Embrace and Let Go

We all know the feeling. The lurch in your stomach when you feel like who you are just isn't who you should be. That drop in your gut when you realize that what you have looks like a piddly sum next to her new this or nicer that. The pressure that you just feel like you fail miserably at living up too.

It can be awfully easy to live under a weight of fear, comparison and discontent and not even realize it. The only thing that a weight like that can do is crush you. It will crush you with fear and compound itself with insecurity and maybe no one else sees it but believe me when I say it will keep you from living fully God's vision for your life.

For two years I've wrestled fear until I realized that I was only Jacob's daughter, a thousand times removed, in a grudge match with God. Wrestling needlessly for the blessing when He had already given it full and free.

It was back in September- before Allume and God's big nudge to keep doing this writing thing. I had begun to feel God truly beginning to make a dent in my fearful heart. Under all the hardened fear of the "what ifs" He was unearthing the soft pliable truth of the "what could be's" and in the midst of it all He gave me a word for this coming year.

Embrace. 

It was a whisper. A whisper that I only heard because I'd been listening closer than ever to the sound of His voice.

It sounded a bit like this...

Stop worrying about who you are or who people think you are and just embrace who I made you to be. You get this one life to fling your arms around wide and I've given you everything you need so stop running scared, turn around, open the arms and heart and embrace it all.

The ugly.
The hard.
The work ahead.
The beauty.
The loss.
The quirky sense of humor.
The busted expectations.
The worn out.
The grace.

Embrace grace and you'll never hold tight to fear. 

And there it was. The permission I'd been looking for from underneath the crushing weight of fear. Embrace it all and you'll find you're embracing me, the God with us, the God for us, the God who cannot fail.

Sisters, this may be my "One Word" for 2014 but I have a sneaking suspicion that it is a word for us all.

I confess that I have no clue, at least not fully, how this word is going to turn my (or your's, maybe?) world upside down this year, but I'm certain that it will. I have a few ideas. The first is an idea so big that I wanted to share it with as many people as I could so I'll be over at (in)courage near the end of January to tell everyone about it.

I don't see "embrace" as a word for women who appear to be living small lives huddled in isolation. No, "embrace" is a call to me and all of us to take hold of who God is making us to be and to live it without fear.

The thing is, in order to embrace all of God's promises, we have to let go of some lies. The lie that we're enough or that we can do it all or perhaps worse even, she can do it all.

It is a Kingdom of paradoxes. Grab hold of God. Embrace Jesus. Let go of the rest.
Embrace and let go.

2014 here we come.

I'd love to hear some more of your words for 2014! Share them in the comments or over on my facebook page!