What If We Stop Pretending to Have It All Together?

Sometimes my life feels like a mess. Sometimes it feels like people see me and all they see is a girl having absolutely no idea what she’s doing. And I guess to some capacity they’re right. It is true that I don’t have it all together! It’s true that I change my mind 24/7. That some days it takes me 30 minutes to decide what to eat for lunch. That I have so many dreams that thinking about them gives me a headache because I get overwhelmed with the fear of not fulfilling any of them.

Sometimes it feels like I’m a tiny boat in the middle of the ocean. Like I’m just floating around and changing directions as quickly as the wind does. Sometimes I feel pressure from myself or people around me to just figure it out. But my question to that is, at what point do I have it “figured out?” Do you have it figured out? Because I see a lot of people doing the normal “I have my life together” things. Going to college, having a career, getting married, having babies, etc. Is that our standard of having life together? Is that really what fulfillment looks like? Being in student debt and working a 9-5 office job that you hate? I’m sorry but I just don’t think that’s it! And I refuse to be a person who chases fulfillment in things that I know will never actually satisfy me. After letting my brain spiral for a bit, I realize that though I may be a boat in the ocean, I am not one without an anchor. That though on the surface it looks like I’m just kinda floating, I’m actually deeply deeply anchored, that there’s only so far I can float. If you didn’t already realize this, in my metaphor God is the anchor.

Through the discipleship program that I’m currently in, I’ve learned that it really doesn’t matter what I look like from the outside, that people’s perception of me doesn’t actually get to say anything about who I am! It doesn’t matter if the whole entire world views me as a little boat lost in the middle of the sea with no real direction, because I know that I actually have a deep anchor in the Lord and in His love for me. That He spoke me into existence, created me in His image, and then sent His son to die for me just so that I could know Him. That He has uniquely created me and given me gifts with intent and purpose.

I know that my time here on earth is short. It would be so sad if I were to waste this little life of mine running after the idea of “having it all together” when, if people were to look themselves in the mirror, I don’t know that anybody would be able to confidently say that they have their life figured out. So here I am, crying out for us to stop chasing after this false reality of “having it together.” It’s not too late to shift gears. To turn around and actually start running towards life instead of just away from death. To trust that your anchor will never let you drift too far. What would happen if we just threw the world’s standard out the window and operated in the freedom that is already ours to have? People are scared of not having life figured out, but what a shame it would be to “have it all together.” What a shame it would be to miss the point of it, to put value in all of the things that really don’t matter at all. Isn’t it funny how we tend to give the most amount of weight to the things that matter the least?