Cease selfishness

I have had a hard time being kind lately. I feel this need to talk poorly about everyone. I am having a hard time doing my job, having a hard time connecting and talking to people.

I want to do all these things. I want to become a person who reads all these books. I want to become wise, stable mind and capable to do more than I can do now. I want to be confident. But I keep discovering that I can't do this on my own strength. Not even on some of my own strength. I need to FULLY rely on God and have him work in me to accomplish (really become) the person he wants me to be.

Have you read the "Circle Maker" I haven't, but I was talking to a friend on Sunday who just finished it. In our short 15 minute conversation, I learned how the Holy Spirit has been working in her life so intensely so clearly and this all changed because she invited him to come and work in her life and she was activity seeking Him. Asking Him to work and speak to her.

I need that so much. I have been working up to it. But it has a journey. I have so much junk in my life. I have so much selfishness in my that I get distracted by my own needs instead of staying focus on what God wants me to be focus on.

Confidence

I lack confidence in many many areas of my life. Confidence if I am doing the right thing, confidence to speak in authority, confidence to stand up for what is right. 

But I am confident in one thing: the Lord spoke and told me that one day Skip and I will be married. I am confident that God will do as he says. I am confident that I will be strong enough and prepared to make our marriage last once we get to that point. 

Many times are we told not to speak "the Lord told me to do..." As it makes it so we can't have wise counsel from fellow believers. It shuts them down because if God says, God said. 

But how the Lord spoke to me about Skip gives me confidence to say,"the Lord told me that I am going to marry Skip" and I think He did it that way because any wise counsel would tell me that this plan is crazy, CRAZY! 

I would say it's crazy to anyone it happened to who wasn't me. But it happened to me. And I am so thankful. 

skip is someone who is worth waiting for. skip is someone who is not only perfect for me to spend the rest of my life with, but arranged by God. Skip and I have had so many different life experiences since we parted ways, and that does scared me in thinking how it will work once we are back together. But I need to put that worry on the shelf because God is apart of this relationship and he can make this worry of mine absolute. 

single friends, and life right now

It seems like my entire life (okay ages 15 plus) I have been in social circles where there are often lots of amazing guys, who want nothing to do with girls...at that moment, always AMAZING girls who can't get a date to save theirs lives.  Then, some time passes and all of a sudden, all of those amazing guys are married, all the amazing girls are still very VERY single and off on a new adventure.

I have very few friends, but those who mean the most to me are SO spread out in the US now! My closest friends that I have had in life now live in: Texas, Minnesota, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, New Mexico, Arkansas, Wisconsin, and Georgia. Note that each state ONLY has one friend in it. 
Of this group of girls only one is married, and she was married BEFORE we met, so basically, I feel like if you become good friends with me when you are single-you will stay single, unless of course you are a guy, then you will magically find a girl out of nowhere 6 months after we meet. 

I am glad though that I have so many AMAZING single girl friends. It helps me in this journey of life. It helps me to stay level headed when I don't understand what/how/where Skip and I are at-- because lets face it, I sound even more like a crazy person about waiting for skip at year 3 than I did at the start. 

I am really distant from having a legit personal relationship with the LORD these days. I feel like I am following these steps, I pray sometimes, I often read my Bible, I think sharing who God is, is important, but I am not close like I use to be. I don't seek after Him and expect Him to respond. I don't give Him my whole life--just enough so that people don't question my relationship with Him. 

When push came to shove, and things became hard; I would cling to the LORD. But for some reason right now, when things are relative easy- when I am "able" to do life on my own, I keep the LORD distance. 

Writing this is a little more honest than I want to be. It breaks my own heart to hear how casual I have become in my relationship with Jesus. I feel like its been so long since I have been so real and raw with God, I don't even know how to make it happen. I feel this need to learn more about God, but not as much to grow with God. 

I feel like my situation is common for Christians. It is easy for Satan to get us to this place. I feel like it is hard for people to see and call me out on the fairly terrible condition that I have become-because I can make it look like I am growing in the LORD. I can share what I am learning. In reality though, I am just becoming a student of a book written 2000 year ago that gives me head knowledge on the creator of the world. 

Its good to have that knowledge, but it becomes worthless, if we make that our priority instead of growing and knowing God. Which I think I have been doing. 
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I have been experiencing lots of overwhelming moments of anxiety at work this week. In a really big bad way. I turn to God's word- I read those 3 verses about anxiety that my concordance points me to, "cast all your anxiety on God, because he cares for" is repeated over and over in my head. I ask the LORD to take the things that are overwhelming me at the moment. Even in this, it keeps coming back. 

I keep thinking that I am not strong enough, wise enough, skilled to do my job that it has become. My boss has been really really distant for about a week now. I know that he is really really stressed about money, training managers, and figuring out how to fund raise for camp. Even though I can see that all these other things are taking place, I think that it is because I am doing a really poor job. I keep thinking I should step down so someone who is more capable can do this, someone who is very strong, wise, and skilled. 

I know what you are all thinking-- "holy cow, Becky is a mess, stop being so focus on yourself-- get your relationship with God together, and seek after HIM instead writing a really long and whiny blog that seems to be going no-where" 

And you are right in thinking that. Thanks for listening to me process this so far, know that I am taking steps forward in doing your advice. This long whiny blog helps me to pinpoint exactly HOW I am a mess. 

And on that note, I am going to I bid you goodnight. Sweet dreams. 

A hard few weeks of camp

Tomorrow is the end of the hardest summer group of the summer, which means that for the past 3 weeks I have been a mess. It is a really hard and stressful camp to put together. I have been struggling, I have had tears, I have been looking at job listings and evaluating seeing if would be easier to do that instead. I failed a lot- it was too much things in a short amount of time. But the worst was hearing my new manager words in the process. 

I knew that I was behind, I knew that I was failing, and made it evident that I was trying to fix it all. But instead of him coming along aside of me and helping me. He decided that he needed to continue to point out to me that I was behind and tell me that I can never let that happen again, that I was making things terrible for our other managers. He said it nicely--but that doesn't change how things feel. He doesn't like how I do my job at all, he always want to change it for me. It's a big struggle. 

I really let this failure and these words get to me. I started to look at other jobs not only was I hurt by failing this week of camp, but I felt like I needed to pass the torch to someone new, someone who could ALWAYS handle the pressure of the job, that me staying here was hurting the minstry and success here. 

The past month has also been really really hard on my boss. What has made him a mess was completely unrelated to my mess-- he was fairly unaware of it because there was all this stuff going on with him. I knew I needed to talk to him, but he wasn't in the state of mind to hear my woes. And I should be able to handle this without having to run to my boss. 

Well yesterday, my boss came into my office, it was the last full day of the hardest week of the year and he was asking me about how I was doing. 

In our conversation, I told my boss it has actually been kinda great. Because my manager said all of these awful things to me about failing at my job, and took over this week in working with them and has been so completely frustrated by the same things that I have been dealing with them for the past 3 (actually more) weeks. 

I went on to tell him the specifics. My boss was mad! I asked him for advice on how to make it different, he told me that I needed to ask he had anyway to do it better (it a way that makes everyone shut-up tone) and I said "but he does, he is always trying to make me do my job different- and in ways that disserves our campers" he stayed mad. He wanted to know more, I didn't want to say more because people were now back in the office and could easily hear me. 

Things happened my boss left to work on something else and I started to blog about this conversation, after 3 sentences, I wrote my boss this email. 

Hey, I didn't want to say too much earlier about our conversation because I didn't want ____ to know that [manager name] and I are having conflict, but the hardest thing that has come up last week in preparing for this week is that [managers name] now feels the need to micromanage me. On Saturday he printed off all the group scheduleds for the next two weeks and went through them with me in a very critical way and keeps "checking-up" making sure that I answered the questions he had for me to ask the group leader. 

He said that he wants to do this each week to prevent this week's issues from happening again. 

All these things (this and what we talked about earlier today) are fairly little, but they add up to me that [managers name] doesn't trust me, and doesnt like how i do my job  and that I am having to constantly defend how I do everything. 

I changed my password on my computer because twice I came were [managers name] was going into my email without telling me and it seemed to be in a way to check-up on me and I just don't trust him with that. 

I really think this is something that can be fixed. I'm not giving up on it, but right now the hardest part is trying to make it so we are working with each other instead of against, without breaking the things that we have established as a value with our customer service side of things. 

Nothing has happen, since then, he came up to me and put his hand on my shoulder looked me in the eyes and said "I want you to know that what you told me stays between you and me" 

I briefly talked to his wife today who told me that she heard from my boss about what was going on and that me and her husband have similar jobs because we tell the most people what to do.

I hate being a tattle tail, I hate that I am struggling with my new manager. I hate that I don't feel open to be real with the hardships of my job with him. But I am glad that I have an amazing boss who will support me even when I am a mess and help me figure out what I need to do to make it better.