Exhausted my gift.

Sometimes I wonder if I have exhausted my gift. How to put this to words is past what my being is able to make visible, but in these words I grapple to adhere to the things I have thought and felt in the last years, especially the last two.

One night my freshman year at Taylor, I spooned Ivanhoes with a friend and poured out questions, asking again for direction and this friend to pray for me to pick my major -- social work or teaching. As you know by now, I went with teaching, and it was because of this night. Because God came down and anointed and called me so particularly it was undeniable.

But here I sit, five years later, and wonder if it is time for me to pack it away in a beautiful box, and put it at rest for a while. I charged into teaching full of creativity, enthusiasm, and spirit. Ready to serve, to be a catalyst of new ideas, to chime into the chorus of activity in my room, and bring love and life to my students. But now I am tired. Weak-boned. Exhausted. Ready for the chair, the corner of the room, and the sheltered place to hide.

I leave the day with a heaviness often weighting my heart. I feel myself grow an arms length from my students. I am exasperated at the thought of doing "one more thing" -- one more duty, one more class, one more study hall, one more meeting, one more activity, one more leading. I am spent. I don't know if this is just personality, or if it is me altogether. Perhaps I need more quiet in the storm, more shade from busyness and more personal time to digress. Perhaps it is me, but either way, I am spent.

In the book "Echoes" by Kristen Heitzmann, she prints the phrase "Used up by God" to adhere to the man giving everything of himself to God... and then needing time and space to heal again in the quietness, safety, and communion of God and his people's presence. He wasn't backing away from his gift, but simply spent for a time.

I wonder if this is me. If I am simply spent for a time. I am "used up by God"; I know it, I feel it, I touch it. He has juiced me with bursting colors, but also suctioned my well dry. Like Jeremiah's bones. So I wonder if it is time to step away for a while. To let my gift rest.

My gift could display in so many forms. In the classroom, the campground, the women's focus, the home, the Young Life stage, the Kenyan plain. I don't know what form next. But I know it needs a rest. Another place? Another classroom? Another setting altogether?

I am mulling in these thoughts, mucking through scenarios, and scratching through for hope. I leave my broken bones to the Lord. His breath, his spirit, may one day blow through again. But these days I am tired, my 'soul sags' (my personifying phrase echos it best), and I wait. Perhaps I have exhausted my gift for eternity, perhaps for a time, perhaps not at all and it just needs a new field to fly in. But exhausted it is, still.

Jesus Felt.

Jesus felt. He felt sorrow for the widow, knelt at his feet. Frustration for the Sanhedrin gathered to devour. He knelt with compassion next to children and softly spoke to the woman at the well. He welled with sorrow for Lazarus and cried aloud for others. He gulped and engulfed himself in a sea of tears and weeping the night before his death. He clung to and hugged his friends. He also saw them walk away. He felt the nearness of his mother, but also the stab of betrayal. Jesus was surrounded in friendships of twelve to hundreds, but alone in the desert, of Judah and the soul. Jesus felt the laughter of Peter casting his net, the assurance of doing his Father's work, the anger of seeing injustices and the defiling of the temple, and the beauty of a lame man walking. Every emotion, on every scale, the Son of God felt. It is his humanness that connects me to him. It is his humanness that makes him understand.

I know people that seem to rarely feel. Or at least have tried so hard to bury their waves of emotion that it seems a straight line penetrates the monitor of their life. I look at them flex my brows. At times I catch myself frustrated with them. With their plaster face and pride that nothing phases them.

And other times, I feel jealously, that they are released from the ups and downs. Still others, I feel concern. What is it we achieve by not feeling? We achieve the control, the hiding behind our walls, the professional distance. But we do not achieve true connection, true breath of intimacy -with people or with God. It is God who creates and who takes the roller coasters of our heart. It is he who forms them, who works in them, who works through them.

Somedays I hate my feelings. Somedays I am frustrated that I feel so much at all. But other days I am glad. Other days I allow myself to feel, and experience every feeling of feeling.

Because if you don't feel, then you don't stand up against injustice. You don't burn towards excellence. You don't reach out to touch the hurting in the way that meets them in their need. You don't strive towards being all you can. You don't stand in the gap with courage, strength, and dignity. You, instead, simply be. You exists, but little more. One blown and tossed by the wind. One who watches wrong happens and doesn't have the passion, the guts, the gumption, or the conviction to stand in the way. One who sees people exuberant with laughter, but stands watching from the outside.

So I'll take my feelings. I'll wrestle with them, I'll roll with them, I'll try to unravel them. I'll take them. I will be frustrated with them at times, stand up to them in others, and still hid them too when selfishness prevails. But I'll take the burning, the passion, the anger, the hurt, the frustration, the deep love, the commitment, the conviction, the animation, the hope, the worship.

I'll take my feelings. Because Jesus felt. In his humanness, he felt.