You, Do You

Ok, This is cool. I have a best friend in CA who is learning how to release the inner Diva or whatever. I absolutely love this chick. We plan to be friends for, like, the rest of our lives! I also love how she has been discovering discovery. Every week there is either an epiphany or a paradigm shift or something. I look forward to her phone calls just so I can hear about her new adventure (or two) for the week. Her life plays like one of those soap operas that get you hooked because they are so surreal to be true, yet the things that happen are true and you just want to write a book about her life so that it would be a bestseller and make you and her loads of money,no really! Anyway, the point of this post is something that she has been telling me that really is starting to make sense and I hope this isn't something she told me not to mention because I would really be screwed. She recently had an epiphany about her life and spirituality: you, do you. I have to give a little background before I move on: She just recently divorced her spouse of 7 years and divorced her church of 29 years. She felt spiritually abused by both of her former partners. It has been uphill for her quite a bit, but as of now I am watching her blossom into this person that has been struggling to bloom for years. I have no doubt in my mind that she is a follower of Jesus Christ. She loves Him though the heavens fall and Hell, Missouri's high waters rise! I also have no doubt that she loves her ex-husband, and that she would try again if he were willing, but I also know what she went through because I was there to listen and pray her through it. Her divorce is not what I want to dwell on though. My best friend has turned "doing her" into a science. She has chosen to become the person that she is destined to be and not what people want to make her. She admits now that it was always people that she used as her barometer to decide what she should do. She married because of what she thought people would think of her. She stayed in a congregation that only used her for their purposes because she was afraid of what people (who didn't really care about her) would say if she left. She held on to pseudo-friends and allowed them to use her because she thought she had to keep people around. She struggled with conforming to a set of social norms she didn't agree with (none of which had anything to do with being a Christian actually) and settling for mediocre relationships in her Faith life, social life and her marriage. She wrestled with the social consequences of leaving both her marriage and her church she attended faithfully her entire life. But now that she has made her choice and actually stepped out on faith she is finding a richness and fullness to her life that she has never had before. She admitted to me that for the first time in years she has had a solid night's sleep every night since she left. She had not been at peace and had real rest in her spirit for all those years. Now that she is following the you do you principle she has found out many things about herself that contributed to her problems: like she tended to choose friends for the sake of having friends, she was in the wrong church for her because it was all she knew, and that she settled for being with a body so that she wouldn't be alone. We both readily admit that being human is messy, but it is so much better than denying our humanness and striving for self made perfection. Now she allows God his proper place in her heart and is more open to His leading. Now that she is "doing her" in Jesus: she has had to cut some of those ties that choke her loose, she is choosing to be alone but not lonely in order to let God choose with whom to share her life, and that she really, really likes clothes and accessories. No seriously, it's chronic. It's almost serial. This is the same girl who recently went shopping for a white blouse to wear to an interview and somehow a dress, shoes, clutch purse, and matching jewelry followed her out of the mall in addition to the white shirt. This is also the girl that after finding the church home she wants to join needed a new outfit for the moment she goes up to the front to sit in the chair. You didn't hear me: She needs an outfit for the chair! She's a "hot mess" I tell you. But I admire her for finding her way. Yes, I was startled for a moment because many of her changes seemed so drastic and I wasn't so sure where they were going to lead her (Actually,I was pretty sure it was hell in a hand-basket), but all in all both she and I know she's in good hands. . .