A quick launch

So I was getting ready to turn 49 and several months ago I determined this would be the perfect time — my 50th year — to Go! Be! Do! like never before: to push past limits, to conquer my fears, to get to the end of a year and feel like “I Lived.” And to share the adventure, the newfound freedom that’s bound to come, with every woman I know who is willing to go there with me — even if only by reading the tales of my fearless quests: but preferably by joining me.

Well, God had in mind for me a slightly different timeline. A month and a half before my birthday I was asked to speak on a panel at a women’s retreat put on by my church. The theme of the panel was our experience as women. That played out in questions about our identity: what we were taught as girls about being a woman, what we’ve learned in the meantime, our treatment by both men and women, our perceptions or experiences that have been redeemed, words we would say to ourselves as little girls if we could go back, and places where we’re still in need of healing. Pretty deep stuff!

I learned a lot in exploring these topics while preparing for the panel and was eager to share and excited to hear from other women on these subjects until… the last question. As I dug into the topic of places needing healing in my life, I felt God calling me to share a decades-long painful experience from the front of a room full of women — most of whom I’d never met before or with whom I had only exchanged a polite hello and some small talk. Terrifying.

So, I spent a solid 3 weeks alternately kicking and screaming, digging my heels in like a two-year-old and contemplating the idea that surely there was a way to low-key it: to share but not really share, to allude to the fact that I’d suffered some wounds while avoiding all specifics.

‘Twas not to be.

I knew with everything in me that I was being asked to speak because I had something to say that other women needed to hear. Whether it was one or thirty-six women, I didn’t know, but it didn’t matter. That one needed to hear it. And the entire group needed to be invited into a place of vulnerability, given permission to speak of painful, private things and to believe for healing for themselves as well.

So I did it. A week and a half before my birthday, before I was fully ramped-up to set out in fearless adventure, I got my bravery on and walked up to the stage hearing God’s voice saying “This is your launch. I’m catapulting you into new territory today. I am with you. I made you for this moment.”

The adventure has begun! In a different way and at a different time than I planned, but I’m guessing that’s a theme that will play out over this entire year — each of my plans that I’ve made so purposely, so intentionally, will have at least a twinge (if not a radical declaration) of “I really didn’t see that coming!”

But if the outcome is even a fraction of the freedom, the courage and the reclaimed identity that it was for me and for other women on the retreat… bring it on!

Wanna join me? In overcoming barriers that we inadvertently set up for ourselves? In doing things that scare the crap out of us, in order to discover how capable we are? In demolishing beliefs about ourselves that hold us back from becoming all we were meant to be? In cheering each other on as we reach for goals and dreams we thought were inaccessible?

Don’t worry, we’re not going for it all at once or even all the time. Some will be baby steps, some will be just-for-the-fun-of-it and act-like-a-kid-again endeavors. And some will be things we wouldn’t have ever attempted outside a community of other amazing women speaking courage into us.

Email me if you’re curious about what’s on the agenda for the year — I’ve begun a password protected calendar of the biggies (I’ll be filling in with some “funsies” as we go) and I’d love more than anything to include you!