Mountains

My life has been riddled with failures since this senior semester started. Not just my typical fail a test here, get in a fight with your best friend there type of failure but instead a full-blown, every avenue of life failure. To the point of mental paralyzation, where I don't know what my next move is supposed to be, where even praying doesn't seem to alleviate the mass amounts of failure that have surprised me.

God has been moving mountains around my life. But not just moving them, He has been destroying them. Bringing complete ruin to mountains at the core of my being and just letting them fall, avalanche after avalanche. He continues to prove to me that my identity is not at all what I have built it up to be. This fabricated mountain I have believed Him to be the artist behind when this entire time it's been me crafting the strokes and designing the picture I've believed He wants to see. God is humbling me, teaching me that you can't cling to mistakes just because you've spent a lot of time and put your heart into making them.

These failures have come in school, sports, friendships, family, relationships, health, and even my faith. I used to classify myself as smart and could always find a teacher or professor who believed I was bright; now everyone is smarter than me, knows exponentially more than I do and I am increasingly aware of my inability to keep up with my academic peers. My health has failed me. I take the medications and do the routines my doctors suggest to handle my autoimmune disease but still wind up exhausted by noon. Friendships I thought would never be shaken have been tested and nearly let go; intentionality is lost and I have failed people closest to me. The one thing I used to be able to rely on to be good at was my athletic ability but I have lost it. I have trained my whole life to get to this point and somehow failed along the way and lost a part of my identity I always thought I could rely on. I've questioned God, gotten furious why all these things that have brought me joy, peace, acceptance, and understanding of my purpose have been creating turmoil and an identity crisis within me.

Through all these failures I can only find it in me to selfishly ask God one question:

God why have you failed me?

Because for some reason my heart believes that when I am not achieving what I think God wants for me that He is somehow failing me. I get angry at God when He doesn't paint the picture I want Him to paint in my life. All these things I once believed could simply be perfected through hard work and a little bit of heart He has shown that He is still in control. My heart has been broken through the loss and devastation exposed by my failures.

But our God is loving. He is always rooting for us, even in our failures. God wants us not to fail lightly, but He needs us to fail fully. Like fall on your face, no options left failure. No one to call, no worldly lifelines to use. Failure that shakes us to our core, that brings us to a new level of honest with ourselves.

God can use our failures way more than He can use our successes.

God brings us to failure to show us that we don't need to be perfect at everything in order for us to glorify His kingdom. We just need to bring what we have and lay it all out for Him and let Him use the broken, shattered pieces to bring people to Him. We need to let Him work within us. Allow ourselves to let go of things He has shown us we weren't using to glorify anyone but ourselves and allow Him to rule over those areas of our lives for Him to be glorified fully. To give up our identities, our talents, our passions and let Him use them fully for building His kingdom instead of us clinging to them for our own gain. To not hide our failures from Him or from the world, because the world needs more real and God needs your failures. We need to get to the end of ourselves and rip up the paintings we paint in the image we believe He has for us.

We need to give God rule over our lives and what He has planned. Sometimes we realize this on our own, but sometimes this takes our lives being shaken for us to realize what we have been doing. We need to fail in order to grow and learn, to humble ourselves before the Lord and say God please use this to glorify Your kingdom. Use this failure to reach someone and to bring them to Christ, to help someone feel less alone and less like a failure themselves.

God has used these failures in me to help let go of the life I've had planned for myself & He will continue to use them. He will use them to help me give up parts of myself I have held so dearly for self-glorification so He can use those broken & treasured parts of me to help glorify His kingdom. To bring my joy back to being in Him and my identity in simply being His.

Because our lives don't start until we come to the end of ourselves and beg God use my life, my failures, and my talents.

God use me.