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2018 was a year of growth & change - Bring on 2019

31/12/2018

New Years Eve has me reflecting on the year that was.. and for me it was a challenging one. Depression, anxiety, insecurities and even suicidal thoughts.. yep.. it wasn't an easy one and this blog is SUPER long.. but stick it out and see what it took to save my life!

no, this isnt me

Have you ever found yourself surrounded by people you love and people that love you.. in a home filled with all your needs and more.. but you still felt empty? Like something wasn’t right, like something was missing and so you start trying to fill that void with whatever might work? Your partner, your children, your job, the gym, your money, your home… what ever it took?
Well that was 2018 (and probably a bit longer) for me..

This year has been so hard emotionally for me… I don’t remember a time that I ever felt so useless and alone.. but the stupid thing was that I haven’t been alone at all. In fact, this entire year I have had the most amazing, loving guy right beside me and three beautiful kids to fill my days with nonstop love and energy but there was still this weird void in my soul.
I thought maybe if I had enough money in the bank id feel better… so I bought some self-help books and tried to get our finances sorted out. But even when our savings was doing great, I still felt like it wasn’t enough.

So then I thought, maybe now is the time to start focusing on buying a home. Maybe accomplishing something big like that, like everyone else seemed to be doing might help me to feel better about myself and fill that thing that was missing from my heart.

So I started a ‘home deposit account’ and cut back on all our spending to try and get there. I told the kids we just had to go without for a bit, sacrifice outings and things… in order to save for our home and we did really well and changed so much of our normal spending habits but as soon as we starting getting somewhere, bill after bill turned up and all my photography work died down… so we went from living on two decent incomes, with a healthy savings account, to my husband having to work his butt off 6 days a week just to pay the bills and put food on the table. The struggle was real. It honestly felt like the harder we tried, the harder life got!

So then I was like ‘Right! If my business isn’t making any money, then Ill just get a part time job and do my part for the family financially that way..’ but do you think I could find a job that would employ a 32 year old woman with 3 kids? Not just that , but one that could only work on school days, between school hours and not on any school holidays because I had to be home for my kids… HA.
Of all the job applications I filled out (id say close to 50!) I only got maybe 2 replies and that was the generic “thank you for applying but unfortunately you have been unsuccessful at this time”.
I legit felt like a complete failure. I couldn’t get any work for my own business and no one would hire me to work for theirs. I remember thinking to myself ‘There’s no point trying to save for a home, we need every cent we have to just get by’. So, I gave up…

On top of my financial stressors there was also a lot going on with our extended family which had caused all of us to drift apart over the past year and the closeness our family had once shared had left a massive gap in my heart. I felt like I couldn’t talk to anyone about what I was going inside me because it seemed so petty in comparison. So I just didn’t and this just made me feel even more alone.

Quitting the gym had been one of my sacrifices for our savings and gaining weight after doing so, I now didn’t fit into any of my clothes. So I thought id take a little bit of what I had saved an buy just one new outfit. I kind of thought it might help me feel a bit more alive and ‘ok’.
BUT after at least 1 hr at the shopping centre, having tried on SO many different things and realising how much weight I had gained (2 dress sizes) I felt overwhelmingly worse and as I was leaving empty handed (after crying in the dressing room) I remember this wash of disgust come over me and my mind turned so dark…

As I was walking though the shopping centre with people smiling and happy all around me, with my beautiful husband at work, working his butt off to support our family and striving to reach my dreams of owning our own home (not his dream, my dream) and my three beautiful kids probably playing happily at school with their friends, completely unaware of all my inner muck, I remember thinking to myself.. “You are so worthless… you are so pathetic. You can’t support your family, you are so flippen ugly and fat, your husband will probably leave you soon. There is no way in this WORLD you will ever reach the goals you’ve set. You just aren’t good enough for any of it… why are you still alive….??’

And in that moment….. I contemplated ending it.

I didn’t stop loving my family… but in that moment I just truly believed that they would be better off without me holding them back.

But I never got to the point where I started to plan it or even thought about how I would do it because as those thoughts slipped into my head, something inside me snapped back to life and my own thoughts shocked the heck out of me.

I have never understood how someone could end their own life. I personally, always thought it was a selfish act, like how could anyone do that to the people they love… but on this day.. I realised something. Sometimes our souls can be so weighed down with pain, that we just want peace and for that pain to STOP. And in that moment it's easy for scary thoughts to find their way into your head.

When I snapped back to reality and noticed how low I was, it scared that heck out of me. I knew I had to do something… I knew I couldn’t keep this to myself or fight my insecurities and pain on my own anymore. I had to talk about it, ever if I felt dumb saying this stuff out loud.

When I told my husband he was shocked. He knows how good our life is (he's living it) He also knows me and he knows Ive never thought like that before, so he told me to get professional help asap. He himself has suffered depression and the doctors and councillors seemed to help him a lot. But I was so scared I didn’t want to wait till the next day to talk to someone. So I tried thinking back to session’s id attended with him and the things they had spoken about during his healing process, which lead me that night, to a very deep, self discovery session with myself haha

That night I sat in bed and went though all the good and bad things about my life and when I wrote it down… I felt even more stupid.. because there wasn’t anything really ‘bad’ about my life. I had everything I needed. I have a gorgeous, loving, supportive husband, 3 healthy, happy kids who never go without anything. We have a great home to live in and live in a safe, amazing place in the world and I may have gained weight but I was healthy and still had good fitness. Our family extended family was having ‘issues’ but I hadn’t lost them! I really have NOTHING to feel so down about.

So then I thought ‘OK… if I am feeling so crappy, even with all of this amazingness. What am I missing???’ and I started to think back over my life. When was I the happiest? What did that look like? What was I doing different? Who was I with? Can I do that all again and get back to that kind of happy?

And that was when I remembered...

When was I the happiest? Probably when I was in senior at high school.

What did it look like? I was way more positive and I laughed so much. I loved to dance and sing and I was always surrounded by people with beautiful, positive souls.

What was I doing different and who was I with? When I was 16 years old, I started going to church. I had grown up with a mum that always spoken about God and we said grace before dinner but that was about the extent of it. BUT at 16 I moved to the Sunshine Coast to live with my mum (after having lived with my dad in Brisbane for year 8,9 & 10) and her and I joined the local church. I found amazing, kind, loving friends, started going to youth group and found out about Jesus.
This lifestyle was so different to anything I had ever know… I felt loved and at peace. The people I was around were so much kinder and so much more positive than anyone I had ever met and the feeling I felt being in church was overwhelming. I felt like I finally fit in and I felt wanted. It was so weird but so good.

Anyway, super long story short, when I met my now husband, he wasn’t a Christian and certain people in my church made it very clear to me that they did not agree with me dating a ‘non christian’, that nothing good would come of that relationship and that it wouldn’t last (hhmm nearly 15 years later… and we are still together, stronger than ever but anyways back to the story)… that judgement really rubbed me up the wrong way. Back then Jason was so against church’s but he was open to coming with me because I wanted him too… who knows what God may have done had we kept going BUT when I started being spoken down too and heard those people judging Jason, I got up and walked straight on out of that church.

Unfortunately, I allowed my pain and anger at those certain people to also build a wall between Jesus and I, when Jesus isn’t like that at all! Jesus surrounded himself with unbelievers, because that’s who needed him most! (Mark 2:13-17)

You see, silly enough, I allowed the actions of people block my heart to who Jesus was to me. “well the church is full of hypocrites and judgemental people, so I don’t want to be a part of it” and therefor gave up listening to the word of Jesus on Sundays, which lead to me ditching reading my bible, which lead to me no longer listening and singing praise and worship and then out went my prayer life as well.. (unless I needed Jesus help bad enough) and pretty quickly I was living for myself.. not for God at all and struggling though my days. Anxiety, depression, insecurity, selfish ambitions, irritability and resentments became my norm!

I found myself surrounded by ‘lack of’, lack of money, lack of patience, lack of kindness, lack of good health, lack of trust in people, lack of fulfillment... lack of… lack of… lack of... and somehow, I allowed that to become ‘My story’. When ever I looked at myself, I saw everything about me that wasn’t good enough and every bad thing would just be a confirmation to me that i was right, I am not enough.... and it didn’t matter what anyone else told me. I knew what I knew about me and my life! ‘Only I could fix it’ or so I thought but after years of trying and failing… I now realise how very; very wrong I was!!

After sitting there that night and realising that my missing part was Jesus, you’d think Id be straight back to church and back to working on my relationship with God (cos that’s what Christianity is.. its not ‘going to church and being ‘perfect’. It’s about having flaws but asking for forgiveness and its having a relationship with Jesus and just trying, daily, to be more like him) but no… I was still so bent up over my past church experience that I refused to go to another one.

But things in my heart still ached. I still felt lost and like I was missing something.

Then one day on the September school holidays my daughter Meisha and I decided to watch a movie. The movie ended up being a Christian movie and to summarise, basically the storyline was about a mum who knew God but lost her faith and then ended up finding her way back. It stirred something in me… it felt like in his own sneaky way, Jesus was dropping more hints to me.

Not only that, then Meisha started asking if maybe one day I could take her to church… she’d only ever been once with our neighbours’ years ago, yet she was filled with faith! I found it a little convicting.
Over the years I had told her bits and pieces about Jesus, but we didn’t live for him nor was he a major talking point in our family home. But that question “can WE go to church” was really shaking something in my core, it was weird… so I reluctantly said “yes” but didn’t set a date!

Im guessing that wasn’t a good enough answer for God but because not even an hour later I was texting one of my closest friends (who I actually went to church with as a teenager), who had also stopped going to church over the past few years and mentioned to her the conversation id just had with Meisha… she then says to me that she had just finished talking to our other friend (who again, went to the same church years ago but hadn’t been attending church for a while) and they had both just decided to start looking for a new church!
Could this have been any weirder… it was always us three in church together as kids, singing in the youth band together, praying together and suddenly, at the exact same time, we all felt something (or someone……) calling us to get out butts back into a church!!

It was at that moment I finally took the hints… I mentioned to the girls the church I had in mind to check out and believe it or not... that was again the same place they had just spoken about! (goosebumps!)

I still thought I was just going there to be in a positive environment and to hear a positive message but that that was as far as it would go... how silly!

You know when a kid hasn’t eaten a certain food in a long time and their friend hates it, so they say they hate it, but you know they actually love it, so you make them eat it and then you can see it all over their face, as they still are arguing that ‘nope I don’t like this’, you can see the satisfaction creep across their face and then they eat the whole flippen thing… yeah well that was kinda what happened to me…! I was refusing what I knew I used to love so much, that I had actually begun to believe it.. but Jesus knew better.. he had me hook, line and sinker!

I walked into the church the very next Sunday feeling so uncomfortable and out of place. Like hello, im a sinner, I turned my back on God and now im walking into his place, like ‘ok… im here, but only to listen, I know I will never get hooked like I used to be'.
I can only imagine the slight smile and head shake of Jesus head.

On that first day we all sat at the back and when the music started I didn’t know any of the song’s, id been out of the Christian scene for so long… so it made me feel like just that, a complete outsider... but then this worship song started and the lyrics appeared on the screen.. and my gosh that song just punched me in the heart… Jesus was talking directly to me and I knew it without doubt!
The lyrics read:
Who the Son sets free, oh is free indeed
I am a child of God.
In my Father's house, there's a place for me
I'm a child of God

Here I am rocking up to church, wanting to be free of this inner hurt, this feeling of emptiness and that something was missing from my soul. Feeling like I just didnt fit in properly anywhere and like im not worthy to be in Gods house and then song says ‘who the SON sets free.. is free indeed…’ that I am his child and I belong!!! WOAH… my heart exploded...

It was in that moment that Jesus took over my heart and my entire life… again!

He filled me with his Holy Spirit and I can’t explain it but my ‘empty’ was gone. How had I forgotten what his unconditional, all-consuming love had felt like? How did I allow people to deter me from him? How could I have ever forgotten him?

I was finally home… and it wasn’t the church, as AMAZING as my church is (Calvary Sunshine Coast), I had found my way back to the person who loves me more than life itself. The person who loves me even when I stuff up and turned my back on him. Id found my way home to the person who always forgives me and no matter what I do, he always wants the same thing.. a relationship with ME!

Jesus was like “Oh… there you are…. I have been waiting for you…!! Now let’s strip away all those lies you have been believing about yourself {John 10:10} You are beautiful, you are made in God image (Psalm 139:16), you may not have reached some goals but let me direct you from now on (Psalm 143:10)
I’ll tell you the truth! (John 14:6)
Let’s break these chains that are holding you back… Let's spend everyday together and Ill show you how… I will keep you safe and through me you will find the most amazing Grace.” (John 14:21, Ephesians 2:8-9, Revelation 3:20)

And I had known this many years ago but had somehow blocked it out!

In finding my relationship with Jesus again, my depression has gone, along with severe anxiety that I have struggled with for the past 10 years and that lost feeling that I had, its gone.
Each day I wake up with purpose now and my daily goal is to make God happy… and in living with that as my number one goal I am literally filled with so much peace and happiness.
My business is doing better, financially we are doing well, I even managed to have most of our family back together on Christmas day.. it was amazing. The blessings have been abundant… not everyday is perfect but every day is manageable with his strength and love topping me up constantly.

When Jesus died on the cross, it was so that our sin and past mistakes would be wiped off our ‘record’ with God and when we choose to walk with him, when we ask for his forgiveness and when we try to be more like him, that’s when we receive our ‘free ticket’ to heaven. (1 Peter 3:18)
None of us deserve it (only Jesus was without sin) but by Gods Grace, you not only get to go to heaven at the end of your life but you receive a life here on earth filled with his love and his blessings.

Like I said before being a Christian doesn’t guarantee the ‘perfect/easy’ life, you will still have ups and downs but you do get one filled with peace, with hope and one filled with an overwhelming abundance of his love.

I don’t know about you but that’s most definitely the kind of life I want!

If you are going through anything like what I have been thought or worse.. and you can't seem to find what it takes to fill that void or heal that pain.. Jesus is waiting for you to come to him… he has been waiting and he will keep waiting… because God is love….. and no matter what your past is, he will ALWAYS love you!

If you don’t know Jesus and you want to, you just need to invite him into your life. He doesn’t force himself on you but when you accept him, I can guarantee you will begin to see that he has always been with you, watching over you! (Hebrews 13:5)

There is no magic words to say and no proper prayer to accept Jesus into your heart but the bible says in Romans 10:9 - If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

So here is something I put together, if you need a bit of help;
Jesus, I need you! Thank you for dying on the cross for MY sin. I open my mind, my heart and my soul to you and receive you as my Lord and Saviour. Thank you for forgiving me, for always loving me and for blessing me with eternal life. Please show me how to live for you and how to be the person you want me to be, all the days of my life. Amen.

What’s the next step?
Like Pastor Dan at our church always says; Everyday just wake up and ask Jesus to show you how to live for him. Some days you’ll get it right, other days.. maybe not so much but just keep trying and at the end of the week, come back to church.

When you give God a chance, you’ll be surprised at what he can do in your life and through your life.

And if I can offer any word of advice, from my own personal experience… find a church that feels like home and GO on Sunday, its an awesome place to start building your knowledge and faith.
AND.. If your nervous about going, come to my church, I can introduce you to some great people or even just sit with you! {212 Crosby Hill Rd, Tanawha}

I don’t know if my story will help anyone, but I hope it does.

2018 started off pretty rough but today, on the very last day of the year I am able to say that this year has probably been one of my best… I have learnt so much, my heart has been changed and I go into 2019 with a new hope and purpose for my life.

God is Good... HAPPY NEW YEAR......

Bee