Glitches

As I awoke this morning, I was called to blog… I have not felt this deep desire to write anything down for months. Today as I am vulnerable and share snippets of my story, I hope that despite my flaws you can see God’s good. “Misery versus peace, the two cannot live together so if they are battling one another it is time to move on,” Matt Magness. There was a time in my life where peace used to reign over my heart despite the circumstances and now misery terminates my soul. There was a season of which I thought was torture, then I saw God’s true wrath. Perhaps where we think we were was not misery but a muchneeded mindset switch. Moving to Charlotte, I am finding God’s grace in ways in which I cannot begin to describe. I have felt His presence in my darkest hour of need. He has provided people for such a time as this….Yet something is still wrong. Stepping out of God’s will was a life decision I never thought I would experience. For my entire 26 years of living, I have been pursuing Christ, so how can I step out of God’s will? As I wrestled with this question deeply, I began seeking wise council. At each contact, I kept hearing two things…”God will give you what you think you want in order to strip you of that desire,” and “God will make all things for good.” Beginning to meditate on these things and dig deep into scripture God began to speak clearly to me….or so I thought. Through much prayer and reading I kept hearing a voice. It would whisper over and over again, “Stay,” and “This is your home.” A quiet and meek voice, it must be from God right? He must finally be giving me an answer to the question I have been so desperately seeking. As my dearest friend, aka my mom came to visit this past week, through our many, MANY talks I was brought to the realization that this small whisper was not God’s voice. I was shocked that I could be so fooled as to entertain a voice of which is not from the one who created me. Mom also said these words, “Maybe if you talk to Matt and he says this, this and that are the reasons I knew this wasn’t right and it relates and matches to your circumstances then you will know the answer.” Can you believe that when I talked to Matt, the three things He said about how to know if God is speaking were the THREE exact things I had experienced in the past week or so?!? Selah. When you are having a hard time distinguishing God’s voice, He boldly uses others to bring you back to reality. “Honestly, knowing you as little as I do, the only thing holding you in Charlotte is the fact you failed, or you feel like others are going to think you did,” Matt Magness. For the past few days I have been confronting this idea of failure. Did I actually choose to move before God told me to? Did I actually make a mistake? After years of following hard after God, I up and moved my entire life for nothing? Even sitting here reading those words aloud I am shocked yet convicted. As I type these words, I am desperately asking God to forgive me…to mold my heart back into seeking the desires it should…to continue to stir in me the fact that I did fail, have greatly paid the consequences, and am now having to tell the world. Losing sight of who I was, I ended up finding myself and it was exactly who I was before I moved to Charlotte with a little extra of course because each mistake only makes you stronger and wiser. And now I am faced with the decision of where to reboot…where to go to heal….where to go to complete the journey of finding my path. Though as embarrassing as it may be, my heart aches for the wild and wonderful…for the church that made me who I am, for every addict in the streets of my hometown. As I see my home church growing and molding into a place of genuine worship and growth, I want nothing more than to be apart of their journey. It saddens me to leave the people I have met here in Charlotte and I am not even going to sugar coat it, it is truly an embarrassment to go back on my words and state, Charlotte was my glitch, but without seeing a glitch, one would never know it is time to upgrade and reboot.