Growing up is weird

This started as a rambly journal entry but I found a lot of solace in writing this all out! Hope its an encouragement to everyone like it was to me.  Being an adult type person has been very strange and mostly depressing so far, but I like to think I'm still growing, so I like to think that means more adventures and fun times to come...eventually.  Haha. 
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I've been thinking about high school/growing up in Cabot a lot the past few days and I feel just awful about who I was back then.  Not the usual, "oh my hair/makeup/outfit choices were totally embarrassing!!1!" kind of awful, although I'll never forgive myself for wearing thick blue eyeliner on my bottom lashes along with brown mascara.  That was a crime against humanity.  

The orange braces...the wild eye-brows...the too-dark eye make up....the HORROR!

More than that, I'm thinking about the people I was friends with, people I saw everyday in class or on the weekends that I never bothered to try to understand complexly.  I opened up my senior yearbook this morning and was so amazed at the note one of my best guy friends wrote-- a "sappy," wonderful note about what a great leader I was as a newspaper editor and how our friendship made his last year a little better.  But I spent the majority of that year agonizing over whether or not he liked me or would take me to prom, ruining what could have been a really meaningful friendship.

I completely abandoned a girl in junior high from our friend-group because of silly things she posted online about some of us, knowing she struggled with her family and her mental health and desperately needed help, just one person to help and support her.  She always made me laugh, but I allowed the things she did to hurt our group to push her out, and she moved away, and I'll probably never know what happened to her.

I had a dear friend that was so marred by fear and anxiety, but was too intimidated by her cool clothes, dyed hair, artistic talents and quiet disposition to know what to do.  I think I was jealous, really, of her beauty and ability, so one day I told her she really should try plucking her eyebrows and I saw what it did to her heart in her eyes.  I know as well as anyone what it's like to hold your value on the flaky, splintering pedestal of what-other-people-think.  I kicked that pedestal out from under her for that day, and I knew then it hurt her.  Just a simple comment.  People had said similar things to me before, but here I was repeating the cycle because...well, I was too worried about myself.

So many of my friends struggled with depression, anxiety, self-harm, anger, broken families, abuse; and even in the thick of it all, sitting in class with each other, eating lunch together, sleep-overs spent sharing our deepest, darkest secrets, I was too consumed with myself and my own petty problems to do much about their issues other than a pat on the back and an offer to go get something to eat, let's listen to that new band's song, that teacher is a horrible person anyway, your dad's just a jerk, let's move on and keep having fun, okay?  Friend after friend presented me with a mental health issue, a devastating trauma, even just simple needs of encouragement, and I could offer them a distraction at best.

Sure, my family had issues, I hated my body and wanted to starve myself, my brothers hated my guts and I never felt like I could do enough to be really successful, but my coping method was a few scoops of cookie dough ice cream, buying new concealer, and drowning my sorrows in binge-watching television shows.  And I was overall okay.  Growing numb and ignoring my problems was my coping method, so that's how I tried to help friends who were compulsive liars, who slept around to feel accepted, who cut their beautiful bodies to feel control, who needed more than a hug in the school hallway to really help them.  So in the end, I didn't do anything worthwhile or helpful.

So I'm sorry to Logan and J.P. for not appreciating your friendship while I had it; I'm sorry to Katie for pushing you out when you needed someone to let you in; I'm sorry to Julianna and Katelynn for letting my junior-high insecurity keep me from helping you with yours; I'm sorry Alisha and Cassidy for not standing up for you when you needed me.

I'm sorry to all of you for not showing you the love of Christ like I knew I should have.

I'm realizing now it shouldn't have mattered if you guys were gay, or an atheist, or you partied on the weekends, or you came to school high, or you failed algebra, or you could crumble my self-value with one disapproving look--all of you are beautiful people who have been hurt in some way.  My faith tells me it's not okay to do some of the things you have done.  But it is not and never will be my job to make you change, and fear of doing that was what kept me from attending to my real call. 

My real job was to love you.  My job was to hold you when you were scared, lift you up when you were down, defend you when you were defenseless.  No greater love is there than this, that a man would lay down his life for his friends. Even if I couldn't get you to change your religious beliefs or your sexual orientation or bad habits or whatever, my job was to let you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I loved you, and that I could do that because Christ loved me.  Regardless of what you believed about God, my job was to let you know that this crazy Christian girl loved you like no one else.

And I failed to do that.

It’s starting to haunt me, now, all the time that I wasted and all the people I let down.  I graduated with 600+ kids, went to school with 1400 more, and in that time I don’t think I ever really loved someone like I have been called to, like I myself have been loved.  And it’s tempting today to let it drive me crazy, sitting here alone over Christmas break from college and work.  And thinking about college and work can get overwhelming too, when I interact with who knows how many customers and have classes on a 12,000 student campus every day—if I can’t love those kids in high school, how could I do it now that I’m growing up? 

I’m meeting Christians where I am now, though, that are trying to do just that.  And you know what? They fail every single day.  People I admire for their strong faith and undying burden to love the loveless—they can irritate and enrage me every day (Lookin’ at you, Dalton J).  Sometimes they are selfish, judgmental, or hurtful—but that’s because they too have been hurt, and they too fall short.  But when they do fall, they let Christ pick them right back up, and they keep on loving again and again.  In my sinful, selfish body, I will probably never be able to love this whole world like God does, I may never have what it takes to truly lay my life down for people that I’m scared of, have been hurt by, or even try my patience—but I am called to try.

I am called to love this world, and God doesn’t judge my actions by how effective my evangelism is, how long my prayer time goes, or how many people I can impress—whenever I choose to love God and love people, that’s a victory, and God claims the glory.  He came into this world as a human so he could understand our hurts, fears, temptations, insecurities—and when he was killed, he conquered death so we could overcome these things too.  I am messy, and there are going to be days again when I want to fix the world’s problems like I so often try to fix my own—hiding under my covers pretending like it will fix itself—but the power that raised Christ from the dead is the same power that will prompt me to keep going, that will pick me up, and that will help me show this messy broken world that God still loves it, too.