I stood in front of over a hundred women who love Jesus just like me. It was the end of our Church’s Women’s Retreat. As happened with me often, I felt a nudge from the Holy Spirit during ‘open mike’ time.

Since I started on my third and fourth medicines after my second hospital stay a few months earlier, I developed tremors–especially when nervous. Even with knowing I was among friends, as I came to the podium, I began to shake. Not just my hands, but all of me. There was a quaking which seemed uncontrolled and entirely dominating.

‘Somehow. Some way. I will make it through‘, I thought. I don’t remember how I exactly worded it, but the theme of the retreat was ‘In every season’. And I shared that while I had been through a very long winter, spring was coming. Inspite of my bipolar, and maybe somehow because of it? there was a thawing, a drawing near to the God of all hope.

I was entirely unsteady down the steps on the way back to my seat. I didn’t receive any amazing response, but some did say my words blessed them. Yet, I remembered what I often think and have come to hold as truth: ‘vulnerability is a discipline. We live this way out of obedience.’

We don’t do vulnerability for its effect on others, but rather ourselves.

Vulnerability is costly. It’s a risk where we don’t know what the incredibly precious exchange of our inner life will yield from anyone else. We realize we may even lose our image before others. But, it is our necessary impasse–between the person we are, and the one we are becoming.

We are becoming one who journeys more and more deeply into God’s love. Here, we don’t need to prove anything to anyone. We simply need to be His.

What holds us back from vulnerability is very often fear, or as I John 4:18 suggests, the absence of perfect love. There are things about us, within us and our stories, which rise up to condemn us. Or so we think. This is because our vision is off. We are seeing the Enemy’s narrative of us, not the redeemed one held by He who holds us.

The Great Author is writing something gorgeous with our lives. And being vulnerable with that story is a holistic step, where mind, heart, soul, spirit and body/voice meet to speak the undeniable truth. Our offerings are hope. They declare in the darkness that we are of the light and just like our Redeemer, we will not be overcome.

When I stood there with shaky…everything, it cost me. I didn’t know if I would literally fall and need to be picked up. My voice trembled.

But, let me be clear. I don’t for one moment believe I needed to be vulnerable in that instant to receive God’s love.

But, I was living out a choice, which was and is re-making me and my story.

If someone asked me what my dream was, I would say ‘to live out my story vulnerably, so that others find courage to do the same.’ In this, the vulnerable sharing of our lives, I believe there is great life, the buying back of all that was lost, ultimately, redemption.

And this redemptive courage, spirit and living re-writes the story for hope, for strength, for beauty and for God.