My heart is absolutely bursting with all I am learning here in Australia. Each day is full of life changing lessons and revelations and I wish I could share them all, but that would be way too much typing for me and probably more reading than you would like, so I will share some of what I feel is the most important. I have always been sort of a “goody two shoes” growing up, trying to do everything perfectly right away. I feel like I tried to manipulate people into liking me by impressing them with my actions and found it worked for a significant amount of my childhood. I completely placed my value in what I did and how well I did it and found it hard to believe I was still worth something if I screwed up. It wasn’t until I graduated high school that I had to start making significant life choices and it was at this time I started to realize there was no way I could please everyone with what I chose. Since then the Lord has been taking me on a huge journey, teaching me how to put my worth and value in Him and not in what I did or what others thought of me and has truly been showing me that who I am is based on who’s I am (His child and creation). Now, I thought I had pretty much grasped this concept after going through a year of working when all my friends were at university. During this time I constantly had to allow God to speak my worth to me because I felt none. The next year when I was in school and still felt insignificant I re-evaluated this again and thought after much prayer I had overcome it. After this I did my Discipleship Training School here with Ywam and God brought this issue up again, continuing to teach me about my identity. After that I was SURE I had a handle on it. Little did I know I hadn’t even scratched the surface of what God was going to teach me in this area. While being here on staff I have messed things up more times than I can count. With so much to do and nearly every hour of the day from 6am-10pm scheduled it has been impossible to do things perfectly. At first this made me angry. I had a very clear picture of the type of leader I wanted to be and the type of dance program I wanted to run and expected both of these to magically function perfectly right away. To state the obvious it didn’t happen that way. I also discovered that I was also holding others to this standard I put on myself. Can you say judgment? Sheesh. Then God began to remind me of something I was completely forgetting: Grace. Undeserved favor that is given to us WITHOUT earning it. Still being trusted with 1 on 1 relationships when I can’t be the perfect mentor, forgiveness that someone gives when I have snapped at them out of stress, students still respecting me when dance work outs or classes don’t run perfectly, and God’s unfailing love when I have forgotten to make time for Him in my day. In taking up grace I have begun to be ok with learning. Ok with stumbling because I know it means I was trying to go somewhere. God does not require us to be perfect, if he wanted us to be he could have created us all as robots. He takes joy in seeing us grow, discover and learn, and it’s often in messing up that that happens.
