It has been a year since Hillsong conference already. It feels like it hasn’t been that long, but then also feels like so much has happened since then.
I love conference time, I'm always excited to just be there and always, without fail, I am floored by what we are a part of.
Last year was the same, but last year was also incredibly hard for me.
I remember not so much looking forward to conference.
I remember feeling like I should be excited, but I was not.
I remember the songs that we would sing in that season.
Songs that said "oh praise His name forever more, for endless days we will sing Your praise"
And
"For all my days in Your shadow I will remain, oh I could stay here forever"
I can still feel how incredibly difficult it became for me to sing out those words.
Not because they were not true, but because they did not feel true for me in that season.
It seemed like every song we sang had the words forever in them, every verse I read talked about it and preachers would preach and in some way my attention was drawn to it.
Without going into too much irrelevant detail,
I'd gotten to a point where I was just not sure I wanted forever, at least not like it was then.
I can so clearly remember saying to God "I do not want a forever if it's like this"
Which is hard to admit when as Christians we look forward to living out our days with God, in his house and there is so much focus on our calling right?
The thing was that from my teens I'd struggled on and off with depression and anxiety and basically just how my emotions affected the way I lived.
I had come so far with it and gotten to a point where I was master over them... well, mostly.
Until I stepped into my calling.
From the outside I'd gotten my dream! I'd wanted to be a foster Mum for so long and I believed, prayed and, of course, took all the steps to get there.
The first few weeks were fine, but obviously it was a major life change and so I was stressed.
According to my Doctor, this triggered a major stress reaction in my body and made me actually, really physically ill. Basically my adrenal system, or something or other went crazy. I'd honestly never felt that sick for such a long time in my entire life.
But this was everything I had ever wanted! I knew without a doubt that this is what I was meant to do.
I finally had my dream! I had prayed for every single thing and detail of what I was living in, so from the outside even to my own eyes everything looked like it was going so well, and it was.
So I should have felt like that right?
I'm furiously typing because I am still so mad about how much joy was robbed at a time which should have been filled with joy and praise.
Instead I struggled with how I felt and I was ashamed of how I felt, so I did not talk about it and I got to conference and I was beyond done with it. I kind of had the mindset that this was going to happen every time I got stressed or something hard was going on in my world. I did not want to keep ending up in the same place over and over again. That is not the kind of forever I wanted.
This was not at all what I wanted. Physically it was everything, but by this point the emotional cost was becoming too great.
I struggled to just keep myself together during conference. I had stuff to do so physically it was fine, but emotionally I was unravelling at a painfully slow pace. Singing those words was like drowning in them because they felt so empty (I could not be more dramatic I know).
It got to the last night and while God had spoken to me and I'd served him "well" that week, I was almost ready to just go home.
By a fluke I stayed and got a seat for the last worship night.
The entire time I still had the thought that I could not do a forever if this is what it was going to be like for me.
It took 4 words to completely undo me and if that's all God said the entire conference it would have been more then enough.
The songs started and I started to speak them out and it was still hard for me to believe them.
I don't remember the exact song or moment, but I remember I was already basically crying more then I was singing. I looked around at the crowd and the band in worship and I remember God so clearly saying "This is your forever"
It wasn’t about the lights and crowd and the hype, but the genuine love for God and being in the house of God forever serving Him. It does not seem like that much of a big deal and also probably seems obvious, but until that point I had not actually grasped it.
My crying because it was hard to sing turned into sobbing, maybe out of thankfulness or shock or surrender.
Because the life that I saw and did not want was not actually the life He intended for me.
Because what He had wanted to show me was so much bigger if I'd looked to Him and not at how I felt.
We hear the best is yet to come on a weekly basis, if not more, but when stuff is actually really hard, do we believe that with our entire heart?
It's not wishful thinking or being hopeful that our life will turn out ok.
It's believing with every single part of you that God has your back and that the future He has for you is so much greater then you can ever imagine it to be.
xx
