This blog has been a long time coming, believe it or not. I have known for over a year that God was calling me to write in some capacity, but I just was not sure what that was going to look like. In His gracious prodding, He used two phrases over and over to speak to my heart to show me what this was unfolding to be: "Tell Your Story" and "Proclaiming Freedom." The Lord continued to sing these anthems over me as I wrestled with several questions, the two most prominent of which were, "Why my story?" and "What do I write about?" If I am honest, I felt like there was no reason for me to put all the messy, unattractive aspects of my life on public display, nor did I feel like the world really needed another Christian blogger on the internet... me least of all. But again, because God is patient and loving and pursues and prods us until we finally submit and surrender, He whispered truth into my areas of doubt and made a few things abundantly clear. One, that the point of displaying the unattractive aspects of my life is to lead others to Him- the One who redeems, rescues, and restores all things. He has authored all my days, and I have a story worth telling because of all that He has done in and through me. Secondly- what do I write about?? When He gave me a story, He gave me purpose. The purpose of Proclaiming Freedom is just that- to proclaim the true, authentic, abundant freedom that only comes through knowing the Lord and being known by Him. Freedom is not defined by the country we live in or the laws that are in place. It is not regulated by rules we keep or standards that we achieve. Because God is God- Creator, Sustainer, and Savior, He is the only one who is able to define true freedom, and He is the only source of it- no matter how high and low we have looked elsewhere to find it. Through my walk with the Lord, (and again, brutal honesty here) my walking away from the Lord, He has taught me what freedom looks like by showing me how captive I had been. Captive to my sin, my shame, my past, my insecurities, my failures, and my way of doing life. I had to come to a point of realization that I had settled for a false version of life, and that I was not living with purpose, passion, or perspective that glorified God or satisfied my soul. We really cannot do one without the other, you see, because our souls were created to worship our Creator, and anything apart from that will ultimately lead to discontent and unfulfilled desire. None of this means that I have all the answers or that I have life all figured out. Honestly, life is hard. There will be valleys. There will be bad days. Things will happen that we won't fully understand this side of Heaven. I've walked through enough hard seasons to know that I cannot do it without the Lord. I've tried. I've rebelled. I've walked away. I've chosen my way over His more times than I would like to admit, but that is the very reason He is able to use me at all. Because I don't have it all together. Because I've fallen flat on my face and had literally nowhere to go but to Him. One of the most beautiful aspects of the freedom that the Lord gives us is the freedom to keep coming back to Him over and over to find what we thought we'd find in all these other places we search. I gave my life to Jesus nine years ago, so I have lived more life without Him than I have with Him. He had to tear down a lot of walls in my heart and heal a lot of hurt that I honestly had not really ever faced until I came to know Jesus. I had lived with bondage and baggage for so long that I just thought it was normal- but captivity is no place for a child of God. We were created for so much more. The cry of my heart in Proclaiming Freedom is to share from the dark places that there is a Light that is able to love us past our shame. To share that there is a Healer that is able to bind up the wounds that we don't want anyone to see. To share that there is a Counselor that comforts us through the valley of the shadow of death. To share the freedom that our God gives that we may know Him, love Him, and serve Him. That is our purpose. That is my purpose. I cannot wait to see what God does through this tiny act of obedience of telling my story; of Proclaiming Freedom.
Until next time,
Melissa