Sending Out My SOS

I didn’t see it coming.

            The tyrannical rain. The dark-as-demons storm clouds. The floodwaters.

            I must have missed the warning signs, but it’s too late now. Now I’m stuck. Right in the middle of the muddy waters where I had entered to help rescue the others who didn’t know how to swim. But now, my ability to swim means nothing against the hell-like rain and dragon-like waves. My feet, my ankles, and now my calves are being swallowed by the muck as the water rises above my waistline. There’s no one left to save but me. Yet, I can’t move.

I panic. But with every movement and maneuver to try to free myself, it seems to get worse. I sink deeper. My tears mix with the rain hitting my face as I call out my SOS. Where is everyone? I wonder. Darkness seems to swallow me in, and I can’t see more than a few inches in front of my face in any direction. I choke unexpectedly when the water laps across my face, rising from the level of my collarbone. This is it. I think. I’m done. I’m going to drown. And with my last few words I yell out to the heavens, “This isn’t fair! What more did you want from me? I gave you everything! How did I end up here?”

            With the last question, my body goes still. “I have nothing left,” I whisper. How did I end up here?

I hear you whisper underneath your breath

I hear your SOS, your SOS

I hear the whisper underneath your breath

I hear you whisper you have nothing left

I will send out an army

To find you in the middle of the darkest

night, it’s true. I will rescue you.

I will never stop marching

To reach you in the middle of the hardest

fight, it’s true. I will rescue you.

                                    (From the song “Rescue” by Lauren Daigle)

            I wake up as if it’s all a dream. But my throat feels scratchy, my body aches, and my heart feels like it’s still stuck in the muck at the bottom of the ocean. I’m tired. That’s all I can say, that’s all I can hear over and over in my head, “I’m tired. I’m just so tired.”

            I may not have been in a physical hurricane, drowning in a sea of darkness, but it feels like it just the same. My spirit has fallen, I feel like my feet are stuck in the muck, and all I can tell Jesus is, “I have nothing left.” Try as I might, I cannot be my own savior.

            Burnout. The storm that hit me at my already wobbling knees, and down I went under water, gasping for air. But the truth is, though the storm burst at once, it had been forming over the years, I just ignored it. My first year I was at 100%, my second year going pretty strong at 95%. My third took a dip to probably 80%, my fourth down to 70%, my fifth, down to 60%, and I’m currently riding out the storm at a weak 50%.  You see, when it decreases slowly like that I couldn’t really tell I was only at half of who I really am. I never felt such purposelessness, emptiness, and lethargy before, and I had never been so completely and utterly un-empathetic in all my life. It truly scared me. Seeing myself so… lifeless.

             

            After time with my counselor (“You don’t need their approval” she told me), advice from my spiritual mentor (“I’ve been through burnout, too; make a strategy to get back to 100% and give yourself time”), and accountability of rest from my boyfriend (“I know you’re doing great things at the girls home today, but please get home before 6 p.m.; you need your rest, too,” he says), I felt hope again. Just the feeling of hope crashed against my lungs, though, because I hadn’t known I had let the hope go for so long. How did I not know? How did I lose hope? How did I lose myself? I realized Kate had drowned somewhere in the past couple years of ministry – the fun-loving, life-giving, crazy-dancing, goofy redhead with a flare for the impossible was now lifeless, sending out an SOS. I had buried her under the weight of the ministry.

Because The Girls had become my WHY…for everything. For example... I remember previous telling Bonolo about my dilemma in whether or not to officially adopt Benji and Lucia. I said blatantly, “I’m hesitant to adopt them because of the girls; it will cause problems and jealousy and drama…” and he cut me off immediately.

“Kate, did you hear what you just said? Your reason for not trying to adopt them is about pleasing the girls?”

Just hearing him repeat it back sent a cold shiver up my spine. But it wasn’t until my 10 day retreat, when I was removed from the world and distractions, completely unplugged yet plugged into the Spirit, that the depravity of condition came as a revelation.

It took a few days of solitude for this revelation to sink in. In my journal I wrote:

“6-18-19

                  I put them first.

                  I equated serving You as the same as serving them(the girls/ministry).

                                    #1 priority = God and the girls/ministry

                                    #2 Family, career, friends, finances, etc.  

I started living like You and The Girls were on the same level. I didn’t realize the idolatry because I justified that You are still my First. And this is true. But what’s also true is that I elevated the girls to Your level – a level that has room for only One – a level that is meant to be SET APART. Instead of being consumed by You, I was utterly consumed by them. They were my waking thought, my priority, my daily duty, my why, my god; and Kate began to drown. I didn’t know that the very ministry you called me to birth was the same ministry causing my death. 

I am so sorry, Jesus. The ministry is not my why. They are not my gods. I do not serve them nor please them. I don’t need their approval. They are not the reason I do what I do.

You are. You alone.”

         
Presented to me as good things, “angels of light,” Satan twisted what was good and holy and honorable to be the very vice that put me under. The girls had become my god. No wonder I had nothing left! My heart felt pulled apart in twenty-five different directions, each girl taking a piece of it for herself rather than for the body of Christ. 
Now, I don’t think anyone would argue with me that the work I’m doing is “good,” “honorable,” “important,” but that’s how satan deceived me, who was trying too hard to be perfect and holy; he didn’t come in the form of “sin” or passions of the flesh, he came in the form of “good, ‘holy’ things.” So I was multitasking to an impossible end; burning the candle on four ends (yes, four); responding to so-called crisis moments and cries from each girl to then painfully hear them complain because they will never be satisfied, will always have a reason to be jealous, to compare, to blame me for playing favorites or complain I didn’t love them enough, that I spend too much time helping so-and-so, etc. I let their self-fulfilling “cries," latch onto me like leaches that sucked me dry; yet, I did nothing to help myself get free because they had become a part of me, my why.

While this revelation seems simple, it was earth-shaking for me. And immediately after realizing I had lost my why and the work of the enemy was exposed, more depressing thoughts came. It almost felt like I could hear the enemy laughing at me.

“Hahaha! I knew I could twist it all up! I knew I could trick you! You fell for it! You rejected God and didn’t even know it! You drifted so far from him, that you got stuck in the muck! I threw distraction after distraction into the river, knowing you would go in because you can’t sit still, but it was all to lure you in and away from the true Savior! What do you think God thinks of you now? How can you ever move the ministry forward now knowing that you fell for the wolf in sheep’s clothing?”

On and on went these dark, depressing thoughts. And I felt miserable. Was God angry at me? After all, I failed at the one commandment I thought was so easy to follow: “You shall serve no gods before me.” How did I fall for this? I had been reading my Bible and praying every day. It's not that I had felt far from God, just empty. Was he now disappointed? Shaking his head at me? Wishing He chose someone else instead of me?

But then I was reminded that the Holy Spirit reveals our own darkness to us with tenderness and with the purpose to heal, while Satan (whose name means accuser) speaks to condemn for the purpose to destroy.

And all I could hear, even in my failure, was God my Father say, 

“Well done, good and faithful servant. I love you.”

Because He didn’t see what I have done/ or failed to do. He sees me. My heart. My SOS.

In my guilt and shame and taking on the full responsibility for my own burnout, I had been temporarily immobilized by hopelessness, but with the love of the Father, suddenly, I didn’t feel so hopeless. For, the root cause of my condition was now exposed, and it made the sun rise like never before. It’s not a ‘quick’ fix, but a simple one, and it all begins with why.

My WHY belongs only to Jesus. What I do, I do because of Him, not “them.” That way, when my love is not returned, when I am betrayed by those closest to me, when I’m lied to and my trust is broken over and over, when I am rejected or criticized and made to feel I’m never enough – it’s okay because I’m serving Jesus, not them; it was never about me and them anyway.

My WHY has been resurrected; Kate is back.   

I feel like a veil has lifted.

I am the bride again; He is my everlasting Groom.

And I am free.  

“Here I am, Lord; send me.”

[What about you? Each of us serves something/someone, even if it’s yourself. But what we serve can enslave us. The world presents freedom in a myriad of attractive, rebellious, wild, “do what feels right,” “believe what’s right for you,” ways. The irony is that “freedom” comes with chains, and lots of consequences – realistically and eternally, there is no freedom there at all. There is only one Master, and the greater irony is this: serving Him is what truly sets us free.]