A couple of weeks ago Andy asked the staff if we were at a place in our lives where we felt like we were ready to battle or if we needed to stay back and rest. After thinking about this for a few minutes, I concluded that I was coming out of a season of rest and God was preparing me to get into battle. Since then, I've felt like every time I get up to battle, I get smacked down. The last few weeks, maybe even months I've made some bad choices. I've made some good ones too, but the truth is that I feel like I've been losing myself. I've come face-to-face with this in the past few days, even more so when one of my best friends and I got into a heated argument where he told me I seemed different. It hit me like a ton of bricks.

Change is all around me. The next month will probably be one of the hardest in terms of who I'm going to have to say goodbye to and attempt to let go. My nature is and has always been to push away. That's a huge part of what our argument was about. When everything around me seems to be shifting, I have this tendency to isolote myself, throwing myself into full-force coping ON MY OWN mode. I know this isn't healthy for me or my relationships, but for whatever reason it feels safe to me. Lady Antebellum has a line in their recent hit "Need You Now" that says, "I would rather hurt than feel nothing at all." A friend and I had a conversation about this one night. I actually feel the exact opposite. I would prefer to feel nothing. Maybe because when I hurt, everything becomes real and I feel completely out of control.

Thank you to Beth Moore for these words...
"Although we may have something unhealthy deep inside of us, those in whom Christ dwells also have something deeper. Something whole. Something so infinitely healthy that if it would but invade the rest of us, we would be healed."