Two years into attending the church it felt like home, the people were family, and I was excited about serving the Lord. They had become my community, the type of friendships that are there for the ups and the downs.
I’d been a kindergarten Sunday School teacher, an AWANA leader, and most recently and much to my own surprise a student ministry leader. I’d been faithfully attending and serving with my church family for 12 years.
So the changes that the Lord brought my way truly hit me like a ton of bricks. This was the year that student ministry would experience a change in leadership. The change itself wasn’t bad, in fact the Lord was so kind in who became the new student director. He, his wife, and their family are incredible and I know and love the Lord more today because I met and served alongside them.
Even good change is hard though.
Over the course of the next year I would find myself completely overwhelmed in ministry. Suddenly, I felt like I had no community to connect with and perhaps for the first time in my adult life lonely.
It was during this time as well that things about my church started to feel off, I couldn’t put my finger on it exactly but I didn’t agree with some of the things going on and this was an unsettling feeling.
2020 was the year we globally experienced COVID and the year the Lord forced me to rest. I had been overcommitting myself for years and it had caught up with me. I was stressed, crying often, but also unwilling to make changes. COVID felt like the Lord told me I didn’t have a choice but to slow down. I don’t take lightly the global experience that was COVID, it was horrific as a whole, but my personal experience was healing.
Coming out of 2020, while navigating Annie, I started having anxiety attacks. These weren’t new, I had been suffering from them since 2015 when my grandma passed. However by this time I had figured out their cadence, could quickly identify the trigger, and could usually pull myself out of it. These were different though, they were happening outside my normal ‘anxious’ window during the year, I couldn’t sort the trigger, and I couldn’t pull myself out of them. They were paralyzing. To be fair my attacks are very mild on the spectrum, but for me they weren’t insignificant.
In July, while Annie and I were in Pittsburgh, I texted a friend for her therapist’s name. I needed help and was finally ready to ask for it. I was processing a significant shift in a friendship, struggling with issues in the church, and increasing anxiety attacks.
Rue & Oak 