Hey leader!
How are you? How are you, really? Have you checked in with yourself this week or have you been working tirelessly trying to tick off the items on your never ending to-do-list? Have you taken a moment to just sit and perhaps ask yourself what emotions you’re experiencing this week? Nevermind asking what triggered those emotions.
As you are reading this, what are you feeling? Happy? Sad? Excited? Angry? Lonely? Where in your body are those showing up? Is it your heart racing? Your tummy churning or do you have butterflies? Your head spinning? Have you sat with those and allowed yourself to experience them fully or are you by-passing it all and keeping it moving?
Don’t worry if you haven’t. Neither have I. I was just asking. Kudos to you though if you make a habit out of not only asking how others are doing, but also granting yourself the same gentleness and care. The rest of us are still grappling with that.
I’m going to do that though as I sit here on this soft grey couch, leaning against a mustard cushion filled with soft duck feathers. I’m going to check in with myself as I sit with a blank wall on one side, a thriving fiddle-leaf plant on the corner and a blank TV screen and the sound of tonight’s dinner simmering away in the distance. I really want to blame the silence on loadshedding but I barely watch regular tv programmes anyways. The news? I read them.
So why did I even bother to describe the environment I’m sitting in you might be asking? Well, I realised a while back that when my attention is zoomed in on the busyness of life, I neglect taking in the spaces I’m in. I neglect the finer details, especially the details of familiar environments, and I never want to lose my child-like wonder, especially in this rather different season of my life: familiarity breeds contempt or whatever the proverb says.
Anyways, Wednesday afternoon I was having a chat with someone very dear to me. Two weeks prior, mid-conversation about something totally unrelated, I blurted out that I was feeling stuck on some aspects of my life, of which the details I won’t share here but the blog is one of them. Mind you, I hadn’t even launched the blog at that point and I was already contemplating whether this was something I should be doing or not.
Her response? “You know you’re on to something when you feel like that before you’ve even started. Keep going. Fight against that resistance. But you do also realise that we also have an enemy, right? Why do you think Paul told us to put on the full armour of God for when the evil day comes? Not if the evil day comes. It’s only a matter of time…”
“So put on God’s armor now! Then when the evil day comes, you will be able to resist the enemy’s attacks; and after fighting to the end, you will still hold your ground.”
Ephesians 6:13 (GNT)
She was basically saying that whatever I was working on but felt like I couldn’t move, was no small feat. It was going to take me applying myself and pushing regardless of how I felt. Resistance will always be there. If you read the Scripture Ephesians 6:10-18, you will realise that the devil be wilin’ and scheming y’all. Even so, the Good News is that we are not left unprotected and exposed on the battleground. God has given us an armour and our part is to put it on.
During that time, I had to ensure that my helmet of salvation was fit and secure on my head because my mind was off wandering yet again. The ugly monster of inadequacy and imposter syndrome has been trying to rear its head into my life for the longest time and I must admit, I’ve caved to its punitive stares more times than I care to remember.
Since I can share blog-related stuff here, I can let it be known that I almost went back on my decision to even launch this platform. This was after deciding on a name, tagline, posting schedule, paying for an annual subscription for the domain and many other technical/administrative things. Everything was sorted on that end by the 1st of March (which was the initial planned launch day because new month new me new blog you know), yet I sat on it for another two weeks before clicking that ‘launch site’ button. During those two weeks I thought about the blog everyday. Heck, I even got emails from the domain host, reminding me that I hadn’t launched yet as if I didn’t know that already (rolls eyes)!
I was muzzled by feelings of inadequacy. I had started overthinking things like I always do. There is not a single aspect of blogging that I hadn’t put a magnifying glass over but I’ll be honest and say that the technical aspects of it weren’t even the issue here. Having an aesthetically pleasing layout is nice I agree, but that’s just that – something to catch the eye and hold its attention.
The biggest points of opposition that I had to resist were, “Does what I have to say even matter? Who cares? What if I say something controversial and it starts to trend? What if I say something and it’s misconstrued? What if I misinterpret Scripture in an attempt to bring context to a point? How would I recover from that? Social media is brutal these days, I have to be careful about what I say in case…I have to filter my words to make sure that I don’t step on any toes. Even if I share my experiences and perspectives on certain topics, I’ll have to tread very carefully.”
The list goes on and on and legend has it that although the year is now 2030, you haven’t even finished reading the first page of that list!
I mean, we read stories about people who the Bible later describes as heroes of faith. Most of them had their own fair share in the struggle with feeling how I (and you) do oftentimes. They did.
Remember Moses? Who had a live encounter with God and was given very specific instructions about how his future involved delivering an entire nation? The caveat? All that involved speaking. How sway when Moses had a prominent stutter?
Remember Sarah? Who God had promised would bear a son but reached old age and there still was no pregnancy in sight? Pretty sure when she hit menopause she was like, “Yep. Pregnancy has left the chat. That ship has sailed. God you missed your window. Jokes on you.”
I could go on about Noah, and Joshua, or Ruth and even Mary the mother of Jesus. I really could. Actually, let’s think about Mary, and the brutality of the backlash she would’ve encountered in that day and age – being engaged a virgin, disclosing her pregnancy from a miraculous conception, having to leave her home to escape death and then the child being the Messiah that they had all been waiting for for generations past.
Think about it for a minute. Imagine the trajectory that her life would’ve taken had she responded to the angel sent by God with, “No my Lord, my reputation is at stake here. I’ll lose my fiancé and be ostracised from my hometown by my people. Marriage is hard to come by these days. The fish in the sea? They are very few and the ones that are there aren’t even my type. Pick someone else for this battle please. I’m not your strongest soldier this time, respectfully, my Lord.” Just imagine. Imagine that, then fight the resistance you are facing in your own life.
This really isn’t the post I thought I’d be sharing today but I guess it had to be shared at some point. And no, this is not me seeking words of affirmation regarding blogging and other aspects of my life, quite the contrary. This is me trying to encourage you to resist the opposition, especially when it comes to the things that God has spoken to you about doing. I pray that you will wage war on the things that are trying to muzzle you. I pray that even after all is said and done, you will hold your ground. I pray that you will actively pursue putting on the whole armour of God as you do life and lead.
- Muzzle (noun) restraint put into a person’s mouth to prevent speaking or shouting (verb) to tie a gag around someone’s mouth in order to silence them or to restrain from expression
Zibuyile iinkokheli 
Leave a reply to Anonymous Cancel reply