On living life more abundantly | To The Church

I’ve done a lot of writing this year. Unfortunately, for you, most of it was not here, but fortunately for me, as I needed to flesh out a lot of things in my journal and some things needed to manifest as songs.

Writing and making music have been the only thing I have ever really wanted to do since I was a child. They give me the greatest creative release and it’s where I feel most like myself.

I often struggle, teeter on the line of what and when I should share my heart, in song or on paper. There is always so much I am thinking and even more I want to say. Because I have such a complicated relationship with social media, finding the place to share is difficult. I worry about how it will be received, how people will view me, and what effect my truth and opinions will have on the ones I love most. That’s why I LOVE this place. It’s social enough for me to share, but without the added pressure. It’s an open door for me to always come through and just be me.

It’s not natural for me to care so much what others think. I’ve always been wild that way. Unfiltered and free. Although I’ve mastered a level of necessary discretion, the core of me is still wild. I’m learning that a part of adulting is learning when and where to let the child in me free.

Life requires adults, living requires children.

I started therapy, a little over a month ago. I’ve been discovering that the lines of adulthood and childhood for me were blurred at around 15. Life required me to become an adult, make adult decisions, and think about my life as the adult version of me a lot quicker than most. Thankfully, no abuse caused this sudden switch, it was just life. Showing me early that I needed to be alert, aware, and in control to have the life I wanted.

I took to my new role immediately. Almost as if there was an inner knowing that I had to step up. Although I am the youngest of 3 I’ve always possessed a level of self awareness and maturity beyond my natural age. I don’t share this as a flex, but simply as something to note as you get to know me through my writing and music.

I shared with my therapist that at 15 I accepted that no one was coming, and that I needed to draw on everything I’d learned about God and lean on my assurance within Him through my personal relationship with Him. People often struggle with how much of God children can truly glean in church; I say don’t underestimate the minds and receptiveness of children. At 12 I received the Holy Spirit and by 15 I was living thousands of miles away from my parents with no real adult supervision. It was my consciousness of God’s desire and requirements for me that grounded me when I was technically free fly about the city to do and be whatever my heart desired.

I learned to survive, because at 15 with no real adult supervision that’s all you can really do. Survive. I knew clearly what I wanted and that eventually I wanted, no, needed to step off the treadmill of survival and walk leisurely into a thriving life. Over the years there have been so many times when I slowed the pace, thinking I’d stepped off the treadmill completely, only to realize I was still on it.

Breaking the pattern of surviving has been a hard one. The truth is I’d gotten comfortable there. I knew the routine and I knew how to protect me. I was good at it. The comfort of survival’s familiarity played mind games on me many times. I almost believed that this was living. Behind the walls of a fortress I built to protect and defend the creative, wild, unfiltered, free me.

This year, a cloud of grief taught me that surviving is not the life more abundantly Yah intended for us. Although a natural, human emotion, grief is not meant to me confronted and processed alone. It wasn’t meant to be survived only. To many of us insist on surviving our way through emotions like grief, anger, and sadness. Doing so, we forfeit God’s promises of abundance. My therapist is helping me to change my perspective on my grief, and pain by choosing peace.

When she told me to choose peace I was almost offended, as it was such a foreign concept. It sounded like accepting the bad and the fact that there was nothing I could do about it. Instead, The Most High revealed to me that choosing peace was practicing gratitude. Gratefulness for what was, and what is to come. I often self soothe through nostalgia, things like cartoons and other things from my childhood that encourage me to let my imagination run free again. Choosing peace, practicing gratitude, and allowing my mind to roll back to the good revive me, causing me to live when, if I can be honest, grief was calling me to death.

As a woman I’ve learned to put away childish things to make the best decisions for me and the ones I love. But as a forever child of The Most High, willfully acknowledging my desperate need for Yah, I am learning to live abundantly. Choosing peace, choosing God, through all of life’s vicissitudes is the life more abundantly promised in John 10:10. It’s easy and sometimes comforting to settle in pain. But life isn’t always easy right?

Life requires the mature, adult decision to choose to live in peace. Living is acknowledging that childlike need that reminds us we can’t do it without God. It’s a delicate dance that I think I’m finally learning the rhythm to. Yay me!

What is your idea of life more abundantly? Let me know below.

Love, Jenise La Vonne 💕