Swimming, Stories and A Yes.

I will be honest and say that the past months of my life have not been the easiest.  They've been hard.  Very hard.  There are a great deal of causes for this hardship and probably even more reasons for it all than I realize.

For quite a while, the negative side of things has been all that my mind and emotions have allowed me to see and feel.  That's not a normal thing for me.  Once I would begin this downward spiral in my thinking and feeling, I would just keep going down and down with no hope of an end until I would be too exhausted that my body finally let me fall asleep.  I would wake the next morning feeling the aftermath of getting hit by a bus.  (Not that I actually know what that really feels like...)  The heaviness of what I was carrying kept pressing down on me and it was all I could think about.

The stress, the things that were not going how I wanted them to go, the things that were changing that I didn't want to change, the homesickness, loneliness, hopelessness, anger, the hurt, anxiety, pressure, the fear, the responsibility I was too scared to bear.

All day.
Every day.

I was exhausted and finding no rest from all the wresting that was going on inside no matter how much I slept and ran and did puzzles and went on long walks through open fields.

I felt like things were never going to turn around.  I felt that it was just going to be like this from now on until I finished my commitment and could move on and I was just going to have to live with it and stick it out no matter how much I didn't want to, no matter how much it hurt, no matter how much it was turning me into someone I didn't like.

But, like every other time I have ever freaked out over something, after hours, days, weeks and months of crying out to God, the turn came.

Well, it had to come several times for it to actually stick but it came.

I started to breathe.

I will mention just 3 of these turns among the many.

Swimming.

I've always like water.  (I've not always liked drinking it but that's just when I was a kid and all I wanted to drink was Sunny D...)  I've always enjoyed going to the beach and playing in the waves, rafting down a river, jumping off a cliff into that river, being pulled on a tube being a boat.  Lots of fun.  But I've never really been the best at actual swimming, you know like the breaststroke or one of those fancy ways of swimming.  I could never get the breathing right.

Well, I'm currently on the small island of Gozo in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea and it's summertime.  That means that it's hot all the time.  I don't like heat.  So the only way to cool off, is to go swimming.  Whether that's in the small pool in the backyard, or going on an adventure to find a

sweet cove and risk the jellyfish, swimming is just the best thing ever.  And I'm getting better at it.  I'm learning to breathe.  I do it every day and I love it.  Literally every day.  I have fully embraced the siesta lifestyle (which I now fully understand) so after my post-lunch nap, I go for a swim and again, it's the best thing ever.

It gets my body moving (like running, but there is no running in Gozo unless you like hills, heat and humidity which I do not) and this makes me happy.  Very happy.

Stories

I've recently begun a project that will probably take me a very long time but I'm ok with that.  I've begun writing stories.  My stories.  I've always loved writing.  I still have a collection of stories which I wrote in 6th grade (one of which is a remake of 2 classic Disney stories entitled, "Cinderblock and the Seven Dogs".  Yes.  That is a fact.  It's a bit of a mash up between the story of Cinderella and Snow White.)

I find that I express myself much better in words written than in words spoken.  (How I was expressing myself in the story of Cinderblock, I have no idea.  But then again, I was 11 years old.)

So with this project, I'm attempting to write all the stories that I can remember from the last 3 and 1/2 years of my life that I've been with YWAM, both in England and with Next Wave and the places in between.  That's a lot of stories and places and people and life lessons learned.  I love it when I write one story and then halfway through that one, I'm reminded of another one, then another and it just explodes on the page.  (You can start to read a few of them here - http://aneverendingblankpage.blogspot.com/)

I want to write a good story with this life that I've been given and writing the stories I have already lived have shown me the good that has been my life so far.

A Yes.

When things are uncertain, I freak out.  And I mean, really freak out.  But when things are clear, I can be calm and can breathe and can take on whatever challenge comes.

There have been a lot of uncertainties with what's happening next, some circumstantial that were not under my control, but most in my heart.  I didn't know which way I wanted to go.  There was finally a yes to these circumstances and my heart finally decided to say a firm yes to what I felt God has been asking of me all this time no matter how much I fought it.  I am calm (for the most part...) and I can breathe with a readiness to take on the challenges ahead.

Finally, the peace and the joy came and then the final turn.

It's been a very tough road to get to this point and there were days when I wondered if I ever would.  But the cries were heard and the prayers answered.

So I'm jumping in.

Again.

I'm jumping into the unknown, into the water, into the story, into something I know I'm absolutely capable of (thank you Philippians 4:13) but also into failures, into fear, into inevitable challenges that will test me far beyond anything I've experienced.

I'm jumping anyways.

Jumping, trusting that God is good.

All the time.