Rooting for Me

In my latest episode of ATOK, I tried to take you on a journey of what it's like to discover that the place God is sometimes leading us --often leading us...mostly leading us--is back to the beginning of our lives. After all, how many lessons in Christendom are taught about "becoming like children?" There's obviously something to that. Most saints (definitely smarter than me) and other people (somewhat smarter than me) I've heard commenting on it have noted that God's desire to see us become "like children" has to do with the level of simplicity and humility we ought to have.

But what is always interesting to me is I don't think I know any parent of a young child who would qualify their kid as either simple or humble.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think I have some incredibly clever insight here or that I know better than others. Like I say in almost every episode, I don't really know what's going on, but I'm learning as I go. What I do think is that there's more to the metaphor of becoming childlike than immediately meets the eye, and I think that has to do with rejecting what we allow ourselves to believe about ourselves as we journey into adulthood.

In 2017 I took this picture of a small rose pushing through the ground outside of a church in Vancouver. Nothing else around her, but she was resilient. Maybe I can be, too.

At least at this point in my life, I believe that most of my personhood

has been dictated by the ideas, perceptions, wishes, and dreams that were thrust upon me from childhood through adolescence and into young adulthood --and while that may have been useful to me at that stage of my life, I'm coming to terms with the fact that none of that is truly where I'm meant to be going.

Some people have the luxury of waking up one day and realizing that they're not happy with their lives and they actually have the grace to be able to do something with that realization --change course, make a different decision, go in a new direction. I love that for them, and I think that's wonderful. That has never, however, been the case for me. I'm stubbornly resolute about my life, typically choosing to remain in an unhappy or unhealthy situation simply because I'm convinced it's the "right thing" to do. It typically isn't until something cataclysmic happens that I realize something should have changed a long time ago.

Actually, it's less that I realize something is wrong and more that I finally accept something is wrong. I think that "realization" hits all of us at some point when things aren't going our way, but I also think that few of us have the ability to actually see our realities for what they are --especially if accepting the reality is painful, requires change, or doesn't make us feel good about ourselves. It's in those moments that we are powerfully tempted to deny reality: look over there, distract yourself, rationalize it, pretend it's normal. Pretend it's okay.

Well, allow me to say --that's not okay.

So how might this play out for me? Let's say I've grown to a point where I've staked my entire idea about myself and my self worth on something other people placed such high value on: my musical talent. Let's say that from the time I could properly express myself, that expression was channeled toward's other people's pleasure and usefulness --whether it was "Martina, come sing for us" at a family gathering, or "Martina has such a phenomenal voice" during times when I'm being introduced, my voice always came up as an identifying characteristic about me.

Don't get me wrong, was this always problematic and unwelcome? Absolutely not. I'm not saying it was even unpleasant. What I am saying is that after a certain amount of time of this being your reality, you start to hinge your whole identity on it. You start to believe that you're only as good as what you can offer with your voice. At least, that's what I fully bought into. We're not impervious to the voices in our head, you know? Sometimes they'll start telling you "you're only as good as the next note you sing," and you believe that. You internalize it. You start judging yourself by it.

And you start inevitably building your life around it. It wasn't so much a pursuit as a following --I seemed to be good at this thing, other people enjoyed this thing, so it seemed natural that my professional life would follow this thing. So every opportunity that came up that had to do with music seemed like a no-brainer. I accepted without much thought or discernment or even checking in with myself. There were so many "sure things" in my experience, and I followed those all the way until I became the music director at a church.

It made sense. It fit. It was, for all intents and purposes, safe. I could deliver on what the people wanted, and I could live comfortably from it. It was security, at least.

So then what happens when all of a sudden, on a random Tuesday in March, all of that changes? I watched the things I gave my life to fall apart in a matter of moments. Everything I had worked towards, everything I knew, everything I (thought I) wanted was just stripped away from me following a few measured lines on a CYA letter, read by a man of the cloth who was nothing more than a wolf in sheep's clothing.

It wasn't just getting fired or losing a job, it was an assault on the very core of who I understood myself to be. It was like being orphaned from Meaning and Purpose. I was suddenly plunged to the darkness outside, a reject, a failure, a pariah. People who were speaking to me up to a day before it happened just up and deserted me, never spoke of me or to me again. Did they know it was happening? Were they aware of it? They never told me anything. They laughed with me, joked with me, spoke with me as if nothing was wrong, only to know my days were numbered? The betrayal I felt. The hatred I felt...

We're going adrift from the main point here. The emotions are sometimes too raw to ignore, and the fact that I've had to swallow all of them from that point to now hasn't helped.

Anyways.

My point is, when everything is ripped out from under you that way, you don't get a lot of time to adjust. You are faced with reality very firmly and with exacting concreteness. And I was thrust unceremoniously into the reality that I wasn't good for anything anymore. That's what I believed.

That was a lie, of course.

But it was a lie that was hiding a much deeper lie. It was concealing the lie that that job was ever who I was to begin with. It was also concealing the lie that I was only as good as where my musical ability could take me. It was concealing the lie that my whole entire purpose in life was just to be a musician for God. It was concealing the lie that I was actually living.

I wasn't. For years I had been dying inside, but I wasn't aware of it until that point. Or maybe I was, and I just kept denying it. We're still working that out.

Lies can sound really good. They can sound very convincing and very comfortable: "You've finally figured it out," "you'll be safe now," "all of that hard work paid off," "they would be crazy to get rid of you," "these people love you." I bought into every single one of those, not realizing the whole time that I was poisoning myself little by little.

But you know what? God loves me too much to leave me in the devastation. The fact of the matter is, I do believe God led me to all the places I've been to. God built up my musical ability. God placed me in high and lofty places. God opened up doors for me with that gift, and that was what I needed at that time. But as my good friend Job says, "the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, blessed be the Lord."

And blessed is He, indeed. See, I also believe that any terrible, awful, horrible thing that finds its way into my life also has goodness, growth, and gain close at heel. The goodness in my situation at that point was that my life got so much simpler and so much more manageable. Stripped of all the complications of that particular job, I am able to see how beautiful life can be when lived slowly and deliberately, without rushing or pressure or stress. Slowing down has the added benefit of actually giving your brain time to process what happened. Through my endless rumination on my situation at that church, I finally realized how much of myself I ended up giving away to the false idea and the false identity of who I thought I was supposed to be. All I knew about myself was what life and other people had taught me to be.

This is where radically accepting the truth enters the chat. In order to move forward, I had to come to terms with several realities:

1. For most of my adult life, I had been living a lie --though never realizing it.

2. I had wasted so many years of my life believing and bolstering this lie, and I would never get any of that time back.

3. I didn't actually know who I was or what I wanted out of life.

4. I had lost nearly everything attached to that old life, leaving me with nothing.

   
   

I won't attempt to describe how difficult this process of acceptance is. Suffice it to say, it's been almost a year and some days I don't feel like I've fully accepted everything yet --but I am so much farther down the path than I was.

It's so interesting how life works sometimes, and it's amazing how your perspective can change after some time has passed. For some of us, there will be a moment of extreme grace when we realize that the fact that we have lost everything is actually the opportunity we've been praying for all along. Your mindset suddenly changes from "I have nothing" to "I have nothing to lose" and you'll find yourself one day starting a podcast and throwing money you already don't have into a website you're not sure anyone will care about or visit --but who cares? I already have zero. I can only go up from here.

And that's the adventure we all want, isn't it? So often, we root for the underdog in our favorite stories and books and movies, and we urge them on with baited breath as we watch them face the unknown with courage instead of caution. Well, here I am. I'm the underdog in my own story, and now it's time to root for me.

-Martina