My heart and I have been doing a lot of reconnecting and talking lately.

I realized after lunch a couple of days ago with my friend Abby that my heart was in bad shape. Like, REALLY BAD. You want to know why?

I would beat my heart up almost every night, then seek God the next few days, where my mind is running fast toward Jesus, and I’m yelling at my poor, bruised, crippled heart hobbling along to catch up with us and run at our pace. Isn’t that hysterical??? I just picture my heart with a black eye and limping on this track, and I’m screaming, Get with the program!!! We’re moving along here!

And Abby told me so lovingly, Be gentle with your heart. 

I’ve been trying ever since. It’s not as easy as it sounds. I’m not going to lie-after 2 decades of suppression, letting all the pain and emotion out is ROUGH. My body is going through hell this season just trying to figure out what to do with these things called FEELINGS and EMOTIONS and CONTROL ISSUES. But in the best way possible, because I know Jesus is teaching me all this for a reason.

So, what does this have to do with pudding, you might ask?

Well, I’ve been realizing that I can’t just say, it’s OK, everything is fine when it’s not. Jesus will literally not allow me to stuff anymore into a bursting heart crying out for relief. So if I can’t stuff, I’ll try to distract or replace. As I just mentioned, control has been a huge problem of mine. And not just recently, but for the majority of my adult life. A lot of people don’t know this, but in addition to living through self-harm in my early teenage years, I am also a recovered/recovering bulimic. That’s not uncommon, though, for self harm to be paired with an eating disorder. At the root of both of these things is a desire to regain control. If everything around you is falling apart and out of your control, and the one thing you can control is your body, that is where you will turn. I think you would be hard-pressed to find a girl who did not struggle with some kind of eating disorder for some period of time in her life. And I say recovering in addition to recovered because although I am free because of Jesus, I suspect that control (especially in these two forms) will always be something that Jesus and I will have to walk through for the rest of my life. These things don’t magically go away.

I got done with Nav Night this past Tuesday, and felt really lonely. I don’t know why, I just did. That tends to happen to me after a lot of Nav Nights. But I sat down at my desk, and started to talk to God about it. I even started to try to convince myself that everything was fine, and to eat a pudding cup my roommate very graciously offered to me when I asked if anybody had any chocolate.

(Point of information-I am going dairy free for a while to see if cutting out dairy will help clear my face from annoying acne. So I am NOT supposed to be eating a pudding cup, and I’ve been doing really good this past week since I’ve started about not eating all the delicious things I so desperately want to eat)

Now here is where things get dicey with me. I really want to be disciplined in this, but me analyzing (quite a lot, I’d say) about what I eat starts to get into some gray area into my heart of if this is Jenna starting to try to regain control in her life again. Not to mention, with food, something I already struggle with.

So I’m kind of at a loss, or a crossroads, if you will, right now. I’m working on talking gently to my heart, and processing things in a healthy way. Self denial is a good thing. Jesus advocates for us to die to ourselves and pick up our cross. But I know myself, and I know that I have a tendency to go way overboard with things until I’m spitting water out of my lungs and begging for someone to throw me a rescue line. I pray that God will lead me through this season, and that I will come out a better person on the other side. I don’t love who I was trying to be these past few years. I want to be better.

And, you ask, did you eat the pudding cup Jenna?

No. I sat down and wrote this post instead.

~J

“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid”.-John 14:27

I know it’s daylight savings time, but does it really have to get dark at 5:00 p.m.?! As a morning person (they do exist, you know) the night time is hard for me. I feel like my day is finished when the sun goes down, and there are no more opportunities for fun!

Obligatory rant on how early it gets dark in the winter in Maine over.

I promise I won’t exclusively write about Sundays all the time, but honestly, the rest of my week was kind of boring compared to today. Just LOADS of studying for chemistry and environmental planning midterms that I finally took Thursday and Friday. I even had to stay in during Halloween and continue to study! Not that I wanted to go out and party or trick-or-treat, but it would have been nice to have the option instead of being up to my eyeballs in stereochemistry.

Today was awesome. I got to talk to all of these girls in succession.

1. Rikki!

Rikki is such a living, breathing, walking testimony. I loved getting to sit down with her today for lunch after church and literally hearing the oodles of things that God has done in her life and is continuing to do. We get to talk so openly to each other. I think once our friendship started to really develop after she accepted Christ at Navs Winter Conference last year (a story for another day) we went off the assumption that there was going to be no BS. And I love that, because every time I get the chance to talk to her, I get to be real. That’s something I wish I could do with everybody-I’m working on it.

 

2. Allison!

Allison and I’s first impression of each other was a way-too-intense, over-the-top, game of racquetball together at the Sports Center of Estes Park, CO during staff training week at Wind River Ranch. She is someone who pushed and challenged me all throughout this summer. She is such a strong, on fire follower of Jesus that I was kind of taken aback by her at first. Allison is fluent in Spanish, studying Spanish education, and hopes to do missions one day. But I think the thing that really showed me her heart was when she taught a bunch of us white girls at the ranch a salsa routine she learned from her time abroad in South America.

I think our dancing must have been so offensive to someone who actually knows what they’re doing, I can’t imagine what it was like to watch us. But she laughed with us the whole way through, had incredible patience, and organized the whole thing herself.

 

3. Gabrielle!

This one was a chance meeting, actually! I got locked out of my room while doing my laundry, and on my way down with the RA, I ran into my good friend Gabrielle who likes to hang out in my building and study. She usually has a couch that she sits on, but they moved all of them out of the common areas on the floors, so I invited her to my couch, and we got to hang out and catch up as well. She is such a sweet spirit and a joy. Her laugh is contagious and you cannot help but smile when you talk to Gabrielle.

…

I was bemoaning earlier this year how a lot, if not all, of my good christian girl friends had moved off campus and were no longer around. Today, God showed me different in 3 unique encounters with some very beautiful friends.

Go tell someone they matter to you this week, and why. You never know the impact it can have. You know me-I’m a words-of-affirmation kind of girl.

~J