Thank you for sharing!

It’s okay to not be okay. And it’s okay to be a mess inside your mess.

For some reason we have this belief that we need to be okay quickly and that as soon as we’re “healed” then we need to just be over it and it shouldn’t trigger us anymore. This could not be further from the truth.

I received a comment the other day that has kind of bothered me. In efforts to encourage me, someone said, “You need to just do what your own blog says.” And I’m not offended by this person. They truly meant to be kind. But it bumped me a little and sort of made me feel like the expectation of me is to have it all together or all figured out all the time.

I want to just be real here for second. I do not have it all together. In fact, I feel like I’m still in the middle of my darkness most days.

I told God at the beginning of this journey that if He would get me through this, I would share about it. But when I told Him that, I had this strong sense that He didn’t want me to wait until I “had all the right answers” (because first of all, that time will never come). He wanted me to share my journey while I was walking through it.

I come on here and I share encouragement on how to walk through hard things and just trust in God. But then I’ll have a hard day or moment and I can’t help but sort of feel like a fraud. Here I am trying to help other people get through something hard and I can barely keep it together myself. And then I question why God had me start sharing now.

But what I’ve discovered is that I will never fully have it together. I’ll never know all the answers. I might never be fully healed. But that’s not what God has called me to do. I believe my message is that much more powerful because I don’t have all the answers. I’m flawed, hurting, but trying to figure this all out and learning how to walk with God and trust in Him and His plan.

But I’m proving to people that you can walk through incredible challenges, not know how they’ll turn out or if life will ever feel good again, and still be okay and trust God, see Him working in your life, and have that as a comfort in this scary time.

I always felt like no one would want to listen to me if I didn’t have all the answers or if I was still struggling. But what I’ve learned is that God can use you in the middle of your struggle, sometimes even more than when you’re “fully healed”. He’s not asking you to have it all together.

He wants to show you that He can use you for big things in the middle of your mess.

 

There are a lot of people who have stories to share about how they walked through something, and they can talk about how fully healed they are. But I felt like God didn’t want me to be another person like that for you. I felt like He was asking me to meet you where you are. In the middle of a struggle. So I could walk through it with you. Not in front of you. But step by step, we walk through this journey together.

And my purpose is to share what I’m currently struggling with and how I’m working my way through it so that if you’re struggling with the same thing then you can be encouraged that you’re not alone and that there is a way to work through it.

So please don’t feel like you have to have it all together. God can use you in your mess.

Actually allowing yourself to heal and work through your raw emotions is healthy. Don’t rush that healing. It needs to happen and often it happens much slower than we like.

If you’re being triggered by something, that’s a sign that something still needs healing. Don’t push it aside because the expectation of you is that you have to be okay. You only have to be okay when it’s YOUR time to be okay, not anyone else’s. No one else is walking through exactly what you’re walking through, so no one else gets to dictate when you should be okay.

It’s okay to be a mess inside your mess. There is a time to be strong and a time to be a mess.

I believe if you’re here reading this, then you probably don’t want to stay stuck in your sorrow or your mess. And that’s so healthy and proves that you’re so strong.

But being strong doesn’t mean you’ll have it all together.

It doesn’t mean you won’t still cry.

It doesn’t mean you won’t get triggered.

It doesn’t mean you won’t be an emotional mess one day.

It doesn’t mean you won’t miss all the things you’ve had to say goodbye to.

Being strong is when you still persevere despite feeling all those things.

It’s when you keep trusting God and having hope in His plan of restoration for you.

It’s not allowing your hurt emotions to make poor decisions.

It’s not allowing the Enemy to set up camp in your mind and take over.

It’s forgiving yourself or forgiving those that hurt you.

It’s moving on when you feel like you can’t.

You will hurt. You will ache. You will mourn. At times you may feel desperate and hopeless. But that doesn’t mean you’re not strong.

So embrace the mess. It’s a mess, it’s supposed to be messy. And that’s okay.

 

 

Thank you for sharing!