ID

[This is mainly directed towards my sisters in Christ…sorry guys.]

So I, like most citizens 16 and older, have a driver’s license.  It’s a Colorado license which automatically makes it better and cooler than every other state’s license, but that’s beside the point. It is my identification. It has my full name.  It has my hair color—blonde, my eye color—hazel, my height—5’5”, and if you add about fifteen pounds to the weight listed, you have my real weight.  All I am is summed up into one bendable, plastic card that says I can go into bars and stay out after midnight.  That is all that I am.  This is my identity, that’s it…right?

WRONG.

Right now, I want you to take a second and ponder this question as you read it: ‘Who are you?’ Ponder it.  Whatever comes to your mind either write it down or just keep it in your actual consciousness.  Take a few seconds. Yes, actually answer the question.

What’d you put—most of you probably started out with your name, maybe you put down what activities you do or what ministry you are involved in, maybe you put down that you’re a daughter of the King.  Those who put down the last option, you are correct!  If you put down your name, let me ask you this—if and when you get married or join the nunnery or a religious order, you change your name—does that change who you are? Names can change therefore your name doesn’t define you.  What about activities—well, if you quit, you’re still YOU.  Who are you? 

In Exodus Chapter 3, Moses is talking to the burning bush about taking on pharaoh and freeing the Israelites, and in verse 14, God identifies himself as “I am who I am”, his nickname being “I AM”.  Every single time we answer the question, who are you? We respond with I am ___________.   Well, I AM is God, so in order to identify ourselves, we first identify God.

Fact: where we came from is not by our own accord.  We had nothing to do with the process of being created therefore we are reliant on someone else.  We are dependent on someone else.  We are dependent on God.  So to answer ‘who are you’, we must answer who is God and more so, who is Jesus Christ.

Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the Living God. That is TRUTH—we depend on that.  Mark 1:11 (right after the baptism in the Jordan) “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” Guess what? Through our baptism, we were adopted by God.  He is our Father.  We are His children.  

Just by being baptized women, we are His daughters, so: You are my beloved daughter; with YOU I am well pleased.  Nothing can take that away—no name, no activity, nothing.  We are his daughters for all eternity.  We are the children of God.  We are His anointed daughters, and He wants us as His daughters.  1 John 3:1-2—“See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God.  Yet so we are.  The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know Him.  Beloved, we are God’s children now…” God claims us has His beloved children.  We are His beloved daughters.  God sent His Son into the world to die on a cross so that we could be His children and be reconciled with Him.  He is our Father in case you haven’t been paying attention thus far.

“Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, before you were born, I dedicated you…”-Jeremiah 1:1.

“You formed my inward parts, you knit me together in my mother’s womb.  I praise you, for I am [fearfully and] wonderfully made…”-Psalms 139:13-14

Being His daughter means that we are women.  Yes, in a discussion on identity, I’m going to say the “W” word.  We are women.  Before you tune me out completely and/or stop reading, let me ask you—why are we so afraid to admit our womanhood, why are we so afraid to accept and proclaim our beauty and our femininity?  It’s who we are.  We are women and with that comes beauty and femininity.  God created the whole world and everything in it.  He created the plants, the animals, and man.  The world wasn’t quite perfect yet so He created woman.  He saved us for last because we are God’s masterpiece.  We are women and He delights in us and has delighted in us since our first moment of existence.  He who is beauty himself formed you with his own hands.  He came into the world for us—for you!  God loves you so deeply and our beauty comes from letting Him love us. 

Well…how do we do that? Well, first we learn what it means to be a woman.  

[Before I dive in, let me just say that I never, ever, EVER thought in my entire lifetime I would be talking about this…ever.  God has other plans, CLEARLY.]

As women, we have this desire for intimacy, we have this desire for communion—we want to feel loved and we want to really be loved.  That’s a mark of womanhood, we can try to deny it as much as we want but we’re only kidding ourselves.  We want to be wanted.  Where do we go—the best place is the Lord because He is love and He loves us perfectly.  He’s going to give us a desire that’s ultimately going to bring us to Him.  However, most of us including myself have looked somewhere else for this desire to be wanted.  We’ve looked to material things to fulfill this desire and find our identity.

Identity was a huge struggle and was a much unanswered question for me up until I went on a retreat that Franny Land (still) offers called Capture My Heart in the Fall of 2012.  All of high school, I had no idea who I was because when I would try to live out my faith, I was an outcast so instead of persevering I tried to be someone I’m not to be loved and accepted.  I found the trade-off: my morals, values, and essentially my soul for a place to sit at lunch.  At the start college, I still had no idea who I was so…I actively searched.  I was so desperate for approval, desperate for love, desperate to be accepted—because of my past though, I put up so many walls because I was afraid to show people the real me.  In my pursuit, I found myself wandering around second floor Clare, Angels Wing.  I found (slash God directed me to) Regina Angelorum, and I thought that all of my desperations had been relieved.  I finally found a group of women, WOMEN, who saw past the walls and loved the real me.  After I was inducted though, I found myself in another hurricane of confusion.  I was an Angel. What does that mean? Who am I supposed to be now?  I correlated my entire identity with Regina Angelorum and more so the seniors at the time I was inducted (Spring 2011…yeah I've been in for a while).  I had no idea who I was as an individual outside of household, and after they graduated that spring, I tried to hold onto them so tightly and find my identity in each of them.  I tried to be who I thought household wanted me to be [in reality, they wanted me—as I am, as I was, ME.]  I failed miserably at being another and was a mess trying to sort through who I really was.  In my pursuit, I found comfort resorting back to old habits.  I was broken searching for someone to fix me.  A year after I was inducted (Spring 2012), I reached breaking point.  I gave up, gave in, and surrendered.  I didn’t know where else to go but to Christ.  Here's what I discovered:

My brokenness is not who I am.

“I am my beloveds, and His desire is for me”-Song of Songs 7:10

I started letting go of everything.  I started surrendering everything because if we want to find out who we are, we have to find out who we are not and we have to let go of everything we are not.  I am not the sum of my weakness.  I am not a failure.  I am not worthless.  I am God’s daughter.  I am His beloved. 

The Lord revealed so much Truth to me because I allowed Him to: the extent to which we trust God is the extent to which He can love us. One more time:

The extent to which we trust god is the extent to which He can love us. 

I know that I am loved.  I know that I have a purpose.  I know who I am because I know who I belong to. 

“I am my beloveds, and His desire is for me”-Song of Songs 7:10. 

I have a specific purpose on the Earth, and it’s different from each of your purposes.  My plan was made for me and only me.  So often though, we compare ourselves to each other and criticize ourselves and our sisters in Christ for doing something or not doing something.  We are each so different with different talents and are made to fulfill a different purpose. 

Remember: “Comparison is the thief of joy”-Theodore Roosevelt

Be who you are.  Be who we are.  We are women.  We are daughters.  We have a purpose.  Who are you is a very simple question.  Note, it’s simple…not easy.  Give God the chance to make it simple through a relationship with Him.  Use the sacraments—daily prayer time, Mass, Scripture, Confession, Adoration.  Ask the Lord to tell you, show you, and guide you…He will: He's really not that hard to hear, you just have to listen.

The extent to which we trust god is the extent to which He can love us. 

----

LRR

Sweetly Broken

So I have this habit of when I love and care about something a lot, A LOT, I don’t talk about it. I keep it in my heart and close off showing that emotion to the outside world. Those who know me very well get quite annoyed with this habit of mine because apparently as a human I have to open my heart sometimes.  I disagree, but clearly I am in the wrong on that.

Last Spring Break, I went to Belize on a mission trip with my school.  I fell in love. I actually left my heart there; so those of you going down there this Spring Break please grab it for me…actually, you can leave it there.  It’s in a pretty great place: the tabernacle in the chapel at Mount Carmel High School.

"To the cross I look, to the cross I cling

Of its suffering I do drink

Of its work I do sing

For on it my Savior both bruised and crushed

Showed that God is love

And God is just

At the cross You beckon me

You draw me gently to my knees, and I am

Lost for words, so lost in love,

I’m sweetly broken, wholly surrendered

What a priceless gift, undeserved life

Have I been given

Through Christ crucified

You’ve called me out of death

You’ve called me into life

And I was under Your wrath

Now through the cross I’m reconciled"-Jeremy Riddle

Almost a year later and that song (Sweetly Broken) is still the definition of my life (I have to give full credit to Becca though for introducing the song to me), and it all started because of Belize. I was sweetly broken. 

I was sweetly broken when I had to give parts as well as my full testimony not only to my mission team, but to every single high schooler who really only knew my first name.

I was sweetly broken when I saw how much the light cast out the darkness in my life.

I was sweetly broken every time a female student would pour her heart out to me about how we shared the same struggles.

I was sweetly broken when I was challenged by a male student who believed MTV’s Spring Break was how we all acted. (We went at it for a while about that…)

I was sweetly broken when I realized: I am enough...as I am.

Sweetly broken, wholly surrendered.

What’s frightening is how much we shape the rest of the world, and though we may not think our actions have any consequences on anyone else…they do.  In a room full of Second Form (sophomore) boys, I asked them all if they had younger siblings. Many raised their hands. Secondly, I asked them how many of their little siblings looked up to them. Fewer raised their hands. Guess what, I replied, even if you don’t think they look up to you, they do, and they look at your actions and they determine how to act accordingly, good or bad.  

We are all brothers and sisters in Christ. Our actions do have consequences and someone is always looking to us for how they should act. How’s that for a reality check.  We shape the rest of the world for better or worse.

Realizing that, I was sweetly broken.  It’s such a paradoxical line, but it’s so true on how we ought to be: sweetly broken, wholly surrendered.  “We do not exist for ourselves”-Thomas Merton. When you realize that, you will be sweetly broken.

This Spring Break, I’m going down to Florida. I’m going right to the root of it, where MTV films Spring Break to counter their attack on my peers and the rest of the world. My personal goal is to make it on their show somehow, but since I dress modestly and I like to behave like a classy lady, I doubt I’ll make it into a scene.  I’m going down to Florida with Belize in my heart and my heart in that tabernacle in that chapel in Mount Carmel High School.  I’m going down lost for words, so lost in love, sweetly broken and wholly surrendered. 

Sweetly broken, wholly surrendered.

Another shout out to Becca for making this video:



----
LRR

Conversion

Like any student of FrannyLand may or may not admit, I think breaks are hard. Period. You leave the oh so glorious Steubenville, Ohio. You leave our holy hill and are forced to face the realities of the world and the realities of home. Ready or not, here it comes. As I've gotten older and grown in faith, however, each break becomes a little easier or at least I've gotten better at them as I have grown stronger in my faith and deepened my relationship with Christ, but no matter how strong your faith is....break, especially Christmas break, is long and hard.

This break, though, outweighs all the rest. It's about as hard as Alabama felt losing to Auburn in the final seconds of THAT game. Now, Auburn is going to the national championship and Alabama just got upset by OU. I've been watching a lot of football this break if you couldn't tell haha. Anyway, this break was and is a conversion story but real life. And like any conversion story, the night is darkest just before the dawn...but dawn always comes.

That first Friday of break, I was sitting at a friend's house on my laptop wasting time on Facebook when I saw it: "Active Shooter Situation at Arapahoe." I fell back in my seat and blankly said a word that I will not repeat because I'm a lady. Then the texts started coming in, "Hey, do you know anyone who lives near Centennial/Littleton? There's a shooting at one of the high schools." Yeah...I do. It's my high school. All I could do all the way from Ohio is pray, and that I did. At the same time though, I was reflecting on my high school years, and I knew my teachers. They loved us. They love their students and would do anything and everything for their students, including give their own lives for the sake of a student's life. I had full confidence in my teachers. My mind kept racing, and just like that, the shooting was over...and the darkness set in.

The next day I flew home with a heavier heart than my 43 pound checked bag. On one of the first days home, I went on a run in the shirt I always run in when it's cold (my Arapahoe Track/Field warm-up), but ten minutes in, I had to stop, fight tears, and return home defeated. I just couldn't handle it. 

My absolute favorite word in the English language is Warrior. That's one of the first things you'll learn about me, and it's my favorite compliment...EVER. Warrior implies that with all that you are and all that you have, you will fight for what's right and fight for your fellow warriors...or at least that's my definition of it. What's ironic and pretty awesome is that my high school mascot is the Warrior and our theme/slogan is "Warriors always take care of one another." That word and our phrase is so ingrained in my mind, heart, and soul. And I realized that more than ever.

I am a warrior: I have to fight and I will fight. We are ALL warriors: we have to fight...

I'm not proud of it but in the midst of darkness, I  found myself personally in the darkest of night with my own sins, but "the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it"-John 1:5. And now, I'm here in the middle of conversion wondering and wandering but not in darkness. Dawn is here, just like our savior Jesus Christ came on Christmas morning. Dawn has come. 

Dawn is here in my community. Dawn is here in my heart, and it's crazy and I do not talk about my feelings often, but this break is conversion (radical, continuous change for the good aka God). It's hard, but it's so worth it because the end result, the goal, and the root of conversion is love. That's all that matters, that's the only answer, that's all there is at the end of day: love.

Love is here. Dawn is here. HE is here. 

HE is love. And "we love because he first loved us"-1 John 4:9. That's why we fight. That's why we have to fight. That's why we are all Warriors.

"No matter how deep our darkness, HE is deeper still."-Corrie Ten Boom

Dawn is here.

-----
LRR