Remember waking up in the middle of night and your legs were just in agonizing pain? I do, vividly. I'd yell for my mom and dad and have not a clue why I was in so much pain. They always just told me it would be over soon, to stay calm and that I'm just growing.
I feel like I'm experiencing the same pain all over again, however it's not necessarily a physical pain, but an emotional pain.
There's so many things in life you experience, some are good, some are bad, some are heartbreaking and some are full of joy. Life tends to throw all sorts of things at you, whether you're ready for them or not and sometimes the weight can bury you and it's just too heavy to lift on your own.
We live in a society where we have to look perfect all the time, we post our best selfs on the gram and feel the need to "show off" that everything is "good" in our lives. Of course, I love social media, for anyone who knows me I'm always posting on instagram, but we are all guilty of this.
Our world revolves around pleasing others and we have to sometimes hide our raw self, our painful self, our growing times, our mistakes. If people saw our true self outside the social media world, they'd see failure, anger, sadness but fear draws us to overcompensate, pretend that everything is okay that you almost feel like you can't be ok.
What I have learnt from experience is that Jesus doesn't prevent the failure, he allows it so you can learn the lesson and enable you to tackle it. We are human, we mess up, and we will never, EVER please everybody. Even Jesus couldn't please everyone, the perfect, sinless, son of God had people talking about him behind his back.
"When we give too much weight to the whispers of people and not enough weight to the word of God it will kill us on the inside."
For me, this has been a season of growing. Relearning who I am, making way to many mistakes along the way and learning to come back to God knowing that it is okay to not be ok. It's painful, there's tears, there's anger, probably some terrorizing yells but at the end of the growth you will get stronger.
Just like when you were physically growing, it's unpreventable. You have to be honest with your pain because it's real and scary and sometimes it can be way to much. Not everything is going to go the way you planned, your heart will be broken, you won't always get the career you want, you will lose loved ones and you will hurt but you don't have to hurt alone.
Invite Jesus into your pain, let him wrap his arms around you as you cry, grieve and watch your heart heal and get knit back together by the one who created it.
Just like when you were younger and growing, the pain is temporary even when it doesn't feel like it. You will come out of it stronger.