Tag: authenticity

A New Reality

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When was the last time you just stopped? When was the last time you just took a deep, long breath in and slowly exhaled that breath? When was the last time you just sat and quieted your mind the best way you knew how? When was the last time you sat in silence?

The past couple of years has brought about so many topsy turvy emotions, reactions and counterproductive responses to the chaos that has resided around us. So, I find that I’m asking myself these questions. I’m fortunate to not have to work a full-time job, my husband is retired and my children are basically on their own now. So, now I am faced with the daunting reality that questions how I am going to fill my days. For 24 years I have been married, for 22 of those years I have raised 3 children along-side my husband, (thank God for him). 

Six months ago, my husband and I moved into a small town in the Pacific Northwest of Washington State. We found a little sweet spot with a view of the Olympic Mountain range and the Hood Canal. Every day we look out of the big picture window and gaze upon the beauty that is before us. How could we ever leave this place? Well, we don’t want to leave this place. It came along at just the right time. With Covid lasting way too long, this seemed to be the icing on the cake when existing in the time of Covid. This place is silent, its beauty is beyond compare, and the peace that exists is undeniable. There is the absence of “noise” from the city, which happens to only be a few miles away. Deer roam in the yard almost every day and bald eagles soar above the hood canal and tree tops. I ask myself, “what more could I ever ask for”? Bottom line, I can’t ask for anymore. I don’t need anymore!

Raising children is a daunting task and very exhausting, yet can be rewarding when you see them stepping into their own unique identities and pursuing their dreams. So, for me, I’m attempting to set aside my tendency to continue to be in their messes and continuing to show them the ‘right’ way…hahaha!  I have to remind myself that they have to find their own way. My way is much different than their way is destined to be. I have to take my hands off now and just become someone to them that will always be there when they need me. I will continue to love them and be there for them no matter what. All I want for them is to be happy, be successful, be open to the ever present reality of change, and always love themselves and those around them.  

As I said before, I am faced with the daunting question of what am I going to do now? Do I feel a bit of an “empty-nest” syndrome? Perhaps. But it’s more than that. I feel that now it is time for…ME! There are days when I feel down, bored, depressed, and I feel I have absolutely no purpose anymore. It’s actually kind of scary. But, it’s time to give myself some quality time to recover from the last 24 years. That sounds funny, but it’s true. One thing that Covid did bring to us, as a blessing, was the isolation that we all experienced, it caused us to turn to things like meditation, yoga, exercise and other different forms that has helped us keep our sanity and not go absolutely crazy. These activities have helped us daily to make it through this crazy period of time in our world. Now that I have time on my hands, I’m taking up small courses like drawing and poetry. This is helping me to step outside of my box (my personality, ego and superficial self) and begin to pull on the creative side of me. It’s my turn to stop, take a deep breath in, and a slow exhaling of that same breath. It’s time to discover my true self, and my own realities and begin to determine which of those realities are true and which ones are not true. 

I encourage you to do the same. You may be a full-time working parent with children at home. I don’t know your situation, but I wish I would have taken time for myself years ago. Don’t let yourself go. Don’t give up on your dreams. Don’t wait to stop and breathe. Keep going, but always make time for yourself. Even if it’s 5 minutes hidden in the closet to just breath. You are just as important as your children, as your parents, as your job etc. Do not diminish who you are and what your present role is in life. Put your oxygen mask on before helping anyone else with theirs. You are important! You have needs too! Don’t deny yourself of those precious needs. 

I hope your 2022 is a year that is filled with rest, moments of silence and contemplation, your false realities falling away and stepping into a new reality of the true and authentic you! 

The Extraordinary Goodness of God

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Sitting here in in our RV at the coast in Trinidad, CA and all is quiet and peaceful. I’ve been pondering the goodness of God and how His goodness pours over into our daily lives. From the simple to the complex, the ordinary to the extraordinary, the little and the big…His goodness is always there. Like a warm blanket His goodness wraps around our lives in such a beautiful way. It’s always there, always faithful, never forsaking and absolutely never failing.

I personally have seen the goodness of God manifest in so many ways over my life, my family, my church, my city and our nation and the world. It would be so easy to constantly overlook those moments when God showed His love and mercy when there was no justification for it. But that’s just how much He loves us. He wants every person to know His goodness, not just what is seen from a distance in other people’s lives, but He wants us to see, know and experience in our personal lives more than anything.

As a child I saw His goodness and watched Him provide by multiplying food on our table, by coming home and finding bags of food on our front door step, all the way to current day and knowing around every corner His goodness manifesting in everyday life.

The goodness of God is pure, authentic and beautiful because that is who He is. He wants to do the same in each one of us. We’ve been created in His image, in His likeness…think about it…He is The Creator and He created us to be like Him. Jesus displayed this so beautifully when He was on the earth in human form. Jesus was so simple, loving, humble, giving, pure, raw and unequivocally authentic when He displayed His goodness. It’s no wonder that it is the goodness of God that leads us to repentance.

He wants to do extraordinary things through us and in order for Him to receive the glory for those exploits, we must know and recognize His goodness in our lives. He uses the simple things in our lives to train us for the extraordinary things we will do as His children.

So my challenge today is this: how is the goodness of God revealed in your life? How does He show up for you? How do you display His goodness in your own life and in the lives around you? Take a moment and recognize the simple goodness of God in the little and the big, in the easy times and the hard times…He’s always there, always waiting, and always loving.

Veronica

Changing of the Seasons

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images

God has been speaking to me about seasons lately. I know I’ve written briefly on this previously in the past, but this morning as I was soaking with worship music there was a specific song that I kept on repeat. The song “Seasons Change” is on the United Pursuit album…”Simple Gospel”. When I first heard this song a couple weeks ago that someone shared on Facebook, I had to buy the album. This song is about when seasons change God’s love remains the same, and is an anchor for all we are. This got me to pondering when the seasons change in the natural.

If you think about it, what happens when summer turns into fall, fall into winter, winter to spring, spring to summer? There is a cycle of death and resurrection! The fall season causes the tree to begin to metabolically slow, the leaves dry up and fall off their life source. The flowers stop blooming and the animals are all making sure they are stocked up on food for the winter. The winter season brings hibernation, dormancy and sometimes what appears to be death. But it’s during this season that the old bloom, the old leaf, the old way of living dies and begins to make way for the new life, from the smallest seed, in the darkest of places. While we think everything is dead, because it looks dead on the outside, it’s really not dead. What we don’t see is the growth and new life that is beginning to take place deep within that which we cannot see. The rains come, the snow falls, and the wind blows and still within, there is life.

Fall turns into winter and winter into spring. It’s in the spring we begin to see things turning a more brilliant green and beautiful little buds begin to pop out of what we thought was dead. The buds eventually, with the moisture it received from winter and lots of spring sunshine, begin to open and we see the beauty that was being formed within the shell of something that looked dry and finished; the beauty we behold is stunning. The amazing colors that once defined what we define as life is once again in full view. The cycle of life is too amazing and too complex for our finite minds to comprehend sometimes. In the end, the entire cycle is what defines life, not just the seasons that express the beauty we see; God sees the beauty at our core.

This all brings me to the point I wanted to make. I was looking at the 45 trees that our gardener said we have on our property. I had noticed in the fall when the leaves were falling off, the birds were having a hay day with all the little seeds or whatever it was dropping off the tree. The trees ended up being bare and looking lifeless. However, as I was listening to the song I mentioned previously, I began to think about this. The fact that even though the leaves are gone, the tree is alive. The whole tree doesn’t go away in the fall/winter season. It’s just the fruit of the tree. The fruit, or the leaves, die and fall off, but the tree remains.

In our seasons that God brings us through it is that there may be fruit, reproduction, expansion, and growth, and it is the changing seasons that accomplish the complete work: not just fruit, not just the changing of color, not just the beauty we see in the comfortable season; we still must experience the shift which causes the fruitless things to die and fall away, that there may be new life. All the while, God within us remains and sustains us through the season of change and process. His love, His strength, His grace is resting on us as we walk through it all. He keeps us grounded and rooted. Why? Because we are IN Him and He brings and gives life through every season! Who He is in us is what keeps us stable and in a place where He can bring the change, prune the branches, wipe away the moss that has grown and begins to deposit new seeds within us that will bear even greater fruit than the previous season.

So may our prayer always be…let the seasons come, let them be a time that God takes the old and deposits the new seed of thought, ministry, vision and purpose along with whatever else He desires. There is going to be such radiant beauty that comes from allowing His seed to be planted within us. Don’t fear the season, His grace and love will remain!

Though the music changes and the songs we sing

We still lift our praises to our loving God and King

Though the seasons change Your love remains

Lord You’ve been faithful to plant the seed and You will be faithful to always send your rain

Lord You’ve been faithful to plant the seed and You will be faithful to always send Your rain

You’re faithful

Though the seasons change Your love remains, Your love remains

Though the seasons change Your love remains, Your love remains

Click on the link to watch the video of United Pursuit: Seasons Change

“Closed for Renovation”

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Isn’t it amazing the vast differences in every human being? Every person contains the incredible beauty, crazy talent, brilliant minds, and all the other array of nuances that make up an individuals authentic personhood.

I happened to be taking a walk recently with my children and dogs in Redding to finally enjoy a day of sunshine after weeks of rain. We like to go to the river trail near the beautiful Sundial Bridge. This place has several types of gardens as you walk along the path. Almost at the very end it contains this whimsical children’s garden. It has little play things for small children to play on or in, it also has this beautiful mosaic art piece that serves as a seating area and has a cute little mosaic fountain. When we approached the garden a sign was posted that said, “Closed for renovation”. The fountain has plastic wrapped around it and it was empty of water. I thought, ‘why does it say closed, because it doesn’t contain a door that you can lock and there was no rope around to keep us out’? I made my way over the mosaic bench and sat down while the girls went exploring.IMG_4531As my evening progressed, I couldn’t stop thinking about that garden. “Closed for Renovation” kept coming to me. I couldn’t help but think that it sometimes seems that God puts a sign up and says, “Closed for Renovation”. I know, it’s funny, but it’s true. How many times have you had God say, “Ok, enough of that. It’s time to make some changes”. As He begins to chip away, prune, saw, hammer, clean, and finally buff you to a shine, you’re thinking the whole time…OMG He’s killing me and I’m not going to survive.

When a mosaic is formed, it is made from tiny pieces of glass that have been broken and shattered. The beauty with this is that usually, this glass came from something originally created that was beautiful. Then it gets broken into small pieces and slowly but surely the artist begins to create another beautiful masterpiece with all the small broken pieces of glass. The amazing thing about being broken is that it all ends up into pieces that are different sizes and shapes. All these stunning pieces of colored glass are then taken by the artist and placed into particular arrangements. It’s hard to see what the artist sees until it is complete and you see the stunning masterpiece that has been brought from vision to existence.

May I suggest to you that God may sometimes set aside a time or a season where you are “Closed for Renovation”. In this time, He wants to take who you are and He says, “I see you to be even more beautiful than you are now”. Then He begins to take you apart…disassemble you…dismantle you and then starts to prepare the platform of your heart once again. He slowly and lovingly begins to arrange the beautiful broken pieces that use to make up who you were. These pieces are so beautifully arranged and set into place by The Creator of the Universe. When He is done, He washes you, dries you and buffs the shine a bit and then the new masterpiece is ready to be revealed. You finally awake, look in the mirror and are in awe of the absolutely stunning and creative beauty that came from all your broken pieces. God loves to take our broken-ness and turn into something beautiful.

God doesn’t reveal our ugly to the world. He only reveals our beauty because He Is Beauty!

Becoming Authentic

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Welcome to “Freely Authentic”! I pray you will find this blog encouraging and full of hope. It is my personal journey to authenticity. I hope you follow me and you can discover your authenticity too! This is meant to be a tool of encouragement, of risk-taking into the unknown, and a tool for both you and I to uncover and unravel the intricacies in the mystery of who we were created to be.

What does it mean to be authentic? Authentic is to be genuine, not false or copied, of undisputed origin, entitled to acceptance or belief because of agreement with knownfacts or experience; reliable; trustworthy. 

All of us are looking for the authentic person we’ve been created to be. Authenticity says we know who we are and we don’t have to be a copy of something or someone else. We are fully known within ourselves and that is the freedom that we walk in that allows us to express who we are.

As a child around the age of 10 or so, my parents divorced. My father was an alcoholic, and my mother had just about all she could take. I remember when they sat all 7 of us children down at the dining room table and explained to us that they were getting divorced. From this time on, there was something that rested upon me and I immediately felt that I had to step up to the plate and be responsible. I remember my oldest brother and myself, the middle child, mainly being the ones who were the ‘responsible’ ones at that time. Mom had a nervous breakdown and that placed even more ‘false responsibility’ on my plate. As I grew up, to be accepted, loved, seen and known, I was unaware and threw myself into being all things to all people. This caused me to become a people pleaser, never really addressing or acknowledging how I felt about myself. Just ‘do what you’re told’ gripped me for life. The lie of ‘children are to be seen and not heard’ hovered over me for so many years and has continued to follow me all the way into adulthood.

So because of this life I had been given as a child, my authenticity was compromised and I never ‘knew’ who I was. This is the journey I am on today. God has healed many places in my heart the last five years, but there is still so much more. I am beginning to see, beginning to express, beginning to delight and become excited about the person that is emerging from the shadows. This person is becoming freer everyday!

God didn’t create us and then tell us to go be like someone else. He created us in His image therefore, if we are to be like anyone we are to be like Him. Because of our humanity and having un-renewed minds, that opens the door for us to begin floundering in our lives as we grow up, wondering who we are etc. It is a daily walk to have our minds renewed everyday so old mindsets don’t come creeping back in. There is nothing more that the devil wants than to keep up bound, silenced and in chains. It is his mission to do that.

Being authentic means that each of us carries a part of the nature of God within us that no one else on the planet carries. I am a part of Him that you are not part of.

Jeremiah 1:5 says, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you…”

God knew who we were before we were ever conceived. He saw us from the very beginning. He had a plan for our lives already stamped in the heavens! He knew us before we there was any formation of us. That just blows my mind. Wow! What an incredible God. Yes, our lives took turns and went down roads that were not in His plan, but through His faithfulness, mercy and grace He never leaves us or forsakes us. He was always there, He is here now and He will always be with us everyday and every moment that lies ahead of us.

I would like to encourage you today to begin to look within and take a good long look…do you like what you see? Is what you see authentic? Is what you see genuine, true, reliable and trustworthy? Sometimes when we just take a moment God can show us so many things. He loves you just the way you are right now, but He also knows who your REALLY are! Take a few moments and see what God says to you. Jesus will never make you feel condemned, but will always show us how He sees us and will always encourage us to take a risk, step out of the boat, and come to Him and be freely authentic!

Declaration: I will not be bound by old mindsets, nor silenced by my fears and I refuse to believe any lie that the enemy has for me. I will continually renew my mind in the Word of God and time spent with The One who created me. He is the true model of authenticity. His love, His peace, His joy and His hope will fill my life on a daily basis and I will become more and more like Him. My identity comes from time spent with the Creator!

I am Freely Authentic!