At one point last year, I sat in the library in school and wrote the following:
I hide behind the guise of preoccupation.
It is my mask; my cloak of invisibility; my disguise.
I put it on when I don't know what to do; when I feel lost; when I have no words to say.
I don't know how to fit in and so I hide.
A phone. A laptop. A book. A dog. Anything will do, as long as it looks like I'm busy with something else. I don't even have to be really focused on it, as long as it looks like I am.
Preoccupation hides me; protects me. And then it destroys me. In trying to hide, I miss the very thing I'm really longing for.
Touch.
Connection.
Interaction.
To love and be loved.
Inside, way beneath all the fears of being discovered, what I really want is to be discovered and to be loved anyway. And I want to discover you and love you too.
But I keep hiding because preoccupation is easier.
And because everyone else is preoccupied too.
Maybe we all hide behind the mask. Maybe we all use this disguise. We run around, filling our lives with activities and sports and service ours and tweets and beeps and hurried walking so that no one will see how lonely we are.
But we are lonely. We have so much connection, but we use it to hide from connecting. We can drift like phantoms, watching lives through a newsfeed from afar without ever having to give or risk more than a "like'.
But if we don't risk that, how will we ever build real friendships? Not the kind of Facebook friend that you met once and now can see every thought they choose to share. But true friendships; the kinds that run like a deep well and give life. The kind that encourages you, challenges you, builds you up, presses you on, cares for you, and you do the same for them.
Could it be that in an age of connectivity we are more disconnected than ever before? From each other and from ourselves. We hide from reality and scroll through the newsfeeds and tweets and blogs to see a happier world; a funny world; sometimes even a dark world. But whatever we look at, it's driving us away from the real world in front of us.
If Jesus came down from heaven to reach man, we can put aside our preoccupations to reach our fellow man with the same love that comes, not to be served, but to serve.
No more preoccupation. No more hiding behind the devices. Walk around. Look up. Smile. Say hello.
Connect.
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I wrote that reflection as I thought through a tendency I had started to notice - how I would hide behind busyness, whether that was looking in a book, texting on a phone, looking away... I've always been shy, but I realized that the fear of reaching out had created a barrier between myself and other people as I effectively made myself invisible.
Over the following months, God began shifting some things in my life and helping me recognize bad theology I believed and lies I had accepted (more on that later) - a lot of it without even knowing it. As I began to see the grace of who God truly is, I began pushing harder against the fears, against the desire to hide, and challenging myself to step out, take a risk, and connect with others and just be myself. When I stopped trying to hide, I didn't just feel more comfortable - I found I was able to reach out and impact other people, sometimes in ways I didn't even know.
I'm in a season of change. In the last year, I've graduated college, left behind old jobs, started new ones, and finished some of those new ones. I've built new friendships, deepened old ones, taken on new leaderships and service roles, learned new skills, and started figuring out what I wanted to do with my life. As we begin this new year, I don't really know what 2015 will hold. But more than just the outward labels changing, I've seen my inward identity changing; being renewed. Through the challenges and through the changes, I've seen how God has been revealing more and more of who He is, and who I am in Him.
Much of my life has a question mark at the end of it right now. But I am excited to see where this story will lead because I know the One who has written it. This blog is meant to serve as a marker; as a place to commemorate the work that God has done. In the Old Testament, the Israelites would place piles of stones so that when people saw the stones and asked why they were there, they would hear of all that God has done.
This blog is my pile of stones.
