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Perception or more?!

This is mostly a rant at myself but you know I can rant at you too if it’ll help?!

Why am I so easily influenced by the worldly perception that showing weaknesses is failure? Why do I let that perception rule my internal thought processes? Why do I seem to think that only perfection is enough for those around me. My whole emotional existence seems to be easily destroyed by such simple comparisons, comments, observations and overthinking.

I’m tired of trying to be wonder-wife, supermum, the incredible friend, captain weight loss and any other super hero you can think of.

It can be putting myself down as a wife because I failed to clean the bathroom or didn’t finish dinner at the time I was aiming for.

Or berating myself because the supermum I aspired to be first thing in the morning turned into the toddler watching almost an entire serious of Fireman Sam whilst the baby naps instead of doing fun activities like making a fire engine out of a box! (and I somehow still didn’t manage to clean the bathroom?!?)

Or a rubbish friend because I forgot something like sending a message or not encouraging someone enough.

Or even just as a person aiming to lose weight. I *should* have lost more. I *shouldnt* have eaten that.

My overthinking mind influenced by a perception from somewhere, where I don’t know, tells me I am not enough and I cannot be enough until I am always achieving.

One of closest and most valuable, lovely friends sent me this the other day.


What if I could live in that mindset?! I don’t really know how it would help me get the bathroom cleaned, the fire engine made, the messages sent or the weight lost but I suspect somewhere God would make it work!!

Achieving is important. Achieving gets things done. Achieving motivates me to do more achieving but the perfectionism and the negative impact that goes with that achieving will destroy me.

So when I feel overwhelmed with an under whelmed soul and an overthinking mind maybe I need to just stop and remember I was made for me!

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Who goes with you?

IMG_2454Community is a beautiful thing. Real community is there in good times and in bad. They stretch us and encourage us to grow and become better versions of us. They keep us accountable and they hit us with spoons when we do stupid things – normally metaphorically not literally!

I’ve found myself pondering my small group of friends and I found myself feeling sad that I have so few friends in recent days and weeks. I know a lot of people but I’m not sure I have that many friends.

I know this sounds like a sob story and truth be told for much of the time I’ve been pondering my friendships and community I probably have been looking at it as more of a sob story.

However, there’s a but, a big BUT. The friendships that I have, the people who I spend my time with, the people who spend their precious time with me and invest in me are precious and amazing friends.

They are the types of people who I want to help, invest in, build up, encourage but also to challenge to do more, different, less, change and just generally be the best that they can be. I want that because whether verbally or through their actions that what they do for me.

Who goes with you? Who challenges you to be the best person you can be? Who really wants a bunch of yes men around them who pay lip service but not heart service.

Yes my group of friends is small. Yes there are times when I wish I had a bigger pool to pull from (to be less of a burden more than anything) but this group are friends are the perfect group of friends for who I am now and where God would have me go.

I am BEYOND grateful.

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Bottom of the pile or worth the effort?

Do you see yourself as worth it?
For years I, without knowing it, did not believe I was worth it. Now by it I mean the effort from myself or from others.
For years I tried to lose weight using weight watchers, tesco diets and slimming world. For years I would lose a bit of weight and then stop and start putting it back on.
For years I put myself at the bottom of the pile thinking that everyone else’s needs were more important and needed to be met before my own.
For years I put myself down and thought negatively about everything I did and everything that was said to me as a compliment.
Then after a life changing moment of heartbreak and the encouragement of a friend I started to realise that I was worth effort. I was valuable and mattered. My feelings didn’t always have to be compromised for the sake of others. My losing weight was important and worth putting effort into because I was worth putting effort into and it mattered to me.
The key phrases from the course Freedom in Christ ;
“I am accepted
I am secure
I am significant”
I began, with a whole lot of help from God, to change a mindset that which had been so deeply instilled in me from so many sources which should have been instilling the complete opposite that I had not spent any of my adult life believing any differently. In conversation that made me feel down and insignificant I would repeat in my head the three phrases above. When a negative thought came into head I would remind myself of those phrases.
I also had prayer and that opened the freedom from negative thoughts using what I now know to be God’s whisper to correct thoughts of maybe even 15 years history. Whispers from God about being worth time, him seeing me as beautiful, wanting the best for me, looking after my heart and building me up those helped to change my mindset!
So having had my mindset changed and having found a way of losing weight which worked for my personality type I started to see progress in something that meant so much to me. I invested time in myself and what I needed to do to stay on track and I was proud and encouraged by those around me.
Do you believe that you are worth the effort? Chances are if you consistently put yourself right at the bottom of giant pile telling yourself you do because you are called to serve others that you don’t recognise your need to made to feel worth it. It’s exhausting to love from a tank that is empty.
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Bittersweet

Have you come across the idea of bittersweet? The idea is that we need the bitter to grow and to make the sweet, feel sweet.
“When life is sweet, say thank you and celebrate. When life is bitter, say thank you and grow.” Shauna Niequist

It’s hard to imagine being thankful for the experience of a parent dying. In fact, it’s ridiculous to imagine it BUT actually the practice of living a bittersweet life allows you to look at the circumstances around the situation and be thankfully for what it reveals. Friends who are there; cry with you, step up when you just can’t go on, who help in emotional and physical ways, are revealed in the bittersweet of the circumstances. It’s easy to see this in the early days of grief.

What’s taken longer is the bittersweet thankfulness of what God is doing in my mum death in me. God is using the experience, the vulnerability, the passion for keeping her name alive, to grow me as a woman, a mother, a daughter, a wife, a writer, a creative spirit but most importantly a child of God.

When mum suddenly died it was like her light suddenly went out but as I reflect now I see that she leaves behind a legacy of lights in her husband, her children, her friends and family to keep her faith alive. Particularly for me and my husband we are trying to keep her presence real with our boys so that they know the faith Granny Sue had (she was grandma when she was alive but Zac was getting confused with his other grandma!) and how much love she would have shown them!

As I explore what it means to be a part of Mum’s legacy and all God has called me to be I’m praying God will guide my path.

Please understand I’m certainly not saying I am grateful my mum is gone. I miss her daily, sometimes hourly. I miss her part in my adventure and I hate that she is gone. I do not believe she was taken to teach me a lesson or that somehow her death was a positive thing but I have to believe in a God who deals with the bitter and can show me the sweet around it. I’m not sure I explain myself very well on this topic!!

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To build up or squash down?

When I sat down this morning after my time with God reading my bible plans and praying to be creative in my me and God time I found a blank piece of paper and a pen but no inspiration to DO anything. I’d no thoughts on how to express myself. And the more I think about it the more sad that makes me.
I loved being creative when I was younger. I drew and I painted and chalked and used charcoals and tries to express myself thought something creative and I loved it. I’d spend hours drawing something from a picture or sat looking at a view.
But one day someone told me I wasn’t creative. They told me I couldn’t draw. What I did just wasn’t good enough. That was my art teacher at the age of 14. The funny thing was at no point had I thought of doing art for GCSE but she felt the need to tell me not to. And from that point until very recently my creative drawing spark went out leaving the occasional cake as the only visible creative out let.
The power that voice had over me put out something which I enjoyed for 15 years because by her standards I was not good enough. But the voices I have around me today encourage me to express myself and build me and it ignites that desire to more, express more, create more.
That is the power of our words. We can put out flames of passion and interest in seconds or we can carefully and sensitively build people up to help them grow, develop and improve.
I want to be one of those people who uses my words to encourage and not tear down. To stretch and not squash. To express honestly in love recognising that my words have power.
I’m hoping when I sit down tomorrow in front of me will be a pieces of paper and a pen and in my heart will be the words or pictures that I would long to draw! I’m also praying Sully stays asleep long enough to let me!!! 😉
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1 year on – who was Sue? Her faith

I find it really hard to think of Mum as a woman of faith because although she was and I knew she was, it’s only really since her death that I’ve recognised the things she did in the name of her faith.

  • Sue believed in an active, real, present, speaking, healing, powerful, life changing God.
  • She believed that he knew what He was doing with her life – she often used the phrase ‘God knows’ when talking to people about uncertainty.
  • Sue was generous with all that she had, particularly her gifts and her time and where she could her money.
  • She believed that reading his word helped have more a relationship with Him
  • She was committed to church even when the people drove her NUTS (thankfully it had been a good few years since this had been the case!)
  • She put others before herself, particularly children and us as teenagers taking on our youth group to ensure we were taught despite hating doing it
  • She was faithful
  • She was grateful
  • She rarely moaned

 

And the crazy thing is that when you look back over the years of illness and much time bed bound or HUGELY limited in what she could do and how long she could do it, of moving around churches when she was settled and happy for Dad’s worth and for loss that she had to deal with in her life she STILL had the faith listed above and probably more that I’ve yet to even think of.