So I’ve been traveling, speaking/sharing at churches and in small groups, and seeing family & friends in the States for 2 months. I’ve been back in Hungary for a week, now, and a lot of it has been getting over jet lag and nursing a very sick toddler (he’s better now, Praise God!) and also going away with my hubby overnight;) In a few days we’ll head to our English Camp SPEAKOUT for 5-6 weeks! Whew! It makes me think of this post I wrote for Sheila’s blog. But, I’ve kept writing my story (and living it!) and hope for at least one post a week during Speakout and (hopefully) more after. I won’t be stopping anytime soon, so please keep reading!
Welcome to the Pure Passion Series!!
It’s already had twists and turns, hills and valleys as I comb through pages of my past and present life.
The thing is, knowing your story, is messy business.
We dig and find and let go and embrace and live and then it cycles again.
So, I find myself stepping back.
Why? Well, as always, it’s a mix of things.
A good friend (one of many that I was able to see in our two months in the States) who reads my blog asked me how it all started. This Pure Passion Journey. I gave her a roundabout answer and realized I had some more reflection to do.
This post also comes from the in-between, can-be-incredibly-lonely of this life overseas that I have come to embrace. As I was thinking about re-entry into our new home while my 19 month-old son {finally} drifted off to sleep during our Trans-Atlantic flight, I thought about all of the lost~ness that is a great big theme in my life story.
It probably came that moment I was born into this world and was no longer inside my mother or in the womb with my twin. It’s woven through the heartbreak of losing our farm at the cusp of adolescence. The barn of that farm is no longer there. It was torn down soon after we left almost 30 years ago. So is the house in which my family lived for the next 10+ years.
And the next one in which cancer found my mother and where she lived her last days? It’s abandoned and the next time I go back to the States may be torn down as well.
Her grave now sits atop a hill in one of the most gorgeous cemeteries I have ever seen. But my siblings, father and I live far, farther and an ocean away and only a couple of us rarely get there.
In the ins and outs there’s me. An identical twin who needs to learn to live independently. A daughter who’s lost her mama before she became a wife and a mama. A woman who has moved too many times, had kids in three different places thousands of miles from each other. Someone who has dear friends in multiple languages and countries.
I am truly on a journey and this lost-ness that must become found is written across every page of the story. And though it looks different for you, it is your journey too.
What does it mean to be found? To come home even as we journey Home?
I’d say that the answers to these questions which fought to be heard as I moved to another country 2+ years ago are how I got here.
I know I cannot survive the life I am called to unless I move from lost to found. Or in the context of Pure Passion from lonely to lover. Every day when I step out into a profoundly different culture, I must learn to know the presence of God and live from a place of dynamic love in which I am both receiving and giving.
This is what Pure Passion is all about! I shared about the clarity I found early in college and what it meant, for me, to live embracing God as my Lover as a single person. My pursuit of fuller passion in understanding sex as God’s good gift is a continuation of that same path as a wife, soul-mate, and help-meet who is traveling Home with another.
And it is only now, in the brokenness upon brokenness that met me in this new life as I walk like a child, sometimes crawl, while feeling the pressure to be a great wife, mother and missionary, that I have begun to lay down all of my own ways of finding my life, or identity.
You see, the deeper the lost-ness the greater the longing to be found. The less other loves will satisfy. This is the great gift of a journey that takes courage and risk and sacrifice. I always knew being found could only come through God, but it’s taken the messy working out of what that means to show me that I can not embrace God’s love in fuller and fuller degrees by myself when I am now one with my husband.
My intimacy with God was stalling in a way I hadn’t experienced since I was awakened by Grace in the beginning of college. And as I struggled through all of it, the Lord helped me to see that I was missing a huge piece: a fullness of intimacy with my husband that pushes through walls of loneliness and draws me into God’s arms in the way my heart craves.
It’s the only way to become a lover of God and my husband. The Lord knows how He made us women. To see the whole picture and long for every detail to be colored in. It’s what makes us seek to control, but it’s also what makes us dream.
So I’ve begun to dream as I never have.
I’m laying down the fears that lay in dark corners of misplaced shame and profound insecurity. I’m opening doors that were sealed tight all of my life.
And the Lord is using my journey to understanding sex and sexuality and His designs for fulfillment in marriage to unlock much of it.
I believe He wants to do this for any woman who desires to become a lover of God and her husband. We are found as we learn to receive the love meant to carry us Home and give our love in ways that we never imagined possible.
That’s how I got ‘here’ on this crazy, wild, pure passion journey and I am going to keep asking you if you will come along?
Sharing with Kelli at Unforced Rhythms, Jen & the NEW SDGsisterhood, and Jennifer Dukes Lee #TellHisStory
Read the entire Pure Passion Series here!!
Join me next time for Pure Passion :: From Bad to Good
