Reflections, not just a college assignment.

Not all college assignments were dreaded, for the most part I actually loved college, loved learning, loved being given a challenge to overcome. However, something I hated in my college education classes was the reflections! Literally hundreds of them that I have written over the course of 4 years and 14 years of various teaching roles. Answering the same questions over and over with each lesson prepared and lesson taught. What was your objective? How do you plan to meet that objective? How does it tie to previous learning yet build knowledge for the next lesson to be learned (scaffolding 😝)? Did you meet your objective? How did you adjust your objective and lesson to accommodate for various learners or unexpected situations?? Reflect, reflect, reflect


Fast forward 14 years from college graduation, almost cried out loud typing that out!! 😢 Pretty sure a new wrinkle just popped out on my forehead too.😰 Anyway, today I find myself longing for more time to just reflect! I don’t want the next thing in life to happen until I have have had time to reflect on what just happened. Why the change of heart? Is it just because I am getting older? Is the desire to remember just a right of passage for moms of 4 kids when they start hitting the double digits (today my second child turned 10)?! When I was a kid there was a magazine my piano teacher always had laying around called Reminisce, I always loved looking at the pictures (just cannot help myself when it comes to photographs) but in general I was just thankful we did not have to live without the modern conveniences that were absent in most pictures found in that magazine. I can remember thinking "why would someone pay money to be reminded of how difficult things use to be?" Now I find myself asking "why do I long to reflect even when what I just faced wasn’t easy?" Use to, I just wanted to forget these types of lessons and move on. Get away from uncomfortable feelings, difficult feelings. That desire to get away has been replaced with this deep longing to fully embrace them, so that I can fully lay them down at my Saviors feet as lesson fully learned. I believe I have been learning that when we do not take the time to try and get a clear picture of what God is working in our lives, we only get a quick blurred glance because we are afraid of the pain, we miss the necessary details to communicate to others the story God is writing in our lives. Going back to writing those monotonous reflections in college the number one feedback my instructors gave when I first started writing them was "not sufficient detail to provide needed evidence that you met your objective." I use to roll my eyes and begrudgingly rewrite it with greater details. Now suddenly I fear what if thats what people say of my faith? "Not enough details to provide evidence that God is in fact real in my life and that I trust Him to be the Lord of my life." More importantly what if thats why my children say of me? "Mom I just did not see enough detail to support the evidence of Christ?" Something God has been weaving into my story is to trust Him through the ugly times, through the foggy; can't see one foot in front of the other times. Trust Him through these times not with a inner quiver of doubt but bolding dive off into the great unknown of God's plan for me and shouting his praise all along the way. Battling days of doubt with solid Truth from His Word and prayers raised from lips quivering fearful not of tomorrow but of missing something He intended for me to learn today. I have set my foot to delight in the Lord in the midst of great unknown. James wrote of this fearless reflective faith in chapter 1.

2 Consider it a great joy, my brothers, whenever you experience various trials,3 knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. 4 But endurance must do its complete work, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking nothing.

22 But be doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. 23 Because if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man looking at his own face[i] in a mirror. 24 For he looks at himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. 25 But the one who looks intently into the perfect law of freedom and perseveres in it, and is not a forgetful hearer but one who does good works—this person will be blessed in what he does.    

James 1:2-4, 22-25 HCSB 

The song All In by Matthew West has been running through my mind all week as I have been working on this post, especially the last line of the chorus:

My feet are frozen on this middle ground
The water's warm here but the fire's gone out
I played it safe for so long the passion left
Turns out safe is just another word for regret 

So, I step to the edge and I take a deep breath
We're all dying to live but we're all scared to death
And this is the part where my head tells my heart
You should turn back around but there's no turning back now 

I'm going all in
Headfirst into the deep end
I hear You calling
And this time the fear won't win

So as I am in this season of unknown, I am reflecting, reflecting, reflecting because I KNOW I will one day look back and not just see the story He wrote of my life but have enough details to provide sufficient evidence of God's sovereignty and providence in my life. My dad calls this a legacy, I want my legacy to be filled with clear details of the evidence of my Jesus every single day.