Titles are Dumb. When I Can't Explain.

Lately it feels like I'm wearing a nice dark shade of exhaustion under my eyes. That the days feel like weeks and the weeks feel like months and the months feel like years. Everything crawling at a snail's pace of slower than slow, and I'm stuck in this ever rotating feeling of overwhelmed, slowness, sadness, exhaustion. And I'm a sad pile of loneliness. Trying to find my feet in this ever-shifting world, trying to relocate my dependence on God and wondering when I made the decision that I could detach myself from His ever-loving graceful arms, and still think I could function in the day-to-day hustle of life and hard knocks.

And there are many moments where I feel I just don't belong to this place anymore. That the things I thought I'd miss aren't really here anymore and the cravings of community and relationships and people who take genuine interest in my life, my struggles, and my ever-changing and growing relationship with Christ are few and far between. And I find lately I've been replacing my heart space with complaining and wishing people would just once, be REAL, rather than taking that space and filing it with Jesus. This is my problem.

More than anything, I need Jesus. I don't know what life would be like without Him. I need Him like air in my lungs and my sweaters on the cold days. He is my breath, my strength, my warmth, and yet in the valley's of life, in the suffering moments, I think, nah, Jesus you take a seat on the bench, you stand in the on deck circle and let me take a few swings at life first. Why.... Why do I do this?

There's this idea that we must be happy, do what makes us happy, live happy. just be happy. But what if that's not it, what if we are not made to be eternally and forever happy about situations in life. Sometimes I don't want to smile and pretend like everything is okay when i have decision to make and the walls of life feel like they are crumbling all around me. Sometimes I want to crawl into bed and sleep for days, sometimes I just want my mom to be here to hug me and tell me that it's okay to be sad, or my dad to tell me I'm brave and strong and that everything will work out fine, or my sister to tell me to stop being a giant baby, punch me in the arm, and tell me to keep going on. Sometimes you want these things and most times you just can't have them. And I'm learning how to deal with that.

I'm learning how to make decisions on my own, learning that sometimes I will be sad, sometimes I will be in pain, and sometimes i will be happy. That it is okay to feel everything so deeply, the way that I do. That life comes at you fast and you have to roll with the punches and have a lot of faith in what you cannot see, because someday you just might see it and it will be a glorious thing.

The hardest part of this season in my life has been accepting that my heart feels broken in the presence of a good God. That the sadness and the loneliness sometimes overwhelm me to the point that I wonder what good it is doing in my life, I wonder if Jesus can feel the heaviness inside my soul. The heaviness of the lives of the people around me, the weights I bear and the breaths I struggle to take as I tread this murky and choppy waters.

But I also have to remember who He is, and lately I've been so discouraged by the people who are His followers, who claim to know and love Jesus, that I've been neglecting who He is in my life. That I've let the busyness of the day to day and my studies and my own selfish desires get in the way of the beauty of what He's made in me and what He is doing.

And yet there is this tremendous relief in knowing His love for me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me. That He's seen the things I've done and knows the things I will do and yet looks at me and says "Cameron, I love you, I love your messy life, I love your wayward heart and I'm calling you back to me."

And so I run. and I keep running. and I learn, and I'm still learning. That sometimes we're the hands, sometimes we're the feet. sometimes we're the ones helping, and sometimes we're the ones in need. But whatever we do in life, we work towards the glory and the goal of the Kingdom. That in the the end, the grades I've received on my exams won't matter and the hours of volunteering i acquire is not as important as Jesus. as people seeing Him, even in my sadness and my loneliness.

That He is the one who is elevated above all. Yeah, it's easier said than done, and somedays the days defeat me and I'm a cranky ole' woman. but you know what, Jesus is still there, tugging on my heart strings, tugging me along this rocky path. Cause life is a journey that we don't travel alone. He is with us always. Even when we can't feel Him, He asks us to open our eyes, to really look and to really see, that He is a work even in the messy, sad, lonely, crapy moments.

So I'm learning this, through tears, through laughter, through angry thoughts. I'm learning that He is the ultimate carrier of burdens and I must drop the weights, must drop my five gallon buckets I carry and trust Him to carry me in return. I mean, He holds the whole world, so I'm pretty sure He can hold me. right?!?


So I let go and let His river's current take me where I need to go.



HIS and yours,




 Cami