New Pieces

These past few months have been silent.

A kind of silence where you ache to hear something, anything, but nothing comes.

With these seasons of life, you don’t foresee them coming.  You don’t hear a warning signal in the distance telling you to take shelter, and you aren’t provided a schedule when you enter to inform when it will end.

At first, the silence terrified me.  I began noticing my surroundings changing, but I didn’t notice a change in myself.  I feared getting left behind and forgotten because I couldn’t keep up.

The funny thing with these moments in life is that you forget the firm ground of foundation you stand on.  While life around you may continue moving forward and progressing, there is a solid basis for you to firmly plant your two feet. 

And it is when you realize this that you realize you can change too.

Change is a new concept for me.  Or rather, the ability to change.  Occasionally, change will come naturally.  However, I have recently learned that change can be voluntary.  This is a powerful concept to understand.  You are given the option to remain stagnant.  Maybe you experienced a season of growth, but eventually, old practices run out.  You need to readjust, reprioritize, and reevaluate.  And you have the option to act on that, as well.

It is a scary thought, though.  To be sitting still while in the middle of a storm thundering around you, the thought of moving brings images of failure, loneliness, and rejection. 

Good news, though.  We aren’t stuck and glued to one place on the solid ground.  It is there for us to be able to move around on. 

That’s when I took a step.  A small one, but a step.

You see, I think it is easy to get caught up in what the world is doing.  How your new city functions, how an acquaintance becomes a stranger, and how people are constantly talking are always tempting to focus our attention on.  What I found myself doing in response to this was posting my life up on a social media billboard for whoever pleased to see.  I wanted to put on a show in real life where people could view only the successful and blissful pieces of me.  Let people see that this change does not affect me.  Let them know this metaphorical storm I am in the middle of is only a short and powerless rain shower.  It will pass, but in the mean time, I am thriving on people, coffee, and smiles.

This is a lie.  We do not always live in seasons of life that never have bumps or holes.  If anything, a social media page is close to being one lie after another because of the depiction it gives.  We invite people into the happy and carefree aspects of our life, but shelter the inner parts of insecurities that we are too scared to reveal.

I recently thought on this.  I could not find a valid reason in sharing life in this way.  It just doesn’t come close to giving a full representation or explanation.  Life is a combination of adventures in valleys and on mountaintops, so I wanted to place a challenge to not live life through pictures and captions.

First, I challenged myself to this idea.  For forty days, I spent time writing – writing thoughts I couldn’t get out of my head and writing pieces meant to encourage.  When I wanted to post a picture or caption of an exciting experience or thought, I instead wrote about it.  I will admit, at first, it was not easy.  But eventually, it became a freeing time of not representing myself on my Facebook and Instagram, but instead through intentional time with people and intentional time alone.  Most importantly, though, I spent time with the solid ground in new ways – sometimes standing, sometimes walking around, and sometimes just sitting in the presence of Him.

So, I don’t want to share life over the past few months with you of how I spent time making memories.  I don’t want to share the past few months of how many cute coffee shop visits I had or how many people I spent time with.  These are wonderful things, but I want to share the past few months’ lessons.  I want to share what this solid ground has shown me.  But let me tell you – it hasn’t been all scriptural calligraphy and artworks in my journal Bible.  But friend, that’s the thing about it.  It is never solely about those things.

It is about a relationship that can shred each of your broken pieces, but build you up in a whole new way. 

And then comes the exhilarating part: discovering and examining these new pieces He has made.