Truth be told.

Sometimes the moment feels too much to experience it all at once.  The overwhelming rush of love and pain and gratitude and breathtaking humbleness swallow up the space.
There's a little thing about me a few of you know.  I wake up on my birthday every year...depressed.  I go to bed depressed.  I get up December 1st and I'm fine.  I continue to dig to find the root.  It's not the age.  It's not the expectation.  It's not current life situation.  I've always kept that part of me close.  Ashamed.  It was a piece of a lie that I held tightly.  I was unloved.  I was unloveable.  I toiled so many days throughout each year trying to earn it.  Trying to feel it.  I guess on the day I was supposed to receive it, I couldn't.
I went to Woman Camp this past October and I uncovered a lie.  But what I found was more than one little deception.   Disrupting the patterns of my daily life, being honest about my failures, my heart was exposed.  All I could see was my worth being trapped by all the untruths I had continued to believe about myself.  It was the beginning of a journey that hasn't been easy.
The fear of rejection cripples me.  It makes me work hard to earn your love.  It takes the wind out of my sails.  It leaves me exhausted and no further along the journey to freedom.  Freedom.  A word that God continues to whisper to me.  "It's so close. Keep going, beloved."  I've thought for a long time I knew what He was talking about.  I was oh so wrong.  The freedom that He promises me is truth.  Truth that I am known and I am loved. Truth that I am lovable and worthy and free to be a sinner walking a path towards grace and redemption and reconciliation.  Freedom from always getting it right.  Freedom from having a good attitude.  Freedom from the sin that so easily entangles me.
I've spent the last couple of months afraid of who I was becoming.  Who I already was.  The work it would take to start changes I didn't know how to make.  Answers to questions that were hard to ask.
I told my friends.  And my friends covered me.  They held hands and protected me.  They gave me truth.  They gave me their lies and we discounted them together.  They came and sat with me in the pit.  They met me where I was and loved me in all my brokenness. For that I am eternally grateful.
This birthday, I was greeted with cards from 24 kindergarteners.  Wine, a picture filled with our 24 children  and beautiful words from my partner-in-crime every weekday.  Flowers delivered to school by my sweet friend who knows me all the way through.  Calls.  Texts.  Messages.  An over the top dinner with the people I love most who generously give and give and give without a second thought.  Graeters and a house filled with children laughing. Going to bed tired and filled with joy.
Last night we had our journey group and they literally filled my cup.  A beautiful glass brimming with slips of paper that encourage and sink deep into the parts of my heart that have grown hard.  It was actually painful to hear the beautiful things they said.  I wanted it to end, but I couldn't drink it all in fast enough.  It was truth and it was good and I believed they meant every word.  Growth, even when it creates life and is beautiful, still hurts like hell.  I literally felt the war happening as ground was taken for the goodness of  a God who fights for me.  The sweet souls that have sat in this with me for so so long are more than ride or die friends.  They are warriors who are going to battle with and for me.  Freedom, I'm coming.