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If you read my March newsletter (and if not, you can read it here), you know that I hinted at making kind of a big, scary life decision after having a very long and emotional car conversation with the Lord. And, if I'm honest, after a very long and emotional few weeks months years.

 

For those of you who have known me for any length of time, this probably isn't that shocking of a decision. It probably seems like the most natural thing in the world for me to do.

 

But for me, it's terrifying.

 

So here's the part where I share what's been happening in my life the past few years, all the uprooting and replanting that the Lord has done in my heart. Some of you have walked very closely with me through parts of this story, and for some of you this may be new information.

 

Either way, I am grateful for you taking the time to read my story now.

As a little girl, I told everyone who asked that I was going to be an author and an illustrator when I grew up. I carried a notebook or a clipboard with a thick stack of copy paper attached everywhere I went.

 

I drew during class, on the school bus, in the bathroom (if you think that's weird, allow me to ask you the last time you used your phone on the toilet.) I would lay on the floor of my bedroom and lose myself for hours in the stories and worlds and characters I was creating. When I was old enough to have a computer in my room, I spent entire days in the summer sitting on my dad's rolling desk chair, clacking away at the keyboard and watching magic appear on the screen.

 

But by the time I graduated high school, that little girl was buried somewhere deep beneath layers of lies about who she was and who she could be. Her only dream at that point was to live a life that wasn't consumed by anxiety.

 

She still loved to write, but she didn't know how to make a career out of it.

 

She still loved to draw, but she no longer believed she could be good enough to do it for a living.

 

Somewhere between her freshman and senior year of high school, the little girl who knew exactly what she was going to do with her life didn't know what she wanted anymore. So she went to college to get a writing degree because it seemed to make the most sense, and she hoped to figure the rest out along the way.

 

She also stopped drawing.

In 2016, I graduated from college with a lot of dollars in debt and no job in sight. I started working at a local library because it was the first place I applied to that hired me.

 

In a lot of ways, my job at the library has been incredibly healing. It helped me fall in love with reading again. It helped me gain more confidence in myself. It gave me an opportunity to connect with the community I'd grown up in in a way I never had before.

 

But eventually, I reached a point where I knew it wasn't what I wanted to do for the long haul. So I started to look for a new job.

 

And I kept looking,

and looking,

and looking.

 

When people asked what I was looking for, my answer went something like this:

 

 

 

But no matter how many applications I sent or how many rounds of interviews I went through, nothing worked out. Every door that it seemed like the Lord was opening eventually slammed shut. Discouragement began to weave its way around my heart, tightening with each and every kindly worded rejection letter that pinged into my inbox.

 

I started to believe that I was stuck, unqualified to do any job other than the one I had. A deep sense of grief overtook me as I began to reconcile the life I was living with the one I'd dreamed of as a kid, one that seemed impossibly out of reach now.

In January of 2019, shortly after an emotional breakdown on New Year's Eve, I scheduled my first therapy appointment with a local Christian counselor a close friend had recommended. I continued to see this counselor on an almost weekly basis for the remainder of that year.

 

This is when the real healing started.

 

Through the course of my time in therapy, my counselor helped me realize that I had expectations for what a “successful” life was supposed to look like in my twenties. Here are a few of the expectations we uncovered:

 

 

The fact that I was approaching age twenty-five and my life still didn't meet any of these expectations made me feel like a failure. Feeling like a failure kept me stuck in a cycle of shame and discouragement.

 

The more time I spent processing these expectations with my therapist and tackling the lies they’d caused me to believe about myself, the more I began to understand that the timeline I had for my life didn't necessarily match the one God had for me. I started to believe that He had me right where I was supposed to be, even if that place was working part-time for a public library while living in my parents' house.

 

By the time I reached my twenty-fifth birthday that April — three months after starting therapy — not a single one of these boxes was closer to being checked.

 

And I was okay with it.

 

This didn't mean I had to stop looking for a full-time job or hoping to one day move out on my own, but it did mean that even if those things didn't happen in the timeframe I wanted them to happen, I could still be at peace with my life.

 

I could be at peace with me.

At the beginning of 2020, a little over a year after I started therapy, two major things happened:

 

1) My job at the library became full-time.

2) Less than a month later, the library closed because of COVID-19.

 

For the first time in a long time, I had all the time in the world. I didn’t feel the need to look for a job since I was full-time at the library, which kept its employees on the payroll through the shutdown. So I decided to use this new abundance of time to do something I’d been wanting to do for years.

 

I started to draw again.

 

During those four months when the world was shut down, I spent hours alone in my room, hunched over a tiny, unused sketchbook I'd bought for myself a couple of years prior. It became my own form of therapy during that chaotic time, returning to this thing that brought me so much joy. I asked friends to send me their favorite animated characters so I could draw one or two each night and post them on Instagram, which was exactly the way I’d taught myself to draw as a child – by copying pictures of the characters I loved until I could recreate them by memory.

 

The more I drew, the more I realized just how much I'd missed this part of my life. It felt like I'd stumbled upon that little girl I left behind in high school and found her patiently waiting for me to return.

 

So I promised her that I would get serious about my art this time. I started to take online art classes. I invested in an iPad in the hopes of learning digital art. I continued to draw in my sketchbook every day.

 

Eventually life returned to normal — as normal as life in a post-pandemic world can be — and I found that keeping that promise was harder than I'd expected.

 

Near the end of 2020, I moved from my parents’ home into a townhouse with a couple of friends. While this was a huge blessing and answer to prayer, it also meant that I had new bills to pay. My quarantine savings were running low and my paycheck from the library was just keeping me afloat, so I started to look for a new job again. The hours I’d spent drawing were soon replaced with writing cover letters and updating my job application spreadsheet.

 

There was another reason that promise to myself was so hard to keep. It turns out the Lord had some more work to do in my heart, work that specifically involved a deep sense of shame related to my art. This was a shame that stemmed from my childhood, and healing from it was one of the most painful things I have ever walked through.

 

But it also became the most beautiful, redemptive story that now I get to call my own.

 

I'm not quite ready to share that story here yet. I will be, someday.

 

For now, just trust me when I say that after years of feeling like I’d lost a piece of myself, God has given it back back. He is a God who does miracles, who makes dead things come alive, who heals our deepest wounds and shapes our scars to reflect His glory.

 

He is a God who can take the smallest seed and turn it into a tree.

 

And I want to spend the rest of my life thanking Him for it.

This newsletter is already so much longer than I ever intended it to be, and I haven't even really started to talk about my decision or what led to it.

 

The thing is, there isn't one specific moment I can point to. It was a lot of small things building up over time, little ways God has gently been reminding me who He made me to be.

 

It's also been some big things, ways that He has made it undeniably clear what He is calling me to do and that I can trust Him with that calling. I'm excited to share those things with you, but maybe we'll save those for another newsletter.

 

Here's what I will share.

 

At the beginning of this year, I started to reach a point where I finally knew what I wanted to do with my life, the path I felt called to pursue. But I still struggled to believe that this path could be an option for me. I found myself in a similar position I'd been a few years before, feeling stuck and helpless.

 

I cried out to God, confused as to why he'd given me these big dreams but hadn't provided the bank account I believed would make chasing those dreams possible. I looked at my friends with better-paying jobs or with husbands who could provide for them, and I felt an ugly sense of envy festering in my heart. I heard a voice telling me that once my life looked a certain way, once I had a certain dollar amount in my savings account, then I could get serious about my art again.

 

Over time, I began to hear a new voice breaking through. It was a voice I've known since childhood, one I only recently learned how to hear again. For a long time I confused this voice with the voice of the enemy, with the fears and lies in my own brain.

 

But unlike those voices, this voice is always gentle, always compassionate, always kind. Even when it's speaking hard truth, it does so in love. And it often speaks in questions.

 

The questions I started to hear went something like this:

 

 

As I started to pay attention to this voice, I also began to remember the other people this voice has called to do things that felt impossible. It called a stuttering murderer to rescue the Israelites from slavery. It called a Jewish orphan to save her people from destruction. It called a teenage virgin to carry the Savior of the world in her womb.

 

And after a lot of prayer, a lot of therapy, and a lot of tears cried inside a parked car, I’ve come to believe that this voice is calling a single twenty-nine-year-old with big dreams and a small bank account to get serious about her art. To tell the stories He's put on her heart. To spend whatever time she has left living into who He made her to be.

 

To find that little girl again.

So that's the gist of it, folks. That's the big and scary decision I've made in the last two months. It may not seem that big or scary, but committing to this path has meant making choices that are a little bit risky. Choices that force me to put my trust in the God who provides manna in the desert and turns crumbs into banquets.

 

And already I have seen this God show up. Already I have started to taste the manna. Already I have heard the still, small voice of the One who is bigger than all my fears.

 

I don't know where this decision is going to take me or what my life will look like a year from now. What I do know is that I have a God who is with me through it all, a God who will be enough when I am not.

 

And I can't wait to see what this God does.