delight.

Have you ever done something so miserable you wanted to close your eyes as tight as possible in order to open them again and find yourself removed from that thing? Like your heart just pleaded with you to stop doing this miserable thing you were doing?

I did that once.

I moved to Kansas City.

You know how that story goes. When we moved here 5 years ago I just didn't get it. I mean, I got it. But in my heart I didn't get it. I knew it made smart financial and career sense, but it didn't make sense to leave behind my sister who was pregnant with her first child, my beautiful niece, my wonderful family, my lifelong friends and the security of a place that grew me into an adult. Or at least into the adult I was at the time. A 20 year old pre-adult. It just didn't make sense. And for the first 18 months that we lived here I grieved that loss. I was sad. And confused. And worried. And bored.

Now 5 years later we're moving back to Nampa. 5 years, changed careers, promotions, our first home, a community, and a really sweet son later.

And somehow I'm grieving this loss too.

In the last few weeks I've been thinking how to put words to the things that God has given me in the last 5 years. I've tried to fully realize what moving to Kansas City has done in my life. And I think I've come to understand that moving here allowed me to see who I really was. That has been a true gift. I suppose growing up in the same place my whole life made it hard to break away from things and circumstances in my past that formed my identity. I don't doubt that the Lord would have broken through in my life had we stayed in Nampa, but moving to KC seemed to just shatter all those barriers at once. Those barriers between what the world had told me I was and the truth that Jesus had for me.

That truth was (and is) that the Lord delights in me.

He delights in me. I wish I had written down all the times in the last 3 years since we started going to The Gathering that someone had a word for me that involved the Lord delighting in me. One time, my friend Amy had a picture for me of me in a field with light (maybe fireflies) all around me and she just felt like the Lord was saying He was so delighted with me. Things like words and pictures from Jesus felt really silly to me when we first started going to the The Gathering, but as we went along our journey with this community it became evident that these were treasures that the Lord was giving us. I think we miss out on a whole lot that God wants to speak into our lives when we don't open our hearts to hear from him and when we don't share that Good News when we do hear it. But several times throughout the last few years people used this word "delightful" to describe me. I think I probably told the first few who said that to me that they were crazy and they had it all wrong. No one had every described me as delightful before and I figured they probably had their wires crossed with someone who just looked like me. Certainly I was not the one to whom they were referring. But apparently I was. Apparently, I'm delightful. I really thought it was a joke at first. And then I started to realize that this was something that God had for me. A breakthrough of who I was to Him.

It didn't happen all at once, but I as I've grown into this community I have also grown into the reality that I am someone that Jesus delights in. That I have so much value to Him that it's the kind of smiling that you just can't stop because through and through you are so pleased. Delight is deep to me. It's like Joy. Delight feels like a condition of the soul - something that can't be shaken. It's not a fleeting feeling. I don't know why I've struggled with my self-worth so much in life, but I have and I still do. So to be reminded that my worth to Jesus is deep, it rich and it is delightful is just everything I ever needed. I crave deep roots. I crave worth. And in one word Jesus gave that to me.

My hope is that going back to Nampa won't be the end of this. My hope is that I can learn what it's like to feel delighted in in that community too. To be honest, I'm nervous! I'm nervous this identity I've found will come crashing to the ground and I'll be back to the place I started when I left Idaho. But my hope is that God is WAY bigger than that. And He is already laying a path ahead of us for really great, delightful things to come.

The list is long and it's mostly filled with people's names of the things that I'm going to miss in Kansas City. It's not time to say goodbye yet, but I wanted to say thank you for being the avenues to lead me to this point. Thank you for giving me a reason to be sad to leave. And thank you for giving me a reason to visit often.