Chameleon

"It takes courage to grow up and become who you truly are." - e. e. cummings


There's something so easy in becoming like those around you. It's something I've done almost my entire life, taking pieces of others and molding them into a muddled version of someone I thought people would like. And whether or not that may have been the case, it damaged the person I was supposed to become. The person I truly am.

I recently found a box full of photos from my childhood and as I sorted through them I saw all the different aspects of my true personality shining through. I saw the philosopher always thinking and looking for meaning. The nature admirer that would watch the wind in the trees, be in awe of the stars in the sky, and would watch white puffed-up clouds float by. I saw pictures that captured a goofy girl that grinned widely and pulled faces, photographs that revealed the mischievous little brat that's truly at the heart of who I am. But what really caught my attention was how full of life I was. My true, God-made inner self untainted by a world that tricks and teases. It's something I've been missing for quite some time and it progressively became more and more lost as I grew up and became more like those around me.

I've fallen apart this past year, more so than I've ever experienced before. I lost myself in choices that were made for other people and not for myself. These past few months were especially hard and I found myself turning inwards and finding nothing there to get back to. The real me had been fragmented into a series of small pieces, glued together with pieces of other people, and my inner self was no longer there.

It's in coming to terms with my choices that I've slowly started to realize the chameleon that I am and how it does nothing for myself or anyone around me. We all offer such beautiful, unique things to this world and I'm finally beginning to realize what a shame it is to cover up what makes me who I am. Just because others don't always fit in with every aspect of who you are doesn't mean that those pieces of you are of any less worth. Don't disregard the things that make you unique - don't become a chameleon - find the courage.

The Art of Learning "It's Okay"

It's okay.

Sometimes people just need to hear that it's okay. Not the "things will all turn out fine in the end" kind of okay, but the kind of okay that teaches you to relax a little bit. The one that allows you to feel a little bit less out-of-step with the world than you originally thought you were.


It's okay to make mistakes.
It's okay to fall apart.
It's okay to not live up to other people's expectations.
It's okay to not live up to your own expectations.
It's okay to put less into the things that drain you.
It's okay to fail at things.
It's okay to not get A's on every paper and exam. Or B's, C's or D's. It's okay to get an F. Really.

It's okay to give less.
It's okay to give up.
It's okay to stop pleasing people.
It's okay to take care of yourself. 

It's okay to close yourself off to the people and things that suck the good out of you.
It's okay to ignore people's comments.
It's okay to stop caring about what people think. They are not you. They do not live your life.
It's okay to not be perfect.
It's okay if you're not at your best right now.

It's okay to doubt.
It's okay to struggle.
It's okay to ask the questions that no one seems to ask.
It's okay to be frustrated.
It's okay to turn inwards.
It's okay to not care sometimes.
It's okay to let go.
It's okay to say goodbye.


For weeks, months, years I've been pushing myself to reach these completely unattainable expectations I've set for myself; expectations I thought others had for me. I've pushed myself to continue to take on situations that do nothing but drain the ever-loving life out of me. I've forced myself to believe that the world would end if I didn't give my all. I pushed myself too hard, I gave too much and eventually my world caved in.

People aren't meant to be able to do everything. People aren't meant to be the best at everything, all the time. The forcefulness of societal expectations has pushed us all into one neat box of normal: grow up, go to university, get a career, meet the perfect person, get married, have kids, grandkids and push up daisies. In that order.

Well, that order stinks.

Life is not a formula. Life is unexpected, chaotic, exhilarating, depressing - life is something so complex that how we function as a society should not dictate how each person should expect to live their lives. When we do, we force people to try to become things they're incapable of - of things that they are not - and when they can't meet those expectations they crumble. They become miserable at not having achieved the (not so) attainable goal of what life is supposed to look like.

I am one such person and today I needed someone to tell me that it's okay not to fit into all these neat little categories. That it's okay not to be perfect.

So, I'm telling you these things, because you need to hear that these are not weaknesses and they do not mean that you are failing. It means that you have discovered that you are the unique, complex, human being God made you to be. Heaven help us if we continually try to shove all that makes us beautifully human into a box.

So. For all those that need to hear it today, for all those that feel like giving in, giving up and finding the exit sign...

It's okay.

Bumping into God

There are few places you can go and be yourself these days. I've been avoiding one in particular for quite awhile.

It's watched me countless times as I've tried to weave my way through life; navigating the ups and downs as a little girl to a grown woman. It's my safe haven, my refuge from a bitter and relentless world.

It's also the place that knows me best, which is why I've been avoiding it.

I've continued to build a steady stream of walls around myself these days. Each wall thicker and higher than the one before and each bringing more misery in its stead. It's a feeling that deprives you of life - of living and breathing. One that measures moments by minutes and seconds instead of breaths and memories.

It's a soul-sucking, hope-deadening experience.

And yet, I'm doing it to myself. I know it. I feel it. I feel as though there's no stopping these waves of self-inflicted torment that I've cast upon myself. I've wound myself up into a tight ball of unrelenting despair and watched it destroy everything in its place. Myself included.

So, tonight I went back. I needed to be there more now than at any other time in my life.

I stood there... unsure of myself. As though the dirt and grass were foreign to me and the water and sun with it. I saw flashes of younger Sophie's sprawled out in various positions. Sophie's who cried their hearts out, who vented torrents of angry words to the water's waves and sat and talked to God in times when she needed to feel close to him.

It took a few minutes, but as I watched the sun slowly sink behind the islands, I felt its magic at work. It carefully began to break down my pretenses and peel away the layers I had formed around myself as a means of protection.

I relaxed.

I watched as the waves crashed against one another and felt the wet spray hit my nose and mouth. I felt the wind rush around me in an effort to be heard, rustling everything in its wake, with the leaves dancing in response. I reveled in the sun's enormity and its ability to bring warmth and happiness with merely its presence. I watched the light glint back and forth on the water as it reflected snatches of the dark depths below. I breathed deeply and smelled its familiar scent - a scent that instantly creates a thousand memories of life by the water.

And as I stood there I realized why I hadn't returned to this spot in such a long time. It's a place where God likes to meet me - more so than any other dwelling on earth. He's sneaky like that. He created me with a deep love for nature with all of its wonderment and spells, sounds and smells. He knew I couldn't resist a peek at the view from the spot where my world was always righted when I felt wronged.

And so I bumped into God again in this familiar place.

He likes to show me simple truths from time to time. I like to think of them as locks and keys. Every time a simple truth is made astoundingly clear by a little nudge from him, I hear the key turn and click in place.

I stood there taking in the sun and thinking of how we always say the sun is setting. As if it's going away of its own accord. The sun has decided to go down, from our perspective, and so the sun is always coming and going. It always decides to rise and set.

But we know the reality is that the sun is constant. It doesn't move. In fact, it's us that does all the moving. Earth spins its course and turns its back. Yet, we see the sun as the one to leave us, as though our actions have nothing to do with it.

And so it is with God. A constant, unmoving entity that doesn't come and go. One that watches as we consistently turn our backs, return and turn our backs again. Watching with patience as we come to him, realizing how much we need him at times, only to think better of it later. Thinking as though we're not in need of his light; yet, without his presence, we'd be living in darkness forever.

-click-

I realized then and there that this was the reason I'd been avoiding this spot. This magical place full of little secrets and treasures whispered out to me across the waters, through the trees and in the air. A place where I am shown my true being and purpose despite the tricks and expectations of the world around me. A place where I go in as a lost soul and come out feeling a little more complete.

Questions and Answers

God.

He's a touchy subject. 

You can love him. You can hate him. But there's one thing you can't feel towards him: neutral. 

That's something I've been wrestling with the past couple of years. It's funny, I've been to a lot of post-secondary institutions since I graduated high school and the entire time all I wanted was to experience a Christian education. Yet, since I began this adventure two years ago, I've done nothing but run away from its people and community. I was hit with a harsh dose of the Christian bubble and what I deemed to be a sheltered people leading sheltered lives, with the all-too optimistic perspective on life. It was suffocating, agitating and about a million other depressing words. 

But what was really at the heart of this frustration with other Christians was my own view of God. 

This view began to change when I started going to a Christian university. It began to twist and turn and blur and the lines that were so clearly drawn for all to see, left me questioning why. What's the reason for this viewpoint, that belief, that rule? Is this really what God thinks? Could he actually believe something like that?

And then I began to question myself. I began to question him. How could you allow this? How could you enforce that? Why won't you let people do this when they only want to love each other?

These were questions that didn't get me anywhere because I felt as though the Christian bubble only allowed certain questions to be asked. That they only allowed for certain types of testing of a book I was beginning to get more and more frustrated at and a God didn't make sense to me anymore. Taking away my personal experiences from the past two years, although they were primarily a big reason for my changing response to God, there was something bigger than my personal problems happening here. Something inside me was changing; I was beginning a new trek. A trek that lead into unchartered territory: what do I believe anymore?

It's been an interesting journey. It's not over yet, it most likely won't ever be, and it's one that's lead me down some dark holes. It's found me stumbling through life looking into the eyes of people that are so certain and never question; that are so full of blind faith that I begin to wonder if they even truly believe what they're regurgitating. It sickened me, this blind faith, these sheltered lives. How many of them were pastor's kids? Raised in Christian homes, all believing family members, protected from the harsh truths of broken homes, flying curse words and the struggle to merely stay alive for one more day because the reality of life was too much? Hell, how many of them had even uttered a curse word? It pained me to see these people with their faith and worship, whether true or fake because it all seemed fake to me. It all seemed so untested.

So, I began to question God. It came about from a horrible class at this school actually, with an equally horrible teacher, who told us to write down the questions we had in response to the corresponding Bible passages we were supposed to read. As I delved deeper into the beginnings of the Old Testament, I found myself unbelievably pissed off at God and so even more questions came spilling out of me. They came from the deepest depths of my spirit that longed to ask questions that didn't make sense, that made me doubt in so many things about God.

As the time went on, my husband and I began to talk more and more about these questions. Could we trust a Bible that was written by humans? Yes, Spirit-filled humans, but how can we know that for sure? How can we not assume that as a fallen creation, some messed up part of the author got into the Bible that God didn't approve of? What if we as readers have interpreted something out of these passages that wasn't intended? Like women not being able to lead or speak in churches from a verse in Corinthians that some scholars question if Paul even wrote. If that's questionable, why isn't the rest? And why trust Paul? How can we trust a council that chose what stories made it into the Bible and what didn't? Were they spirit-lead too? How can Christianity have so many different opinions on the same Bible so that we have a multitude of denominations? If we all think the other's interpretation is wrong, might ours be wrong also? What does God really think of church. Does he hate its stiff collars and additional rules and procedures or is he pleased by them? Does he hate the way we portray him to others? If he does, how can he stand for our version of him? Does anyone actually know the true version of God? Or do we only know what a religious group has organized for us? 

Welcome to a small part of my mind for the past two years. 

But despite all of this I realized something. There comes a point when you realize the questions you have may never truly be answered and you have to decide whether or not those unanswered questions mean more to you than God himself. Do those unanswered questions make you stop believing in God?

I'm surprised to say that, for me, they don't. I don't understand God, his ways and especially his followers. But I know in my heart of hearts that God is who he says he is. That he created me with loving thought and intention and sent his Son to die a death for all of us that was undeserved.

I may not have all the answers to my questions, but I have answers to a lot of questions I haven't been asking. I see God's fingerprints all over this place. In trees and rushing water, a bird's song and its vibrant colours. Even in my own body and its inner workings. 

I don't have all the answers. I don't even have a few. But I have enough to know that God is there; mindfully present when he seems silent, grieving my hurts when they seem unbearable and so desperate for a chance to show me his true self.