a heart that's bigger

This week has been all about growth. If you didn't know, that is the theme of the entire summer. But do you ever get a small glimpse of the big picture, even if you can't fully grasp it at the time? Briefly, this week, as I started training for my new job, I got a glimpse of the big picture. I didn't understand what that big picture will be, but the glimpse was enough to know that there is a changing inside of me.

I know this changing is a good thing, a maturation for the next step in life. I feel as though many of my peers have already accomplished this step, that somehow I'm behind them, but still on God's schedule. I don't fully understand what the next step is, but I am eager for more understanding.

I had a conversation recently about growth, and where it comes from. I had confessed that I am afraid of the challenges of the summer: providing pastoral care (without prior experience), working more than full time, preparing spiritually for another year of seminary. But I'm also eager for those very same challenges, because I know there is no growth without them. All of my seasons of growth in the past have included fear. And it is in the decision to face that fear, with the full knowledge that God is holding my hand all the way through it, where something in me grows up. If you run, you'll never know what you could have gained.

So, I've decided to be intentional about facing fears. Recently, the scariest thing to me has been my capacity to be used by God. I feared very strongly that God couldn't use me in the way that I knew my peers were being used by God. And yet, I yearned to be an instrument of His. So I prayed to be overtaken by God's purpose. But the moment that an opportunity presented itself, I was afraid again: that I would fail. What's with all this fear! I'm not going to live in fear-- so I'm doing the things that make me afraid. That's growth. That's a heart that's bigger than it used to be. I'm so grateful for the woman God is making me to be. It makes me think of this one part of my favorite Bebo Norman song, A Page is Turned. It's a wedding song, for sure, but there's one part that goes like this:

A page is turned in this world to reveal a little girl
With a heart that's bigger, as it is unfurled
By the language in her soul, that's teaching her to grow
With a careful cover of love that will not fail
And the God of second chance
Picked her up and He let her dance
Through a world that isn't kind

then it continues with the wedding part:

And all this time, preparing her the one
To hold her up when she comes undone
Beneath the storm, beneath the sun
And grown up tall, here you are
Your day has come.

Well. I don't know about my day having come (or rather, I know that part of the song doesn't apply), but the entire rest of it speaks to me. I see myself as a little girl, and I know how lost I was and how innocent before I knew God. But God picked me up and He gave me the joy to dance! And now, NOW, I am the girl whose heart is growing bigger as the language in my soul is revealed. Through Him. Because He gives me challenges that I refuse to run from.

I am learning about the God of love. I'm growing up.