When Growing Pains Overwhelm Your Soul–

You’re right in the middle of it. You’re experiencing more growing pains in your soul. And 2019 is turning out to be overwhelming. Again. Like it was last year. Only just recently you felt like you were making a lot of heart progress and it seemed like maybe you were turning a hundred corners and twirling in fields of wildflowers and brimming over with songs.

But now you’re not.

And it feels like Square 1 all over again. I’ve been there. More than once. I’ll be there again…maybe even this week. So you are not alone.

I get it.

I’m coming alongside you today….in whatever middle you’re sitting in (or crushed in) to whisper some truth to your weariness.

First, you already have God’s love and His favor. This has not changed…not even a hundred corners ago. You are fully, deeply, and inexplicably loved by the One who made you. Know that you can’t receive more of God’s love even if your heart would just cooperate and grow at the speed you wish it would. God loves you always and all the way.

Now yes, there is a reward for righteousness, but not gained favor. God’s favor is complete. And it is for a lifetime (Psalm 23, 103, 30:5) Go in grace and grow in God’s strength. Turn corners and re-turn corners. Fall into mercy and grace. Praise God for His love and His faithfulness! Taste and see that He is good.

Second, the middle is messy. Like really messy. You’ll make progress than fall backward. You’ll spring forward then sink low. You’ll be low, then reach to the sky with hands outstretched while surrender is your heart-song. You are becoming more like God and more like Him always feels like a big mess, because we are so opposite of Who He is.

Everything about us is being retrained, remade.

We are choosing joy when we’d rather choose despair. We are surrendering dreams and expectations when we’ve got this white-knuckle grasp on all of it. We are learning what it means to delight in + desire God when we are so easily distracted by earth-bound everything else. We are seeking to become more like Him as an act of obedience and an offering of worship (Romans 12:1).

So yeah, it’s a huge mess, but it’s a mess worth working through because a deeper relationship with Christ is our peace and our joy…and even our ever-growing delight. 

Third, you were made on purpose and for a purpose. The middle gets really good at lying to us. We get suffocated in falsehood. We are convinced that our purpose is dead...like really dead. God couldn’t make life out of this. He just couldn’t.

Well, you’re wrong.

Flat out wrong.

You were made on purpose by God, and in God you have purpose (Ephesians 2:10). You don’t need a husband. You don’t need three kids. You don’t need to be successful. You don’t need to be a great ministry leader. You don’t need to be talented. You don’t have to be perfect. And you don’t have to be enough, because you aren’t enough. And well, that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

You need Jesus.

SO LET’S ALL TAKE A DEEP BREATH!

Your purpose is to know God, to be known by God, and to make Him known. And guess what? You’re going to do that in a hundred different, tiny, specific ways that God has designed for you. And all for His glory. That’s how much purpose you have as a woman created by God.

Live your middle place on purpose, because God has intricately woven purpose into your life–every single season of it. You have no excuse to forfeit. And when you do? Well, that’s when grace abounds all the more. You are absolutely loved with an unchanging love given by a God who made you for Himself (Ephesians 2).

So tell me. . .

Are you really forgotten? Aren’t a hundred corners worth turning over and over again? Isn’t this mess worth fighting through? And there is grace upon grace upon grace from the God of all strength and peace for every terrifying or joyful moment in your story.

Be honest.

Can purposelessness really describe this long season of your life?

Answer that.

Press on.