only had a few moments of actual happiness. The rest of my smiles and laughter were shallow, mostly in an attempt to avoid the inevitable "Are you okay"s that I would have gotten if I hadn't put on an act of happiness.
Most of the week, I thought that the word "quiet" was about how God was trying to quiet the negative thoughts in my head and quiet me so that I would fade into the background and watch what God was doing in and through others. That did happen and it was significant, but it's not what "quiet" was about.
For a while, I've known that I'm a pretty selfish individual. I've tried to justify it with "Well, that's just human nature", but it's truly just not justifiable. My first thought when I enter a room full of people is not, "How can I love these people like Jesus would?", but actually, "What are they going to think of me?" That seems harmless on the surface, but in reality, it's a poisonous way to view the world. This viewpoint is what encourages the sense of entitlement that is so rampant in our society. It takes my focus away from trying to love people and serve Jesus well by centering my entire thought process around how I look, how I feel, or what other people think of me. This is a very effective way to totally lose sight of Jesus.
So, I'm selfish. And God used the week of Chicago to show me that in a whole new way. I realized toward the end of the week that God really wanted to quiet that selfishness. That was what my fading into the background was about. That was why He wanted me to be quiet. He was showing me that my behavior and the state of my heart were actually pushing Him away.
Back to my statements at the beginning of this post. I realize now that those feelings are coming directly from selfishness. They stem from my thoughts of "What do people think of me?" I'm still going to struggle with these feelings of inadequacy, but now I have the mindset of resisting those thoughts instead of letting them play through my head and give me a severe case of dissatisfaction. I know without a doubt that these feelings are not of God and I do not need to tolerate them anymore.
I know this post seems disjointed and unfinished. I promise, there's a reason for that. There's more to this story, but I'm saving it for another day (soon, I promise). This post is just Part One of an ongoing story that is constantly being written by my Savior. Tonight, I'm celebrating the fact that God wants to work in my heart even after He's seen all the ugly in me.
