Grace = You cannot fail
Below is something I started writing to you sometime in December, but I wanted to share it now. I have combined the post I started in December with something current. They actually begin and end a story.
I like that.
December 2017
Part 1
I haven’t written in a long time. four months. Three months-ish. This is the beginning of the shame. But first I want to address something I’ve been mulling over…
I have had clarity on the “why” behind this blog. I am writing and sharing my story because I need to… for more than this reason but this is the one I will share. I am writing this blog because I need to write my story out for myself. I need to see in writing the evidence of God. If it speaks to you that would make my heart soar. But for now. I write not for views or likes but for myself. I have heard that sharing your story is what helps you heal and own what has happened to you. I also believe it is what gives us strength and builds grit. My story isn’t a sad story or a pity party it is beautiful and righteous and lovely and I want to see that with my own eyes. So I won’t be “polishing” my blog posts for awhile. I will just write.
Okay for today I want to address shame in real-time.
The past three months have been some of the hardest months of our lives. We’ve lived in three different homes with two different families and now in our own apartment. We’ve been living with four forks, a knife and a crock pot, a card table and blow up mattress. We have jumped into life here in WA and yet feel so disappointed.
Its occurred to me many times that living like this was not what I had in mind when God told us, “we would lack no good thing,” or that this would be where we “thrive.” If anything between the traffic, pavement, busy-ness, four forks and the empty walls that make our apartment feel so empty, the strain on our relationship and just the fact that moving to a place that I thought I would never move to again is overwhelming and a lot to process.
This is not what I signed up for. It is not thriving and it feels like we lack everything.
Now the shame comes in here.
I didn’t trust. I felt alone and afraid and I gave up hope. I didn’t ask God for help. I avoided him. I didn’t cry out and keep worshipping. I let myself be silent. I didn’t write, I hid everything away inside - locked up. I didn’t face the pain, I buried it in hurry and distractions… and most of all I didn’t rely on what God had taught me about how to love myself and let him love me in the midst of disappointment and doubt.
I felt like a zombie for awhile and that in itself scared me. I thought “It’s happening, my worst nightmare… everything I have worked so hard for this past year - gone.” Vince and I argued - we fought and in a place where I have very vivid memories of hope being lost. It was too much and I gave up.
I also felt like a fraud.
How could I write and share my story if I was depressed, panic attack-y and not facing myself?
February 7th, 2018.
It has been two months-ish since I am typing again. WOW. How much can change in two months?
Part 2
I went walking with a friend in Springfield, MO last week. I was recounting the hopelessness and the giving up and the shame of the end of 2017 and the first thing out of her mouth was,
“Alyssa, you are so brave.”
That thought never consciously entered my mind and when she said it, my spirit leaped and tears of surrender and relief poured down my cheeks. She was right. I was brave.
Brave for moving halfway across the country for no reason but God’s voice.
Brave for enduring and not coming back “home.”
Brave for just trying.
The guilt and shame I felt dissipated in my friend’s words, my mind was free again to see a new thing, a different point of view.
And this is the story of the new thing:
December 31st Vince says to me, “I’ve had 5 dreams about going to visit Springfield.” I cried. I actually thought I don’t think I will come back to Washington if I go. But when Vince comes to me with these ideas that stretch me and my faith and my capacity as a human being I give myself some time to think about it. A week later I sat in our bedroom on a burnt orange velvet chair I bought for $20 dollars and ripped the skirt off the bottom (I am proud of it. It was one of my first amazing, fun finds since being back to WA) and I looked at tickets to Springfield. They were $144 round trip from Seattle to Kansas City. I looked up from my phone and I heard God speak,
“Alyssa I want you to go back so you will know I am the same God to you there as I am here.”
The morning I left for Springfield I was laying in bed and I heard God say “Ezekiel 2” I opened my Bible to Ezekiel 2. The first verse God says to Ezekiel “Stand up and I will speak to you.” The second verse says “Then, The Holy Spirit raised Ezekiel to his feet and spoke to him.”
God said to Ezekiel “Stand up” and then GOD himself raised him to his feet. Ezekiel didn’t even have to stand up. God did it for him.
I am Ezekiel. I am on the ground, exhausted, breathless and weak. I feel I have nothing to give and I have no hope. BUT GOD… speaks to me without a warrant and says “Alyssa, stand up.” It’s as if His very command revives something in me and then before I can even stand HE brings me to my feet again. His words are his action. As He spoke he was already raising me. He didn’t even give me the chance to stand on my own because that was never the intention of his words. His words were only meant for me to be raised up, to feel my knees lift off the ground and feel him place my feet upon the earth again. I did nothing.
This is grace.
God reared his head against the ideal I held that I must do things “right” for me to warrant something good.
- and I am so glad He did.
How good is our God? How GREAT is our Father!?
In a season I thought I failed, God showed me mercy and
I experienced grace.
I cannot fail.
I live in a world where I am always caught by grace.
and so do you.
I needed to feel this and not just know this.
This is my gift from the end of 2017 and the result of the first half this post and no one can take this from me.
How sad is the devil now? He tried to tell me I failed, but even when I do nothing and even make mistakes and sin I am caught by grace - I am raised to my feet by the spoken word of God. I will never have to worry about standing up myself. My destiny is pure and unscathed.
There are angels singing right now because of this victory and now so will I.
Grace is not just for our sins it is to give us the courage to keep moving forward into our destinies with confidence that we cannot fail and our destinies are secure and GOOD.
Before December 31st, 2017, I surrendered to the worship set Vince put on for us. I had tried to ignore it, to resist it but I gave in. That night was the first time I pressed for God in a long, long time. He said,
“You cannot fail. ”
I saw a storehouse of everything I needed. “you have everything you need.” I saw myself in a classroom with other people, some I knew. Jesus was our teacher, sitting at a desk at the front of the classroom. Everyone was taking their tests but me. I looked around and thought I couldn’t do it, I thought, everyone knows what they are doing and I don’t. So I gave my test to a mouse and some rodents under the seat next to me to eat. Then I saw the classroom scene again, but this time I gave my test to Vince to take for me. I felt a warm hug and an urge in my heart - God said, “just take the test."
