Transitions.

You know something's wrong when Tammy Chan doesn't post on her personal blog for 5 1/2 weeks straight.

I did start a couple of posts, but I haven't had (or made?) the time to sit down and work on them or finish them.  Hence, the unplanned hiatus.

It's the reality of transition, right?  You get swooped up into this tornado of change and never even get the chance to consider whether or not you're strapped in and ready.  And even when you think you are ready, you're not. 

That's what happened earlier this week.  It was like I knew I was throwing myself willingly into the deep end of the crashing waves with full knowledge that everything was going to be chaotic and I was going to swallow a ton of sea water.  But instead of drawing deeper in my dependence on God, I tried to protect myself from stressing out by absorbing the hits.

The sea water came back out of my system in the form of rivers of tears as I literally traveled to my recent staff conference.  I was talking with Nathan the whole bus ride from the airport to the hotel and pretty much cried the whole three hours.  We had some hard conversations that I was responding pretty poorly to because all the sea water I had been absorbing was suddenly spewing out of me without my control.

I was still on the verge of tears when we arrived at the hotel and bumped into some of our colleagues, but thankfully I had a chance to take a shower and head down to a bench outside the hotel to talk to Nicole Page.

Something I love about talking to Nicole is that I always feel like I have the freedom to cry and not have to work hard to fight them.   I also love her intuition.  People who are keenly intuitive and interpret their gut feelings correctly are so great.  Nicole is one of those people.  Talking to her made me come face-to-face with the reality that, as much as I'd like to pretend I don't, I do thrive better in stability than chaos to a certain degree; that different does not mean impossible; and that God is faithful.  She created space to help me confess the lies I let creep into my heart, and affirmed the truths I vaguely knew to be true in my head but needed to be planted firmly in my heart.    

I know it's not completely over, but the great movement of emptying myself completely to be filled again with hope and affirmation and faith was really helpful.  Praise God for the good night's sleep and the refreshing sense of being present during this week of training. 

Later on in the week Carolyn Carney asked to pray for me and the picture of the disciples in the boat with Jesus sleeping came to her mind:  they left point A but weren't quite at point B, and there was chaos and an impending sense that they weren't going to survive the trip across.  She prayed that I would have a sense of faith and peace of having the Lord who calms the storms with me on board my ship. 

Amen.