Signs of a transformed life

Dear Friends,

How many of you willingly choose to “clean out your muck” or complete a “searching, fearless moral inventory” totally unprompted? If you’re raising your hand, go you!

However, many of us don’t like to trudge through all of our stuff all that often because it is just that: a long, hard walk through a lot of yuck. And yet, life has a way of putting blocks in our path that cause us to stumble face-first into the muck.

The past six months of my life have been some of the hardest that I have faced yet, culminating with the sudden loss of my mother in June. Up until that, I really still had my teeth clenched, eyes ahead, and was plowing through without stopping. But then. Tragedy such as this does not allow itself to be ignored.

My mother was in the hospital for almost 10 days, and was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer on day seven. I could not go in and see her until the last 24 hours as my husband, daughter and I finally got hit by COVID. So the last hours that I got to spend with her, she could no longer talk or communicate. Angelic nurses reminded me that she could hear up until the very end, so I spent a lot of time just talking to her.

Our relationship was complicated. Is there a mother-daughter duo that isn’t? Many of our days were wasted in anger, or frustration, or hurt with one another and we rarely faced those things head-on, but allowed them to fester and grudges were held. And then you come to this moment where you are faced with the incredible fragility of our human bodies and our lives here on Earth and you finally realize that God did not mean for us to live this way.

We trend toward anger, we are meant for love. We trend toward grudges, we are meant for reconciliation. We trend toward excuses, we are meant for true forgiveness.

Facing this tragedy, alongside a grandmother in the hospital, family illness, and a job change finally forced me to stop and take a searching, fearless moral inventory–and I didn’t exactly love everything I found. But then, I met God there. He was waiting to clean out the muck with me. I didn’t have to do it alone. Just like I whispered words of forgiveness, love, and hope over my mother as she slid from earth to Jesus, I have since whispered prayers of repentance, gratitude, and hope to God.

I would absolutely never wish such circumstances on another, but I know they happen to all of us in a myriad of ways. Don’t wait for the valley to rise up in your relationships. We may not live long, so let’s live wide. Put on your boots, tell God you’re ready now, and clean up. Forgive the neighbor who leaves their trash bins out for three days, forgive the co-worker who put you down, forgive the friend who hasn’t reached out in too long, forgive the significant other who hasn’t noticed you in a while. Life will become brighter, bigger, and lighter and it is so, so worth a little trudging.

In the muck with you,
Lauren