I have trouble sleeping. The medication that I take to control my anxiety makes me feel “normal,” but the side effect is insomnia. Many nights I fall asleep after midnight and wake up around 5 am. I try to stay still and quiet so that my hubby can have his beauty rest. These sleepless nights leaves me with a lot of quiet time to think. And pray.
LisaMorganMoore.com. To many people, the name “Lisa Morgan Moore” means nothing. It means something to my family, my 150 blog subscribers and my about 1000 Facebook friends, but that’s about it. I’m not famous or a celebrity or even an influencer. So who am I?
Read to the end, and you will learn why I named my website after myself.
Sharing is caring. If this post encouraged you, will you share it on Facebook so that it could bless your friends,too? Thanks for helping me to reach more struggling women with encouragement, hope, and grace.I have secrets. Lots of them. I have thoughts and ideas and behaviors that I don’t share with anyone. Not even my best friend or my husband. I keep them to myself because I am afraid if I tell people the truth about me, they might not like me.
Women are amazing secret keepers. We don’t tell anyone about our crumbling marriages. We stay silent about the fears that keep us awake at night. We are ashamed of our immense debt and poor financial decisions. We aren’t honest about our health and mental battles.
Even though I am super-transparent and vulnerable on this blog, there are still things that I’ve kept to myself because I have thought that if you knew these things about me, you wouldn’t like me. And deep inside, I really want people to like me. Even at 47 years old. My fear of rejection keeps my mouth locked up tight.
Sharing is caring. If this post encouraged you, will you share it on Facebook so that it could bless your friends,too? Thanks for helping me to reach more struggling women with encouragement, hope, and grace.In the heart of God, He conceived an idea for a woman would be named Lisa. He created her quirky, optimistic, silly, introverted, and needing to feel in control. It is hard to be her, because people often misunderstand her. So for years, I’ve often done what was expected of me in order for people to like me. And when I’ve made choices out of self-care and preserving my emotional health, people have been angry with me. Those words have stung.
But I’m growing as a person and finding the courage to just be me. It has resulted in me being really honest lately. And it’s quite scary. Usually I try to be someone other than who I really am because I’ve found that who I truly am is often not good enough for others. I have been rejected because of my personality.
It hurts. Still.
Dear reader: This blog post has been written and ready to post for two years. Over seven hundred days. But I have not posted it. Why? I was afraid to. Recently, many of my friends have posted openly about their regret in having abortions, and it has given me courage to share my own regret in paying for one.
I sat around a table of adults who were there to interview me. At twenty-one years old, I had butterflies in my tummy and my hands were clammy with nervousness. I had applied to be a summer camp counselor at Methodist camp that served the poor and elderly in rural North Carolina. The only question that I remember from that day was this:
“Which person in the Bible do you most respect?”
My answer was Paul, but not for the reasons that you might expect. It wasn’t because he had served Jesus sacrificially or because he had written a large part of the New Testament. It was because he made this honest statement about himself in 1 Timothy 1:15, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, and I am the worst of them all.”
In an early morning outburst, I fled my schoolroom and barreled down the stairs. Leaving my two homeschooled children behind, I shut the school room door, and my bedroom door, and my bathroom door, and then my closet door. There, in the darkness of my walk-in closet, I fell to my knees and put my forehead on the bristly Berber carpet.
“Jesus,” I desperately prayed, “please let my children live until my husband gets home.”
I was exasperated, frustrated, and felt totally unable to homeschool my children. I had no clue what I was doing and knew that I would go down in the hall of fame of homeschool teacher failures. I didn’t know how to do the impossible things facing me.
Happy New Year! Have you made any New Year’s resolutions? The new year gives us a new beginning and a fresh opportunity to make changes in our habits and activities. Many resolve to go to the gym, get organized, or drop a dress size. New Year’s resolutions define what we plan to do in the new year but they don’t address something that I believe is more important: what we BELIEVE about ourselves.
What we believe about ourselves drives our behavior.
As the final days of 2018 draw near, it’s a good time to reflect on the days that have gone by. How do you evaluate a year? How do you determine if it was a good year or a bad one? I’m still imperfect, I’m still weak, and I am still a sin-prone human. But I’m not the same person I was 365 days ago. The God of amazing breakthroughs has changed me in tangible ways this year.
Change is in the air.
In Wilmington, where I live along the North Carolina coast, it finally looks like fall. The leaves on our trees are finally changing colors and beginning to drop. And it’s December! In Wilmington, which has far more pine trees than hardwoods, we don’t see the season change as dramatically as the rest of our state. But change is in the air nonetheless.
Over the summer I began to feel that change was coming in my ministry. Honestly, I haven’t wanted to write…which is both good and bad. It’s good because I often wrote from a place of brokenness and pain. Thank God, He has mostly healed my broken heart.
But not wanting to write is bad because I’m a blogger. Bloggers write.
Sharing is caring. If this post encouraged you, will you share it on Facebook so that it could bless your friends,too? Thanks for helping me to reach more struggling women with encouragement, hope, and grace.I haven’t had much to say lately. I used to write blog posts two to three times a week, but lately I only feel compelled to write about twice a month. I’m not really sure why. I will sit down at my favorite writing spots (a peaceful front porch or a trendy coffee shop) and I will grab my iPad, ready to write.
But no words come. I’m waiting in silence.
