“Remember He is the artist and you are only the picture. You can’t see it. So quietly submit to be painted.” 

CS Lewis

I entered my 20s determined to feel and experience all the things. I dove deep into whatever pleasure next presented itself because I just inherently seek joyful experiences and also because I was harboring a lot of pain that I wanted to forget. In the midst of those years, somehow a very good God softened my hard heart towards Him, took my pain and healed it.  

My 20s were a decade where that God transformed every aspect of my life and heart. He gave me room to work through my anger, questions and hurt, and yet always provided for me in all ways. In other words, He does what he always does- showed me tremendous grace when I least deserved it. He redeemed me back to my true self- healing parts of my life and personality that had developed as a result of fear or hurt. He peeled back so many aspects of my hard protective barrier to reveal soft flesh. He reawakened passions within my heart that I had shut out as a result of fear or a desire to appear successful in someone else’s eyes.

He gave me a greater- bigger-  more beautiful – sense of what it means to truly live. I stepped away from “good enough” in exchange for “can’t live without.” At every step, He has only proved more faithful than I could have ever dreamed. I never could have imagined the incredible goodness that would await me at the end of this decade. I never could have expected that when I handed over everything I thought I needed, that I would end up with everything I could have ever wanted. 

In this next chapter I just hope that God continues to shape my heart more and more into the woman He created me to be and that every aspect of my life points back to Jesus’s incredible goodness and transformative glory.

To seek, consume and create beauty in all things is the truly the driving desire of my heart. I am an aesthete in every sense of the word. I get off course when I forget about the inherent source of that beauty and am my best self when I abide deeply in the transformative grace of Jesus. For so many years, I let myself believe that the pursuit of beauty was a vanity. I believed that because it wasn’t useful in ways I could quantify that it had no value. But I now know that the pursuit of beauty which transcends the ‘everyday, ordinary’ always points us upwards towards God, towards a better, truer way to live.  

Now for my 30s, I just want to grow and learn how to better bring those other worldly transcendent experiences to others. I want abide with God so much that my heart is shaped and transformed in a million different ways that I could have never expected. I want to focus on better developing deep, loving, consistent relationships with others, and step more fully outside of myself. There is really nothing more beautiful than that.