I Am Enough, or in this case Enneanough!

For as long as I can remember there have been 3 questions that have consistently roamed in my thoughts:

1)       Who am I?

2)       What is my purpose?

3)       Why can’t I seem to be like everyone else?

The who am I question was most easily made sense of in role playing. I knew the things I wanted to do and I knew over time what that was supposed to look like. Therefore, as a Mom I knew who I wanted to be, as a wife I knew who I wanted to be and as a child of God, a daughter of the King I knew what I was supposed to believe and what I was supposed to say. I believed the truth of God’s word, but honestly had not been transformed by those truths. My life to many looked like one of fairytales as a married adult woman with two kids. I had pursued and completed educational benchmarks, I had courted and married the man of my dreams, and I was living what was for me the ultimate role of being a stay-at-home Mom. However, I deep down knew that something was missing. A disconnect between my actual life and my felt life. Just like any good façade this one began to crack. I reached what I call a pivot point, a time in my life where my old coping mechanisms and role playing had ran it’s course. I knew I either had to dig deep and address these feelings of disconnect or chance spending the rest of my life this side of heaven not really tapped into the abundant life I had been blessed with. At this point in my life the Lord had already begun to show me that my identity had been lost at a very young age, or more accurately never truly developed. He began by bringing me back to the beginning, the place where my parents named me and the significance of that name. Many of you met me and have known me as Tina. This is the name my family of origin calls me and most of my extended family, with the exception of two Aunts. Unfortunately for me there is pain attached to that name, in that it came with a sing songy nickname….. Teen Teen the mean mean. This was the explanation I was given when I asked why my name had went from Sonja to Tina early in my teen years. This explanation at the time was just added to the narrative of what had been my childhood. I was the “hard kid” the “mean kid”, the one who needed to be controlled, tamed and disciplined. It was an embodied understanding I had of who I was, with no real understanding of who I was meant to be. I knew I had a lot of feelings, many of them so big I didn’t quite know how to make sense of them myself. I felt very very alone, and honestly like everything about me was bad. The best way I knew how to cope with those feelings was to disconnect from them. Focus on being the best kid I possibly could and ignore the feelings, sort of like the song Let It Go from Frozen.

“Don’t let them In”

“Don’t let them see”

“Be the good girl you always have to be”

“Conceal”

“Don’t feel”

“Don’t let them know”

Don’t feel, that became my life mantra, at least that was what I strived for. Unfortunately that was not a mindset that blessed marriage or any relationship for that matter. Anytime conflict would arise my internal dialogue was one of protect, turn off, show up, but don’t invest. A mindset that provided protection in one season of life was proving not to be fruitful for my current season of life. God began to show me how He was going to reveal to me the identity He planned. He spoke to me directly through the stories of Peter and Paul in the Bible. He reminded me that He changed their names and in doing so He changed their purpose and destiny. Embrace the name Sonja(meaning wisdom) and Aretina(meaning virtue) this is the name I gave you. This for me was the beginning. It gave me clarity and hope. It began the journey that was understanding my purpose. I am so grateful for this space and sharing with you the beginning of the journey that has become I Am Enneanough. Please check in next week when I share what God has shown me about purpose.