(Hiking team reunion lunch)

Is God good?

What is a positive thing that God has produced from your last season?

What things from your last season of life need to die?

What is/are the thing(s) that are the reason for making you believe the lies about yourself and God?

What does inheritance look like?

     These were all questions that I was given to ponder and pray over on our hiking trip at the beginning of the semester. It didn’t take me long at all to realize that my time here in Georgia would be brutal and wonderful, just based off of these questions that we were asked on our first day!

     Difficult does not even begin to describe what this semester has had in store for me. I have cried, sobbing in anguish over the climb ahead of me. I’ve taken a sledgehammer and furiously broken down the walls that keep me from living a greater life. Then, when I felt utterly weak, broken, and exposed, I sat in the open barrenness that I created around me. Secrets and wounds and pain that I have kept entirely to myself for my entire existence were exposed, I spoke my fears out to my peers here. I expected rejection and shame and taunting, because in the past that is all I had ever known when I tried this thing called “vulnerability”.

     But then the impossible happened. I was embraced, accepted, loved, and rejoiced in. They cried and hurt with me, and didn’t try to fix my problems. I wasn’t looked at like an unfix-able artifact, which is how I had been viewing myself. Learning how to embrace joy in the sorrow, I saw the necessity of confronting my dark side head-on. I could either pretend the problems weren’t there and spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder at the monster behind me, or I could turn around and go to war against it, destroying every piece that invaded my life.

     Today my hiking trip group had a reunion lunch together. We just spent time laughing and enjoying each others’ company. After we ate, we chatted briefly about if anything came up on the hiking trip that makes more sense today than it did three months ago. At the beginning of the semester I did not know how to answer “What does inheritance look like?” Looking at it today, after all that I have been through, I know at least part of the answer.

     I have inherited freedom. I truly don’t have to hang on to those things from the past, self-inflicted or otherwise. Grace. God does not look at my sins. He has forgiven them to such entirety that He doesn’t even see it anymore, so why should I? Love. He loves me so much that He is waging war against the Enemy every single day, ever hour, just to save me and have an eternity with me. Such love that He would send me to Georgia to a group of strangers to help remove the shackles I had binding my soul. He knew that so much more could be done in me away from my friends, my family, and my comfort.

     I didn’t come here just to train to lead trips, that was just a wonderful side effect. I came here to experience a greater lightness in my mind and spirit than I ever have before. And now I get to impart these teachings to others enslaved by a cage of their own making.

“The quickest way for anyone to reach the sun and the light of day is not to run west, chasing after the setting sun, but to head east, plunging into the darkness until one comes into the sunrise.”-Gerald Lawson Sittser