Proud

I got the privilege of having coffee with Greg yesterday and it was something I'll never forget. Greg is one of the most compassionate, maybe the most compassionate, people I've ever met. For an hour I told him my "life story." He teared up and showed compassion the entire way through. I've never had someone get that emotional over my story and I am quite possibly the least emotional person when I tell my story. It is as though I am reading from a text book.

My story. That's what it is. God made me and everything that I have been through, am going through, or will go through is part of His bigger purpose. And when I look around me, I feel like I see so many people that I perceive as "lucky" or as "having it together." But maybe the truth is that I am lucky. I have seen a lot of stuff in my twenty years and I've got a million stories I could tell, but as Greg put it, "there are only two ways to come out of a story like that: bitter and angry or compassionate and big-hearted." He quickly defined me as the second one. But in being either of those, it means accepting what I've been through and allowing it to shape who I am. That's hard sometimes, because more than anything I want to be "normal." I somehow have confused normal with unblemished. They're not the same. We're all broken in some way, some more than others, but God's not going to not use us.

I feel like I've been living the Stained Glass Masquerade song, by Casting Crowns:

'Cause when I take a look around,
Everybody seems so strong.
I know they'll soon discover
That I don't belong.
So I tuck it all away,
Like everything's okay.
If I make them all believe it,
Maybe I'll believe it too.

But I don't believe it. I know who I am and where I come from. The journey is learning to love who God made me to be, broken and beautiful. I want to know that "who I am is who I want to be."

Greg said, "At the risk of sounding condescending, I'm proud of you. I'm proud of you for not rolling over and giving up in the midst of everything and for being vulnerable enough to share your story." And I realized that that's something I've never heard or felt... being proud of myself or feeling like someone was proud of me, just for making it through. And for sure, I didn't fully understand the definition or what he meant by that. But I like the feeling.

Anyways, all of that is to say that one of the big things God is teaching me, quite possibly the biggest right now, is how to love who I am and how to love where I came from, because it has shaped me and although it may not be clear now, God's plan is perfect. Always.