Hi! My name is Lauren and I am currently living in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Instead of boring you with the mundane details of my life, I want to tell you about how I found my identity and purpose. It’s quite simple really—Jesus.
I grew up in a small town around Jackson, Michigan in a Christian home. Both of my parents grew up believing in Jesus, but it was a private matter. It wasn’t something you really talked about. That carried over into my childhood. We went to church on Sunday and prayed before meals, but there were very few conversations about God and who He is. I said I believed in God, and I had probably heard the Gospel hundreds of times, but I would not have been able to recite it if asked.
As I got older, church and praying before meals grew irritating. I wanted to sleep in on Sundays or see my friends. Honestly, I would have rather done anything other than go to church. It was a boring obligation that I was none to happy to have to oblige.
I became angry for no reason. I was a recluse who spent most of my time in my bed reading or staring at my phone. I disliked most people and rarely wanted to leave my house. I was horribly insecure and struggled with anxiety. I was also never content. I was always looking forward to the next thing. For example, I never liked school. While I was in high school, my thought process was that if I could just get to college, “it” would be better. This mindset was consistent in pretty much every aspect of my life. This is jumping ahead a bit but as I look back at who I used to be, I can’t imagine how anyone would have wanted to be around me.
When I went away to college, that obligation disappeared. I no longer had my parents around to drag me to church, so I was excited at the idea of being able to use my Sunday mornings however I pleased. To my surprise, I still felt the obligation. It felt like I needed to at least be doing something because that’s what Christian’s do.
A year prior to this, my twin sister had truly given her life to the Lord. She had her own encounter with Him and was pursuing Him the best way she knew how. We were at the same university and she had started a Bible study with some of her friends. She basically told me I needed to join and while I didn’t really want to, it checked that box for me of doing “something Christian”. I attended for three years, but it was very similar to when I went to church as a kid: I showed up, did what I needed to do, then left forgetting what I had just read or heard. We even would make goals according to what we had read or discussed and each week when I was asked about how the goal had gone, my answer was usually “Dang it, I forgot. I will do better next week.” Big shocker, I rarely ever did any better. That is until the end of 2020.
I graduated in December of 2020, so that last fall semester was a big one for me. Calling back to that discontent mindset, I was excited because I was about to be completely done with school. I was about to graduate and have a full time job and “it” would be better. The funny thing is, I never knew, and still don’t know, what “it” is. Anyway, I was starting to look for jobs and quickly became discouraged because everywhere I looked, entry level jobs required some form of experience and I had none. Adding that on top of the tumultuous year that 2020 was and the uncertainty ahead of me, I was feeling quite hopeless.
In November of 2020, I was talking to my mom on the phone expressing these feelings and she ended up sending me a sermon that had a message along the lines of “God has got us. God is in control and this world is only temporary.” I was staying with my uncle at the time and while on his back porch, listening to this sermon, I felt this sense of peace come over me like I have never felt before. I burst into tears and it was at that point my life changed forever.
I knew God was real. I can’t really describe how other than the peace I felt was otherworldly and the truth sunk into my heart. He wasn’t just this imaginary figure high in the sky pulling the strings. He was a living being and all that I had heard about His goodness was true.
After that day, I started to explore faith, specifically what it was and what it looked like. Throughout the next year, I started reading the Bible more and started to pray. I didn’t really know what I was doing and I had a lot of barriers I had to break down like the “this is a private matter” mindset.
During that year, I had graduated college, gotten a full time job, moved back in with my parents for eight months, then moved to Lansing, Michigan to be closer to work. Fast forwarding to January 2022, on a random Friday, my sister texted me about if I had thought about getting baptized at all. Now, some quick background on this, she had been mentioning this to me throughout the previous year. She would bring it up occasionally and my answer was always “Hm, I don’t think I know enough about it” or “I want to make sure I understand it before I do it”. I kept blowing her off and never really looking into it even if I said I would. As I look back on it now, I think there was something inside me that knew what getting baptized meant and what it would do and I wasn’t ready to make that commitment.
Getting back to that random Friday, she had texted again about getting baptized and I became frustrated when I read the message. I think I replied with a terse answer like “No, I haven’t thought about it.” I was annoyed by what felt like her persistent pestering (that is what is was). That night, I was reading in Isaiah and Psalms and the word “covenant” kept coming up. I had already known what that word meant, but I figured I would look it up just to make sure. I saw that it meant in a few short words, a promise between you and God. My mind immediately jumped to, “how much do you wanna bet that baptism is a covenant?” What do you know, that’s exactly what it is.
Just like on my uncle’s back porch, I burst out crying. I was baptized by my mom two days later in my parent’s bathtub. That…that my friends, is when I was made new. Everything about me changed. Almost five years removed from that day, I can look back at who I was before and say to you with awe and reverence for God that I have no idea who she was. The person I am today is far from the person I used to be and everything that I am is because of God and His love for me. There is no better way to describe it than 2 Corinthians 5:17: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” (ESV)
These past four years, five I guess if we want to count the year where I was stumbling my way through faith, have been a whirlwind of a lot of ups and downs, sanctification, and perseverance. I am not going to lie and say that this time has been enjoyable. It has been anything but that and in fact lead to a lot of dark lows and even to a point where my faith was hanging on by a thread. Even as I am writing this, it is still not easy. These things were, and still are, necessary though and I am now able to see why.
The Lord has taught me so much already and my hope is that this blog will allow me to pass some of those lessons on. There is nothing special about what I will have to say or even what my struggles and experiences have been. It is the Lord who is special and even if this ends up being a way for me to praise Him for what He has done in my life, He is worthy of it always.
Why “Excitedly Humble”?
The phrase “Excitedly Humble” was inspired by John the Baptist actually. While I was reading John chapters 1 and 3 this past summer, it struck me how excited John the Baptist was to point to Jesus. In John 1, verses 19 through 27 read:
“And this is the testimony of John, when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, ‘Who are you?’ He confessed, and did not deny, but confessed, ‘I am not the Christ.’ And they asked him, ‘What then? Are you Elijah?’ He said, ‘I am not.’ ‘Are you the Prophet?’ And he answered, ‘No.’ So they said to him, “Who are you? We need to give an answer to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?’ He said, ‘I am the voice of the one crying out in the wilderness, “Make straight the way of the Lord,” as the prophet Isaiah said.’ (Now they had been sent from the Pharisees.) They asked him, ‘Then why are you baptizing, if you are neither the Christ, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?’ John answered them, ‘I baptize with water, but among you stands one you do not know, even he comes after me, the strap of whose sandal I am not worthy to untie.” (ESV)
Then in John 3, verses 28 through 30 read:
“You yourselves bear me witness, that I said, ‘I am not the Christ, but I have been sent before him.’ The one who has the bride is the bridegroom. The friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegrooms voice. Therefore this joy of mine is now complete. He must increase, but I must decrease.” (ESV)
When I was reading these passages, I felt an excitement, an urgency, behind his words. He was pointing to someone other than himself and was doing it with great pleasure. He was building notoriety and had followers of his own, yet he still glorified Jesus.
We hear a lot about humility and the need to be humble, but the word “excited” does not accompany it, at least not in my experience. I was struck by the beauty of the image that suggests. To be excited to praise someone other than ourselves…may we all seek to have that heart posture. May we all seek to point to the Lord with excited humility.
Excitedly Humble 