Letting Go of Your 'Try Hard' Life

Do you feel rushed, tired, and under pressure? Are you so used to feeling like that that you barely notice? Do you feel that no matter what you do, it’s not enough?

Last week I took a break. I went away to Norfolk and stayed in a cottage right out in the country. It was quiet. The skies were big and uninterrupted with buildings, masts and wires. I enjoyed being out in the wind and the sun. I had time to read. I sat and watched the world go by. I took lots of photographs. My soul was soothed. I could just ‘be’.

Many Christian women live their lives behind a mask of ‘being ok’. Already battling society's false expectations of how a woman should look, dress and live, for many, faith simply produces another set of false expectations.

Emily Freeman was a classic Christian ‘good girl’. Cheerful, self-reliant and strong on the outside, she was irrationally angry on the inside when other people believed her facade and didn’t realise the struggles she was going through beneath her bubbly veneer. In Grace for the Good Girl Emily writes: “as day fades to dusk, you begin to feel the familiar fog of anxiety, the weight and pressure of holding it all together, of longing left unmet, of unexplained emptiness even in the midst of great blessing and perceived success.

Sometimes in quiet stillness, I felt an aching that wouldn’t go away, a longing to taste and see, to live authentically free.”

Is there something you are hiding from? If you answer this question honestly, it will reveal what it is you fear. Maybe you are hiding from remembering your past, from facing regret, from what may happen in your future. Maybe you don’t want to be known because you fear people might find out you are stupid or wrong or that you don’t know so much after all. Maybe you are hiding from your dreams because to face them would mean admitting they are there. And to admit that they are there would mean you aren’t living them after all.

Is there something you are hiding behind? When I answer this question, I discover those places where I put my trust. A hiding place is a place where we feel safe, emphasis on feel. I think it is a safe place to hide from the things I fear, so that is why I stay there. Maybe you hide behind your sweet personality, because to be anything other than nice would be offensive or bad or wrong. Maybe you hide behind your list of rules because you think following them is the way to be accepted by God. I hid behind all of these masks and other ones, too.

It is important to know the answers to these questions because only in identifying the lies that trigger certain reactions will we be able to receive the truth we need to replace them. For a long time, I believed I was searching for God and thought I had found him, this God who is order and control, distant and passive. I knew he so loved the world, but I didn’t know his love for me. As I gazed off into the foggy distance, hoping for a glimpse of the outline of his presence, I missed the One who stood beside me, casting his shadow over me as he showered me with his love. While I thought I was searching for him, he graciously, miraculously, and intentionally found me.

There is someone you want to be, and she isn’t a hiding, mask-wearing, fear-filled woman."

Grace for the Good Girl Sample chapter
Price: £8.99
ISBN: 9780800719845
Published by: Revell (Distributed by Lion Hudson)
Available through any good bookshop or online

Becoming a Servant in a Serve-Me World

Today I’m writing about another ‘backlist’ title. (That’s publisher speak for a book which is no longer ‘new’.) It’s great to talk about the new books coming along, but there are lots of real gems which are easy to forget with all the hoopla surrounding the new ones.

Today’s choice is The Outward Focused Life, and it’s about expressing a ‘doing faith’, not simply a ‘believing, static faith’. Let me share a bit of it with you.

“For years I’ve held on to a letter that reminds me of what’s really important. A woman wrote to me:

We live on a busy street. There are lots of kids who ride by our house on their bikes. I am probably overly protective of my children because I don’t want them to get in with the wrong crowd. Perhaps not a very Christlike move on my part, but I feel I need to protect them. There is a little girl who rides around here named Annie. I have had to talk to her before, because she turns our water spigot on until she has made a mudhole of our yard. She is always dirty, and I, ashamedly so, hate to see her coming. [My six-year-old daughter] Becky was outside playing today, and her older sister came inside to tell on her. Becky was playing with Annie. I told my older daughter to ask Becky to come inside for a minute. I asked Becky why she was playing with Annie.

She said, “Mom, I am playing with her because she has no friends. She rides by here every day by herself and never has anybody with her. I thought that I would not like to have to ride my bike alone all day, so I asked her if I could be her friend. She is sitting out on our porch right now waiting for me. Can I go back out and play with her?”

I was dumbfounded. I get so wrapped up in what I am doing and in trying to raise good kids that I forget what God wants us to be doing. I took a Popsicle out to Annie, and she thanked me and smiled the prettiest little smile through that dirty face. Then I thought of that verse about “whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me.”

This letter makes me think about what’s really important in my life. And maybe I should stop asking, “What’s important?” and start asking “Who’s important?” “Who” is always more important than “What.” The question all of us have to ask is, “How important to us are people who don’t yet know Jesus?” There are adults who ride their bikes past the doors of our churches each day and don’t know that Jesus – the friend of sinners – is their friend. They have dirty lives and play in dirty mudholes, and we, the church, have all the Popsicles.

We just need to step off the porch and ask them if they’ll be our friend.