I remember a time in my life when I believed the lie that as a woman, it was my duty to be overwhelmed, exhausted, angry, unappreciated, over run, and inadequate. I had felt that way since I was a teenager and it continued on to my time as a single mother working three jobs at eighty hours a week and it didn’t stop once I was married with a “help mate”. Every new season of my life only brought more challenge and each new challenge brought me more anger and despair. I was always considered laid-back and easy going when I was younger. I was the youngest child and I just went with the flow of my family and always hid in the shadows of whoever was before me. When I became a teenager, I just wanted to find a little of myself and find my group of people who would make me feel like I was not only seen but that someone really wanted to see me despite my flaws. I never understood that my power came from something within myself and that the appreciation and validation of others wasn’t going to do the trick. I believed the lie that I needed something else other than what I had been given in order to be what I was meant to be. Read that again, out loud, so you can process that mouthful.
This lie has been hammering the lives of women since the Garden of Eden. The enemy appeared to Eve and made her believe that she needed that ONE thing to just…be…better…to…just…be…more. Girls, it’s gone downhill for us ever since. Just as it does for the men in our lives, the trash that fills our minds come from every side and every angle that exists. Media, our family, magazines, television, our friends, and ourselves, because it just isn’t realistic to escape the junk, negativity, and the lies about who you are and what you deserve. Too many of us believe that we were made for nothing more than this, instead of being made for “such a time as this” (Esther 4:14). It is too easy to let life overwhelm us with everything we think we are expected to accomplish. When we get to that point of being overwhelmed, we also start to think that there is no escape from our current reality and we are just meant to grasp for survival and hope we can exist. Hope we can exist. Have you ever gotten to a place in your life where that was about all the hope you could muster? “I just HOPE I can survive this.” You realize you can’t even hope for something to change or hope for something better, because that would require more from you than what you are able to give. You’ve already given all you’ve got to everything and everyone else that has already demanded your attention, so to have something else to give for yourself and things being better is just so unrealistic. There’s nothing left to give, but life just keeps on taking anyway, right?
This is the part where I want to be able to put my hands on your shoulders so I can look at your downtrodden face and make you look at me with your exhausted eyes and tell you that you don’t have to live this way anymore. This is the part where even though you feel like you have nothing, the one thing you do indeed have is the CHOICE of whether or not you are going to continue on this way. If your first inclination is to tell me that I don’t understand, I don’t live your life, and that this is SO easy for me to say then I hope you will stick with me as this blog progresses so that I can gain your trust when I say I understand. I want to deal with these issues that we face as women, as workers, as wives, as mothers, and as just one person on the planet of many. There are too many of us who are going through the same situations and deal with the same feelings but we would never know it because we judge, keep silent, and let our differences keep us from finding our common ground. I’m on a mission to end that in any way I can, and that has to start by stopping within me. Here I will hold myself accountable for how I weave my story in to the fabric of this world, and my prayer is that together you and I will grow and empower ourselves so that we may uplift and love others to do the same. Thanks for joining me. Just hang on. It’s usually a bumpy ride with me.
Life Beyond the Noise 