Come to the Healing Waters

This may seem like a bit of a doozy, but this blog will show you more of my life on the Internet than Facebook ever will.

Seven years ago, this week, I accepted Jesus into my heart as my Lord and Savior at church camp. Our camp director described the numerous qualities of God through the qualities of water. My favorite quality, seven years later, is comparing God to healing water (a good reference is the episode in season 1 or 2 of “Avatar:: The Last Airbender” where the main character, Aang, tries to learn fire bending too early and ends up hurting his good friend, Katara.) This makes no sense right now, but keep reading, I promise it will be worth it.

The past two school years, I have been e drum major of my University’s marching band and member-at-large for the University Player’s. This past year, I have been a brother of Alpha Psi Omega, national honorary theater fraternity, and was hired as the assistant costume designer. As an upperclassmen, I was stepping up and being a leader for the department that has shaped me and formed me into the person I am today. These past two years, have discouraged me so much as a leader. When your major is falling apart, when the ensemble you conduct is booed off the field at for sure homecoming (and most likely other games as well), and when your fraternity is considers snobby, e lies of you being a terrible leader start creeping. With all of this and a faith that has been royally burned,your worth to anything starts to greatly decrease.

So what did God do? He took what I first learned and loved about God and brought it back up to fix me. How? Let me tell you of three different ways.

1. Being in a community with 20 other females who loves Jesus has done something in me. The fact that I am not a fan of church is ok. Christianity, as a whole, has so many problems. When you take a look, person-by-person, you can see how Christ works in people and it is beautiful. Will I resume going back to church once I get home (I’ve been M.I.A pretty much since February 2012 with a few months as the exception in there), I don’t know. Will I try harder to interact with a few more disciples of Christ when back? Quite likely.

2. For a few weeks, each teammate got to lead feedback. If you are about to go on an A.I.M trip and are blog stalking, feedback will be something you will be learning/living with for quite some time. I was the third person to go and I spend days organizing this event. For my time, we did group juggling (it was such a fun time). I left that time feeling, ok about the end result.

So when my teammate gave me feedback a few nights later about how she wanted to see MORE of my leadership qualities, I was blown away. The thought that I could be a leader already, blew my mind and made me sit and think about that idea. A few days later, I had to ask her to explain more. Her words: Organized, teacher-like, out-going, confident. I sometimes wished that I could have seen this more in me while being a leader at college.

3. Our squad’s last major project is to turn 4 apartments beautiful. Our squad decided to have 4 leaders.. I was one of the four selected and the only one from my team in a leadership position. Each room has a theme. Mine? Water, it has been a constant theme is summer (It has rained quite a few times while we have been here). I spent numerous hours planning on the murals in this room and how to lead.

This project TERRIFIED ME. I did not want to fail the girls who would be moving into these rooms. Honestly, I did not want to be mocked as a terrible theater major for how terribly this room would end up to be. At the start I was discouraged, it had the least amount of people signed up and all of them were from my team. Our leadership goal was to mix the rooms. After just a day of painting, all my worrying and effort paid off.

A few nights later, after feedback, our team was digging into deeper realms of our hearts. One of my team leaders was working in my room and was involved in this conversation. Sitting across from me on the bed, she told me that she has learned so much about leadership from me.

Those words alone did 2 initial effects. 1) I almost cried out of sheer shock. 2). I was silent for about 3 minutes trying to process those words. After stopping my tears and determining I STILL did not get what she was saying, I had to ask her for more details. Her details, took almost 5 minutes to explain everything she saw in me. (Some of those words: organized, encouraging, thoughtful, etc, etc, etc.)

After that conversation, I can tell something is happening. While leading a simple game of mafia last night and it no going so well, I didn’t get so mad at myself. I just took the distractions of our team and just made it work. I didn’t leave discouraged, which I usually left every band and University Player’s event/meeting feeling like I’m a terrible/inefficient leader.

So, for years I asked Jesus to heal me of parts of my life. Never have I ever asked Jesus to fix my worth as a leader. Apparently, Jesus sees my leadership and wants to use it in the future. To use it, He needed to fix/heal it. And fix/heal it, He’s doing.

Forewarning; This healing process is NOWHERE near done, but it’s a start.

“Hallelujah, grace like rain falls down on me.
Hallelujah, and all my stains, are washed away, are washed away.”