Becoming Relevant

Hi friends.  I'm missing this quiet place while I'm away in Harrisburg at The Relevant Conference.

I wish I had time to tell you how amazing and beautiful and redemptive the whole thing has been, but I am short on time and long on things to process about all I have learned and experienced here.  I only will leave you with a few words from the Five-Minute-Friday exercise we did in a session today with Lisa-Jo (live and in person!) and a short prayer that is on my heart.

Five Minutes of Becoming:

Being here has, in so many ways I never expected, been about… becoming.

About embracing and discovering and admitting and coming to a place where I realize that I am in progress.  That I, too, am, like all these other amazing and beautiful women… in process.

We are becoming.

We are becoming bloggers.  Becoming writers.  Becoming friends and family and kindred spirits…becoming beautiful and honest.  Becoming like Christ.  Becoming like us.

Becoming like me.

And before arriving here, I believed that I had a grasp on what that meant.  What it meant to be and to become.  That coming into myself was something I had already slid into, was already (sort-of) there, and that this would be about learning and networking and growing and taking a step forward.

But as I’ve been here… as I’ve soaked up the amazing beauty that is all around, and as I have remembered the sound of the whisper of God… I have realized that it was always about becoming.

Becoming a woman whose purpose is clearly defined.  Not as a blogger, not as a writer or a mother or a kindred spirit, a friend or expert, or anything that is outside of the love of the Christ that redeems this broken heart.

Being here is about becoming less, about coming more into the central love of the cross, about bending low and laying down my striving, that I would know what it is to be authentic. 

My prayer:

Lord,

I remember what the whisper of God sounds like, now.  I remember how your love brings me to so much fullness, it leaks from my eyes.  I remember that you gave me this thing within, this thing that drives me and makes me discover and connect and experience and grow…and thrive and thrill and break open with joy.  And I have doubted in my abilities, but I rest now in yours.  I rest in the assurance that you know what you’re doing, that you have redeemed and ordained every word for a holy purpose.

And I thank you with a gripping gratitude for reminding me.  For whispering your breath so I can feel the wind of it.  For nodding to this frail heart and spurring me onward.  For the way you created this world to be so relational, and our hearts to delight in others.  For lighting the fire beneath my stunted heart, again.  For love, Lord, big and wide and high and deep.

That I would feel you here, *this* close, for the rest of the time here.  Thank you for the blessing, Lord, and that I would be so bold to ask for more … Bless me more, fill me more, with knowledge, with community, with connection, and with the stirring of your Spirit.

Fill me, Lord, with your purpose, your dream, your truth.  Help me siphon all the *me* out of this experience and soak up the *you*.

In your precious name,

Amen