How To Be a Person of Substance
How To Be a Person of Substance
It's been a long time since I've had the desire to sit down and write out the things I've been feeling.
Through the ups & downs of the past year in my life, I've been so busy trying to create substance in my life that's worth something for me. Yet with the desire to do so, I've only recently realized that I've let the real substance, the intangible part, of me slip away into the entitlement and expectations of society and success.
But I've been at this for so long. 5 years since I started dancing full time, while working my ass off on the side to be able to continue pursuing dance with some stability. I deserve success, don't I? I deserve to have a "platform" where I can share Jesus & influence my community with good things. I deserve income, because I've worked so hard for it. Of course I do.
I forgot that years ago, God told me to not have any plans.
Don't have any plans, He said, because I will always wreck your plans with better ones.
But age, society, the ever so quickly evolving standards of life demand plans. They demand you to be one step ahead, to be better than your greatest competition, and to stay hungry & passionate, even when you don't feel like being hungry or passionate anymore.
You're drained and disappointed, but there's no time to slack.
You're tired and weary, but then you should always be doing something productive, not resting.
You're in deep longing for connection and community, but your friends are just too different. They don't seem to understand your lifestyle, so you choose work instead.
You've become a workaholic that's unsatisfied and discontent with your current status, even though you are surely "moving up the ladder".
But what happened to the simplicity of times where it was the PRESENT love of something that kept you going? The times where you felt like all was possible simply because you knew you loved it enough, and God supported it? The times where you weren't jaded by life’s disappointment, weariness, & age.
The progressive nature of God is the most intriguing thing to humanity. Because we are hopelessly limited, in our understanding of the world and of ourselves. But there is an Artist who orchestrated everything to go from glory to glory when fully surrendered to His heart & to His presence. I had forgotten that that version of "glory to glory" that God promised to take us through is the ultimate version of success that I once dreamt of & longed for. That knowing Him, and living life through Him, brought only constructive results rather than destructive perceptions of my own self-worth and identity. I'm so utterly in need of laying down the things that I placed as my most treasured earthly rewards - things that I keep telling myself I "deserve" because God once promised me those things in return for faithfulness and good stewardship - in exchange for the beauty of seeing what God can do, even when I feel like I have nothing left.
How beautiful can my own creativity be, when there's no earthly standard to compare it to? How beautiful can I be when there's no entitlement of being a certain someone to please anyone but God Himself? How beautiful can it be, when I choose to trade in my hard work, my earthly rewards, my opportunities & my income, my loneliness & my weariness, & my unhealthy expectations of God's plans for me, for a simplistic ability to enjoy the present moment with a present God?
I want to be a person of substance.
A person whose beauty and security shines through my exterior in a way that is only explainable by a God who made me to be.
My choreography, my movement, my art, my conversations, my work, my relationships, can all have substance if I let them overflow from Heaven's resources.
But the most powerful substance of my identity comes from knowing that if I were to ever be incapable of choreographing, of moving, of creating art, of conversing, of working, of having any relationships, that I am still completely whole, completely loved, & completely valuable = without any of these things that I currently work so hard to perfect.
Digging deep to find a new way to approach life, and to fix my eyes on having Jesus be my core drive in all that I do, so that one day I may be wholly satisfied with who I am, without constantly striving to be.
