Hey friend!
This was a quarter-life crisis week for me.
I was seriously stressing about who I wanted to become. And I won’t lie, I feel like I have moments like this every few months haha, but man do they suck the joy out of me! But God is never far away in crisis, and when I was going to bed one night, my heart crying out to the Lord, I felt Jesus speak into my frustration. His encouragement helped me find breakthrough.
My internal dialogue before breakthrough:
I felt like a budding flower on the edge of blooming, but instead of feeling excitement at what was to come, I was panicking. I was a bud about to bloom in an identity crisis.
What kind of flower was I supposed to be? Will I bloom beautifully? Have I made good decisions up until now? Am I on the right path? Will others like me? What if I fail and I can’t bloom? What if I just stay as a budding flower and never bloom? Isn’t that safer? Or maybe I should try to be something else entirely? Press restart? Try again?
These are the questions of my identity crisis. Talk about overwhelming.
But then the voice of Jesus began rushing in, and when I closed my eyes, I saw myself as that budding flower through the Lord’s eyes.
The Lord is my gardener. If I am a budding flower, I do not get to determine what kind of flower I am going to be. Especially right before I bloom! That would be crazy, right?! A flower doesn’t get to decide what it becomes at all. It is the gardener who chooses each seed and plants it. And my gardener chose me. God knew exactly what kind of flower he was getting when he chose me. Before I even grew an inch, God knew who I was going to become.
In the seed of me, ma, God has woven together the fabric of who I am, who I will become, and how I will bloom. It is not my job to try to be any other flower than the one I am. God already knows what he has in me, and he loves me! As a flower, my job is to need him, my gardener, and to depend on his care every second of my little flower life. I grow when I trust him. I bloom when I surrender to him. God brings forth the bloom, not me, and not by my effort.
What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. For we are God's fellow workers. You are God's field, God's building.
There was never meant to be any striving for me in blooming. No fear and no failure.
There was only meant to be surrender to my gardener’s perfect timing, his delight in who I am, and who I am becoming.
I felt pressure to control when and how I bloomed, but that role was not mine to take. It belongs to the Creator who designed me, chose me, planted me, tended to me, and now joyfully brings forth my blooming.
And when I do bloom, won’t he be so pleased? Won’t he be so delighted by the beauty in me that he has waited my whole life to see unfold? Isn’t the gardener just as expectant to see the beauty of my blooming self as I am? More so even, because he has been waiting since before I was even born to see that moment. He is the one who created me and formed me in my mother’s womb (Psalm 139:13-14). God is the mind behind every detail of my DNA, every part of who I am.
At this point, you may be asking this question:
what does it looks like to bloom?
I won’t pretend I know the perfect answer to that question. But I do believe that blooming is the process of becoming like Christ and stepping into the fullness of God’s will for you on earth.
I believe that God has a beautiful and unique path for you to walk in. We all have experienced seasons of life and circumstances that have stunted our growth and felt out-of-line with who we are. There is an off-ness in our heart when we aren’t living in our true identities! But God wants you to live in a way where who you were made to be can begin to unfold and shine to its fullest self.
I believe blooming happens when we align our hearts with growth that comes from God and plans that come from God.
Growth and plans from God, and it looks different for everyone, but at the core of it is always surrender.
We surrender to his guidance, his plans, his passions, his interests, his people, his church, his nature in us, and his gifts to us. Aligning everything in us to his will takes surrender. What a process it is, and it takes time. But friend, that is where fullness of life is.
We will only truly bloom when our hearts and lives are surrendered to the gardener!
Blooming isn’t found in outcomes or success or the approval of man. It isn’t found in our performance or perfection or knowledge. It is simply found in the love of Jesus shining down on us like the sun, day after day after day, and that loves transforms us from the inside out.
prompt:
I’ll leave you with the two questions I asked myself as this crisis resolved to a close:
1. Father, how have you made me?
2. What in my DNA will inform how I bloom?
When I asked the Father these questions, these are the words he brought to mind:
you love words and using them to encourage others.
you love to find beauty in imperfection rather than perfection.
you embrace the messy processes of life with joy.
you see beauty and dreams in others and call them out and celebrate them.
you are a creative person, not an artist.
How has the Father made you? What has he placed in your DNA that will inform how you bloom? I encourage you to take these questions to the Lord and journal what he brings to mind.
Remember, there is no striving in blooming. There is only surrender to the gardener. who loves you!
Keep pressing onward toward growth. Bloom freely, in his timing and not your own. God is your gardener. He cares for you, nurtures you, waters you, and places you in the light of the sun. Your blooming season is coming, and you can trust that it will be good.
With love,
ma
p.s. these thoughts and words are inspired by God but are by no means scripture! I really just want to share how God has been encouraging me in my current season of life. If you have any questions, please reach out. 💛
Three Things Worth Sharing:
(A shoutout to my favorite artist’s at the moment! This is your sign to fill your home with art!!)
Linnea Jaskiw Art Prints: Linnea creates the most flawless watercolors and her prints look like originals. I especially love her Alphabet of Animals as a baby shower gift! Linnea is one of my closest friends, a new mama, and a military wife 💛 Show her some love as she launches her watercolor business!!
Shop Inslee Botanical Print: In the spirit of blooms and mother’s day, here is another artist whose work I adore: Inslee Fariss. Her prints and stationary are stunning, although a little more pricy.
Blakely Made Prints: And one more artist just because her style is just so whimsical, colorful, and summery and I just love it!