As a child, there were moments I felt despair. Remember those moments? When something you wanted so desperately couldn’t be given, when a classmate left you out on the playground, when you had a fight with a friend.
I was so desperately sensitive as a child that I appeared shy to strangers and weak to friends. I was a tiny, fearful child in public; perfectly calm and at peace in my own home and backyard.
Those disparate images of my childhood still appear quite frequently in my adult life. I look like an extrovert, easy to talk, smiling, confident, but inside I’m shaking. Not from fear as much as I’m just not comfortable expending that much energy just to make small talk. It exhausts me.
The wonderful thing is that I was made this way. I’m fearfully and wonderfully made. I was told this over and over as a small child, but I don’t think I believed it then.
As an adult, I believe God takes me around to the same lessons that I couldn’t learn as a child. It’s because I am His child. I am His beloved daughter.
As this blog function changes (see tomorrow’s post for the scoop) and as I learn to trust God’s voice again, much like I trusted it as a child, I find myself turning back to those childhood years again.
I don’t turn to the world’s ways of figuring out what we’re here for nor do I turn to my own ideas, I turn again to that Abba Father Who guides me as a child. I am a small daughter, looking up to find out if I should step forward. I’ve been there many times before; I will be here many times again.
As a child, I could only believe in what I saw. I saw nature and animals and love and kindness. As an adult, I can believe in more nuanced themes now, but I choose to turn again to look at life from a child’s eye.
Call it simplistic if you will. I call it the awakening of a creative artist. Our creative self is not aged, it is young. Creativity is a return to those things that we believed when we were young, and that are now proved through life.
We have been wounded, broken, and left crumbled on the ground. It is My Creator that has picked me up, lifted my face to the sunshine and to all that is good and right with His creation. Those things are still nature and love and kindness and now grace.
I believe now.
{ 2 comments }
Beautifully written! This post contains everything that has been surfacing in my mind over the past week, but I wasn’t able to sort it out or articulate it. Thank you for inspiring me to dare to believe, because each of us are fearfully and wonderfully made. And I needed the reminder that in order to reconnect with my creative self, I’ve got to be willing to reconnect with my inner child! (I’m also intrigued as to what changes will be made to your blog!)
Maureen,
Thanks! It is really, truly what I’ve learned in the past nine months since embarking on my memoir/essay work. I love that I’ve learned it at least once and I’m excited to learn it again many times over!
This blog will go down to intermittent posting because I have other opportunities to blog and I need to put my time there. I’ll keep everyone posted, I promise!
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