Happy Monday from Southern California!! Hope you had a fabulous weekend!!

I am super stoked for you to meet today’s contributor …. She is a dynamic leader, authentic, hilarious & just fun to be around!! I know you will be encouraged by her post!

Meet Lee-Anne!!

You learn a lot from using people’s showers! Not like the public showers in the gym, the personal ones..the ones that have pink razors, next to Old Spice shampoo..the ones where someone’s hair didn’t make it all the way down the drain…the little pink luffa next to the squeegee. I should know. We bought a new house and I made one little comment about knocking out a wall in the kitchen to open it up. Two months later and most of my house is stripped to the studs and long story short no hot water for two weeks…with no clear end date in sight. Did I mention that I have a husband and two girls age 4 and 6? So the Allmans have been what we like to call ‘Glamping’ (glamorous camping) in a construction zone for 2 weeks with no hot water…..but I digress! Our entire family has showered and bathed in multiple friends home facilities over the last 2 weeks…any engagement has seen us arrive with our mobile shower bag and a load of laundry that I conveniently pop in while we are chatting or eating. Thus the observation on people’s showers.
You see in my 20’s I thought that being brave was all the things I could stare down and conquor…..backpacking through Africa and Indonesia for a year..learning how to ride a Honda 750 motorcylce and then traveling alone across country with a tent and cigars, cliff jumps, car surfing etc. etc. But the season of getting married and having kids, taught me that courage can look so very different. Accepting the limits…that I am going to have a CPS moment (as my friend says) if I don’t reach out to someone and ask for help; being the mom who hasn’t showered in a few days and whose car smells like old goldfish crackers and not fearing the comparison or judgment. It meant not working out for a few years and trying to be brave enough to not compare this unfamiliar body or be ‘ugly’ to myself. A million tiny decisions that certainly never plagued the woman that I was…the 20 something year old version . As I have moved into my 40’s I have realized, with gratitude, that God continues to shape my definition of courage or ‘living brave.’ Do you know what the most repeated commandment in the entire Bible is? Don’t steal? Love everyone? Don’t Judge? Nope! Most repeated commandment is this ‘Don’t be afraid! Think there might be something in that? A wise person once said ‘We don’t like fear but it’s the air that we breathe’. He knew! It’s at the root of almost every bad thing….So yes – COURAGE…LIVE BRAVE! And with 40 comes this fresh understanding that the opposite of fear is not courage, the opposite of fear is faith.
There is a story in the Bible about Jesus and his friends in a boat during a storm…the guys think they are going to die and Jesus is sleeping right through it. Eventually they have had it…they wake him up and say’ Don’t you care if we drown’. He wakes up and says to them ‘Why are you afraid? and straight after that ‘ O you of little faith’. His response is not ‘you should have been more brave’ but rather, ‘you lack faith’. Could it be that the very bravest act of all, might be letting go of control? This would mean accepting that I cant control it, that I will probably fail but believing that there is a God who loves me, and loving Him and loving others might be one of the bravest things I ever do?
Which brings me back to other people’s showers, bathing in the pool and using other people’s laundry. Accepting an offer to impose on someone else’s personal shower space is humbling and feels just a little bit brave. I am dying to the self sufficiency, I am dying to the need to control and in my little world I am being reminded that my greatest act of living brave is to accept the love of my Creator and to pour out that love in return.