five days.

Instead of paying attention in class today, I wrote enough blog posts for five days. You think I may be exaggerating, but I'm not. I've decided to write a series of posts about where my heart and my head have been for the past week. Are you ready to enter into the madness? 

I have to say, I'm a little confused about where to go from here. I don't know where to start. What to share. Who is reading. How to talk not only about myself, but encourage you to be thinking and questioning and wondering how this could possibly apply to your own life. I want this blog to be a place of inspiration and encouragement for the people reading, but I also want it to be a place where I tell the truth. The truth about who I am - in all my brokenness and sinfulness. And the bigger and more salient truth that God is graceful, and through Jesus, we are rescued and redeemed.

So here I am, ready to tell you the very messy truth about the past week, with so many questions about how to begin telling the story. What do I say? How much do I tell? Is there such a thing as an over-share in the blogosphere? Do I have to tell everything - even if it makes me look broken?

These are the questions that have been filling my mind all day. During class. On the bus. Driving to Glenview. While I've been thinking about how to tell the story, the answer, shockingly, came through the words of Shauna Niequist. And while I don't have her book in front of me to pull a quote from, I know there's a chapter where she writes about stories. The chapter, I believe, is titled, "Your story must be told." Your story must be told.

In the most simple and real sense, that has been the answer to my questions. How do I begin? Your story must be told. Start at the beginning. How much do I tell? Your story must be told. Tell everything. What if it doesn't end up completely tied-together? Your story must be told. It won't be perfect, but it's real and raw. What if everyone knows the good, the bad, and the ugly after reading it? Your story must be told. It's not your story anyway, Erin.

My story, it must be told. The really, really good parts that I am bursting to write about and the parts I don't want to share, because they expose my broken, sinful parts. Why blog about my life if I'm not willing to lay it all on the table? Besides, if I really think about it, I'm not just telling my story. God's story is intimately woven into mine (and into yours), and that deserves to be told. The whole story.

Over the next five days, I'll tell the story. I'll tell you about how I spent the majority of last week feeling uneasy and disconnected, like the people close to me should have been loving me a certain way, and they weren't meeting my expectations. I realized, after taking some space, that the reason I felt uneasy was rooted in a deep desire at the core of my being: I want to be loved. We all want to be loved. My friends weren't loving me the way I wanted to be loved, and if I look close enough, I can see that I haven't felt grounded in the gospel lately. I haven't felt connected to God - through prayer or scripture or quite time - and haven't been seeking His love for fulfillment. That's where the disconnect came in - I was not feeling loved by God and took that out on the people in my life, expecting them to fill that void. This, I realize, is a breeding ground for pride. In not feeling grounded and centered in Christ, sin crept in and allowed me to justify my feelings toward the people in my life. They are wrong and I am right, and I treated them out of that thinking. This realization of sin has made me feel entirely human, entirely broken. Ultimately, this connects me back to the truth that I am sweetly broken, wholly surrendered. I am human. I am broken, and I am redeemed. I am both wretched and beautiful. At my core, I am a ragamuffin; a sinner saved by grace. This is who I am. Messy. Broken. Incomplete. Beautiful. Redeemed. Loved. This is who I am, and I am choosing to make no more apologies.

Five days. In all honesty, I don't want to write about all of this, but the story must be told. I don't want to share the things I've learned about myself over the past week, but my hope in doing that - in sharing the ugly parts of the story - is that they will speak to the bigger story being told in us and around us everyday; God's story.