“It seems like everything in life goes in a big rush . . . you rush to graduate,
and then you rush to get married, and then you rush to get a house and have kids,
and then . . . it all settles down and you look around and go, “What do I do now?”
~ Nicole

We get to choose how we live. 

Let me back up a minute.

When I was a junior in college, I distinctly remember lying in my bed one night praying that I would never get too comfortable. I asked God not to let me become a mediocre Christian that just went through the motions, settling for weekly church attendance, 3.5 kids, a minivan, and a comfortable, easy life. I wanted to be moved. I wanted to hurt a little, be challenged, and get out of my own way. I was on fire and I didn’t want the burn to ever cease.

Fast forward 12 years and that comfortable Christian with the minivan who attend church weekly with three kids wore my face. I’d settled into comfort — and quite frankly — mediocrity.

By the time I had my third child, I had given up my ideals and my motivation for trying. I believed I would always fail, so why bother? I was tired, depressed, and wrote a book for mothers that was birthed out of that time in my life.

I had become a shell of what I once was — of the woman I wanted to be. But who was I? I needed to figure out a new normal. Me, in new mother skin, but who isn’t “just a mother.”

“As you grow older you become busier, and time went faster and faster, the months pushing each other rudely out of the way, and the years slipping off the calendar and into the past.” ~ Isobel {September, p.44}

One day I woke up and thought, “I don’t want to live like this. I don’t want to live by accident, letting life’s waves roll over me, drowning me, causing me to choke for air. I want to enjoy my life and my children. I don’t want to look back on my life at the end of it and regret it.”

I decided right then and there to choose to live, to choose how I lived.

Because of that morning, and that choice, I spent two years wrestling with how to live a wide-awake life.

And through the searching and questioning and stretching, one of the things I learned was that by God’s kindness and grace, I could live by choice. I began to see that God gave us minds and hearts and guts and bodies to be able to choose how we want to live. For too many years I went along thinking that I had no choice, that I had to suck it up, get through, and make it heaven with hope and faith, gritting my teeth and bearing through it all. It was false.

While it’s true the Lord ultimately directs our steps, we have great freedom in choosing how to think and how to walk out our days. We have a vast buffet of choices at our fingertips, and as long as those fingers, those hands, are open to God, life can become a beautiful feast of delight.

It’s all such a gift.

What an honor to be able to glorify God by living in step with the heartbeat He instilled in every one of us; the heartbeat to live and move and choose; the heartbeat that we were made for more than mediocrity; the heartbeat that I am allowed to enjoy my life.

Friends, I am so thankful to finally be awake again. And it is a deep desire of mine to see you awake for your own life, choosing it, and believing that you really can lift out of the fog of robotic living and enjoy your life, fully, right where you are.

And this choosing, this wide-awake living, isn’t about having a perfect or pain-free life, it’s about knowing that life, your life, matters and has purpose and beauty, and it’s worth living. You see, if we walk around half-dead, just going through the motions, we’re not going to make it; we’re going to limp through.

But a fully alive woman, choosing her life, following God by faith, and delighting in who God made her to be and in the world around her, she can change the world.

She can call forth life in others.

She can be a part of bringing God’s Kingdom to bear on this earth.

She can help people go from light to dark.

She can be healed and seen and loved, and she will flourish.

How are you doing? Who are you?

What ache is in your soul and what do you need to release in order to live free and full and awake?

You can choose, you know. You can choose to live. But only you can make that choice, my friend.

Don’t let another day go by, letting the waves roll you over. It’s time to open your eyes, inhale, and live.

Keep on,
Sarah Mae

Need some help with how to do this? Check out my new book, Longing for Paris: One Woman’s Search for Joy, Beauty, and Adventure . . . Right Where She Is. 

[linebreak]

Share on Twitter:

A fully alive woman, following God by faith, can change the world.
{Tweet this!}

Leave a Comment