An Epiphany on Epiphany Day

Yesterday, I felt like God gave me a flash of insight into what He must feel at times. Don’t you love those moments that make you want to laugh, feel better about life, and cry all at the same time?  Looking back, I’m so thankful for the insight…but I still have to say “ouch!”

I’ll try to explain this as best I can without revealing the other parties involved in the situation. Hmmmm… So, I work as an Admissions recruiter at a satellite campus for our university.   I’m new to my position, so I’m still learning how things roll in this world.  I’ve also been EXTREMELY busy lately.  Though I’m new, I’ve been tasked with recruiting a couple of extra cohorts (new groups starting our programs), and ALL of my cohorts start in the next month or two. I’ve put in A TON of HOURS since Thanksgiving (minus Christmas break) – oodles of hours of overtime – to do my best to recruit these cohorts.

Honestly, I wasn’t super excited about the task initially. It felt extremely overwhelming.  I had to learn all of the programs, clean and organize files for programs that hadn’t been recruited for months, get everything ready in my new cabin, move into my cabin, start a new job in a new city, etc. You get the picture. On top of it all, I also planned a big event for our site right before Christmas.  Lots going on, that’s for sure.  I think I’ve only had one other time in my life that equaled how I’ve felt through these past couple of months – but that particular time only lasted 3 weeks. This is 3 months. (I guess there’s a sign of increase right there! Ha!)

Through the experience, however, God has really been working on my heart. I mentioned in my first post about going through a process of resurrection life. Well, this is part of the process. I’ve realized I have faith and “dealing with hard issues” muscles I hadn’t exercised in quite some time.  And we all know what it feels like to start exercising when you haven’t done so in a long time. Yup. It’s painful. 

But God definitely knows how to bring all that back in a hurry!  In the midst of everything going on, I realized pretty quickly that the only way I was going to survive these few months was to lean into Him. I had to turn all of my affection to Him and deliberately choose to let the stress go, hand it all over to Him, ask Papa God what He thinks about me, listen to what He says every day and declare it, pull out the lies from my brain and replace it with the truth, etc. Sometimes faith is HARD WORK. But in the long run, it brings peace. And rest.  It’s like striving for rest. Seems like an oxymoron, but that’s how it works. I can’t strive to carry my workload by myself. It might kill me. Literally.  But I can do my best every day, and strive to stay in tune with Jesus.  He is my only hope.

Though I still have a ways to go in this process of relearning and reusing these faith muscles, I feel like I have experienced a remarkable change – even in the past few days. That is where my “ouch!” moment comes into play. I’d been feeling something build in me for a few days. I wasn’t sure what the issue was, but I know it reached a boiling point yesterday! I actually got angry! (Not a typical emotion for me). Even then, I still wasn’t totally sure what was going on.   It wasn’t until I had a heart to heart with my boss that I finally figured it out: We were having issues with follow up because people didn’t believe we would have enough students to start a group. And (through lots of tears) I said “if we’re going to make this happen, we all have to be on the same team!”

Well, needless to say, my boss did a superb job of handling the situation.  I felt much better after processing through everything and letting it all out.  As I walked into the bathroom to “repair myself,” I had my epiphany. I instantly had this intense impression/feeling, and I heard God say “Audra, that’s how I feel sometimes.  I am working FOR you! I’m working overtime (or all the time…) on your behalf! (I immediately thought of the phrase from Isaiah 40:28 ‘He will not grow tired or weary…’).  But we have to be on the same team!  It’s not helping anything for me to be working on your behalf, if you are grumbling, complaining, talking bad about things, etc. (aka operating in unbelief). I need you to work WITH me. Believe WITH me. Have hope WITH me. Receive what I have for you, even if you can’t see the full picture or the end result right now. If you aren’t for me, you’re against me.”

Ouch. 

My second revelation came at the end of the day. My boss jokingly made the comment “Audra has this thing about failure not being an option.” It was funny. We laughed.  Later, however, I clarified that statement: “I’m ok with failure….I’m just not going to believe for it. If I fail, I fail…and I’ll deal with it. But I’m going to run the race believing I’ll win. Otherwise, there’s no point in starting. I’m not out for a fun run.”