Category: The Journey

The New Rules of Community

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The funny thing about new experiences is that you’ve never had them before.

Our experiences build up and we start to think, “I know what I am doing.” But then one day, poof, you encounter something totally different and new.

Recently for me, this newest experience is community after college.

I thought if I had learned anything in college, it was how to do community. You just roll up to the event being hosted so that you can make friends with people with similar interests, say “we should get coffee sometime”, and then boom: one million best friends.

Turns out that isn’t how the world works. First of all, people are older than you and younger than you. They have jobs that are nothing like yours. They have different backgrounds and beliefs. They can have a lot in common with you but they can also be literally grandparents. And suddenly, all of these people are a part of your community.

And you have no idea what to do with that.

Can I trust you with my hurts? Can I be of any help to you in your struggles? Do I have anything to contribute to your life? Will I be rejected after I have invested in you or will I be rejected if I don’t invest in your life?

The clear, concise rules of community were stripped away and instead you are left with a host of what if’s and how to’s. And that can be really scary. When I found myself in that place, half of my heart said, “just give up, you can make it if you stick to the surface. Keep your cards close and play what you have to.”

But that isn’t what God had intended for us. Over and over I heard, “Loneliness is a gift that calls us back into community” or “Press into these relationships and seek opportunities for vulnerability.”

I had preached words like these before to people. I have written blogs about vulnerability and belonging. So why has it been so hard for me to be intentional and be myself? Why was it so different this time?

I think ultimately, I couldn’t place myself and when I couldn’t place myself, I thought the community didn’t have the room for me. I was isolating myself before I had the chance to be isolated. I wasn’t willing to give it time to organically grow either. I was desperate for those deep, three year friendships three weeks in. In case you were wondering, that is impossible.

Luckily, God didn’t let me fall into a trap of my own self-doubt and insecurity. Starting at work, I grew into the community with my co-workers. Sure they valued me as a part of the team, but they loved me too. That is rare. That is a big deal. And I love them too. Deeply. Just like I had with my roommates and committee members. I got to do life forty hours a week with people I love. It is something I won’t take for granted.

Then I had a foundation I could build from. And it gets a little easier once you know you can make it out there. So now I have to keep risking awkward silences and small talk to get to the bigger, deeper connection.

The way I see it, we are all human beings. Whether we admit it or not, we are all afraid of the same rejection and disappointment. But we have the opportunity to step out and do as Christ commanded us, love God and love our neighbor. When we live in accordance to God’s will – and God wants us to love and live in community – He will help us get through the unknown and connect our hearts. You can endure the “get to know you” because it’s the only way to become fully known.

So brothers and sisters, as we keep on living in this crazy world, let’s trust God in the process. Pressing in when things get hard, and giving thanks when things are easy.

Chapter 2: Not a Horror Story After All

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Unknowingly, I have operated under the assumption that if my life after graduation was different it automatically meant that it was bad. File that under incredibly dumb things that I believed as a twenty-something.

I had a really hard time trusting that I was where I was supposed to be. Everything changed. I felt alone, I was scared, and I could not stop comparing myself. It felt like everyone else was so satisfied, progressing so smoothly. I felt fragmented, like I had lost my sense of belonging.

But I was in a chapter that I could not leave and could not skip. I prayed for gratitude. I prayed for patience. I even prayed for change. One of the major issues I was running into was that things had changed, and I assumed that was a loss.

My parents had told me a hundred times while I was in school that college was “not real life”. I had completely rejected that statement like any kid who knows way more than their parents would. How could it not be real life if I was living it?

When January came so did the culture shock of living in Cleveland without Lee. I didn’t realize how celebrated I had felt as a Lee student. To me, Lee students were heroes. I stepped off my pedestal and into reality.  (Cue existential crisis #1)

After losing my identity, I lost another portion of college life. Conveniently having a thousand friends. I didn’t realize how easy it was to have so many friends in college.  Sure, you are busy in school, but more often than not, you are doing whatever you have to do with your best friend by your side. Now I had a schedule unlike any of the people that I had previously spent all day, everyday with. Community looked completely different when the vast majority of my time was spent alone. (Cue existential crisis #2)

And then there was school. Minus the four years I spent developing basic human functions like walking and talking, I had been a student. To end that chapter – essentially the only thing I had ever known – was confusing. Measuring success in school was as easy as a GPA. The course of correction was simple enough. As a life-long perfectionist I was very comfortable with this system. I knew when I was smart, hard-working, and capable of success. And then, poof. No more grades. What was the new measure of success? Was it food on the table? Money? Hours spent in prayer? Books I had read? (Cue existential crisis #3)

After about four months of everything from “I’m okay” to “oh wait am I literally dying” moments I started to think about what my parents had said. I knew that my college experience was indeed real life, but it was nothing like what I could expect the rest of my life to look like. The majority of the world does not live the way college students do (thank God).

People don’t fit neatly into categories.

Friendships and love require lots of hard work and rarely come naturally.

Success is different to every person, you will never look successful to every person you encounter.

The “real world” is different. It is a change. It feels nothing like all of the life experience you have ever had. This unknown is hard to get used to and at first feels a lot like failure and loss and all of the bad things you fear. But this change is just that, different.

Transitions will come through out your entire life. Navigating the newness of marriage and parenthood and retirement and every other chapter can easily catch us off guard when different = bad. Learning who you are in each chapter comes back to knowing who you are in Christ. The changing chapters will never out weigh the importance of following God. We can’t predict our stories, but we can know that the Author has our best ending already written.

We can never know the bigger picture in this life, yet somehow, we have to know it is so much more important than this moment. Faith is what gives us the power to conquer fear. God moves in transition. Count on it.

What are you doing with your life?

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So I graduated from college. You know what that means… I get asked 278,342 times a day what I am doing with my life.

Every time I get asked that I want to turn to sand and blow away in the wind. Or shake the person and ask them what they are doing with their life. I want to say several different things like, “having this conversation with you” or “if I told you I would have to kill you.”

But the reality is that right now, I work in retail. At first, I was really ashamed. It isn’t fair to be ashamed of my job, great people – thousands of people, have jobs exactly like mine. When the question inevitably pops up in conversation, I would feel like I was letting the interviewer down, even if they were a complete stranger. I felt like everyone expected me to do something really great right away. After all, not everyone graduates from college at 20. Surely, if anyone was going to start off as a CEO right away it would be me.

Friends, family, that right there is some nasty, toxic pride. In a way, I think God very intentionally placed me where I am right now because if I am being honest, I have let people judge me by my performance since day one. It worked for a long time, too. You could ask me about what was going on or how I was and I could provide a three minute explanation of how busy I was with so many great things.

I was doing great things, but too often, for the wrong reason.

I thought the only way that I could serve God was if I did everything, perfectly. Jesus would have gotten the internship with the non-profit that saves babies right? He would have immediately been promoted to Director? He would still sleep eight hours and get coffee with his friends and followed the Whole 30?

First of all, no.

True, Jesus did amazing things, but his life wasn’t so extraordinary that the kings felt inferior compared to his resumé. (He was also the perfect son of God and I am the daughter of a navy nuke guy.) Jesus served God by the way he lived. 

He took time for people, he prayed, he taught, he celebrated others, he made time for family and disciples. He did not compare himself, brag about miracles, turn loving others into a start-up with a cool logo, forget about his Father.

Jesus and his disciples model a life that reminds us that fisherman or tax collector, the most important thing about your life is how you are living it. That is something I missed in my busy-all-star-greatness. I am not saying that I was an all-together garbage person the past three years, but there was an undue anxiety to prove myself as a worthy servant of Christ.

Jarod Noel said at the Focus conference when we humble ourselves in our communities, we are able to focus on God’s will being done instead of whether or not God is using us. Humility doesn’t keep score. Along that same line, Tim Keller said in Every Good Endeavor, understanding work as being the hands and feet of Jesus “elevates the purpose of work from making a living to loving our neighbor and at the same time releases us from the crushing burden of working primarily to prove ourselves.”

Do I need to say that again? Understanding work as being the hands and feet of Jesus releases us from the crushing burden of working primarily to prove ourselves. 

When we frame work that way, it becomes clear that every detail of our ordinary lives adds up, and should ultimately paint a much bigger picture. Work proves that Jesus loves our neighbor, not that we can do great things. We then have the opportunity to make room in our lives for the pieces that the world may not value as much as our Creator does. Learning these lessons in my post-grad season may not have done much for my resumé, but has helped heal me and brought me a new peace I am excited to take into the next season.

I have hope that God does have a bigger plan for my life than the answers I can give you right now. I hope that He will make me a teacher and wife and aunt and mother and bridesmaid and secretary and so many other things. But through it all, it is so important that I remember the most important title I can ever adorn is “loved daughter of the Heavenly Father.” The works I carry out due to my faith in God are the most important and most valuable.

Type Two: Importance and Belonging

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Hi, my name is Halle Camilleri and according to the enneagram I have a type 2 personality.

I took this test after hearing a lot about it from my friends. When I read my results I got wrecked (If you don’t know what “wrecked” means, think of having a significant emotional awakening). The first thing I read said:

  • Basic Fear: Of being unwanted, unworthy of being loved
  • Basic Desire: To feel loved

What. Have you been reading my prayer journal? It was the bottom line I had been searching for in counseling, books, prayer, you name it. To feel loved. The fear of not being worthy. My big learning experience in college was learning to love others for the purpose of loving others. Not to be loved in return. Not to be recognized as a loving person. Just to love.

Well it turns out this is an entire personality type and as I went further into my research, many of my friends and family struggle with exactly the same thing. Type two people think the most valuable way to use their time is by helping others and making them feel loved. However, it can be really difficult to accept the same love and aid from others. It is easy to be graceful to others, but hard to show yourself grace.

Type twos can be very healthy, loving, giving people. They feel validated by being needed and purposeful in a role of service. They are the “mom” of the friend group. However, the shadow side of type twos is the secret pride, self-deception, and over-involvement in the lives of others.

Bingo.

The exact flaw I had spent my entire life grappling with. The thing about my mom, my brother, my friends, that we all try so desperately to either keep hidden or justify. But there was the answer. We want to be loved, we make ourselves needed, and we can either act in humility with no strings attached or we can grow to resent those we serve when they don’t love us back in a way that helps us cope with our fear of being un-needed.

I needed a minute.

Being human is not one of my favorite attributes of myself but if there is anything I have learned over the past few years, it is that when we acknowledge our struggles and work to be vulnerable to overcome them, we can live transparently in our community. My personality requires that I question my motives. I have to watch my thought process in order to track with my emotional well-being and keep my pride in check.

Pride is dangerous. It is 100% true that everyone needs to be loved and feel like they matter. But there is a difference between belonging and feeling important. Belonging is having a place where you are loved and cared for. Being important is seeking recognition and accomplishment in order to gain a reputation for your “selflessness”. Belonging brings healing, being important causes pain and insecurity.

Love is selfless. There are no strings attached. Type two people can love people so well but we have to be aware and intentional of the tendency to replace belonging with pride. Giving isn’t about receiving. Love isn’t about being recognized.

Sleeping at Last recently released a single about the type two personality. The words have given me so much peace and better understanding about how my own heart works. I highly recommend that you take the test for yourself and do some research. Learning how you relate and validate yourself helps us to build healthy habits. I don’t have all the answers, and I promise I never will, but I can keep investigating and working to help us better understand one another.

Love and life are precious God-given gifts. I want to be able to share mine with all of you the best ways I can.

Lost Plans

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The person I thought I would become is very different from the person I am.

When I sent my application into Lee University I imagined where I would be in the Fall of 2017. I would be engaged. I would be working, doing whatever it is that people do in PR. I would have been involved in a few areas of campus. My friend group from summer honors would hang out together every week, just as tight knit as we were during those two weeks. I would have made it through the best two years of my life, learning and growing into this incredible person. You know, safely following God deeper than my feet could ever wander (can I get an amen?).

I loved my plan, my dreams. I prayed that God would grant me my prayers for this incredible life changing experience.

But, wait a minute, with all of these safety nets and sources of validation, where was the life change?

If you ever read anything from my old blog you know that going into Lee I hard-core struggled to go day-to-day without knowing the purpose of my life. I have been frustrated over and over by unanswered prayers and all of those situations that force me to be still and know that He is God. Every encounter was a quick, harsh, judgement. Yes, this is it. My best friend, my new roommate, my first love, my college, my major, my career. This is the answered prayer, right? I was a one and done kind of gal.

Entering into relationships and commitment, I didn’t question my own judgement. I followed open doors, just hoping that these were the doors that would lead me to the right destination. There was rarely “prayerful consideration”. There was mostly “yes”.

Now, where did that get me? Honestly, in a lot of cases, into some really great places. The issue came about when I started to lose myself to the situation I had entered myself into. I took on identities based on learning experiences. Instead of seeing a path, I set up camp, hoping that the outside world would just let me be. I didn’t want the plan to change.

But when this April hit, I realized that my time was running out. The identities and titles were stripped away. All of my “God-given-masks” were lifted. It was me, God, and a brand new season.

And I was crushed.

It hit me that I was still on a journey. Lee had not been the final destination. As soon as the plans changed I threw my hands up, saying I don’t know if I can do this. 

One of the best things that has ever happened to me was having my comfort stripped away.

As I pushed further and further to try to find myself again, I was finally forced to look outside of myself. I had to cling to my family and my community. I had to ask God the hard questions. I had to seek His peace. I had to be broken enough to ask Him to put me back together.

I’ve learned that my belonging can’t come from anything I can do. My belonging can’t come from anything I can be.

My sense of self, my purpose, must always be to love God and know him more. Learning that I can never satisfy myself, that I won’t meet my expectations, I won’t follow my own plan, taught me that the only thing that will ever satisfy me is looking at my life the way that God does.

Everything is temporary, my brothers and sisters. We have nothing to cling to. No expectations for tomorrow. All we can do is be grateful for everything given to us. The plan is to follow Him with everything we can. Our plan should never to be to make a name for ourselves. I want your favorite part about me to be how I earnestly seek after the Lord.

So I am done writing my own plans and giving myself directions. I won’t let you or myself or anyone else decide who I should be. When I became who I wanted to be, that was the problem. I made it about the opinions of anyone other than God.

I am so, so glad that He has reminded me for the 32,473,947,985th time that He is all I need.