Fully Known, Fully Loved

I read a lot about being a freshman in college before I went to college. I have several Pinterest boards dedicated the topic and, while I felt prepared for tough classes and gross caf food, I did not feel prepared to make friends.

Last month, I moved into Dallas Baptist University. I'm only 20 minutes away from home. I go to the same church I've been going to since I was 9. In a lot of ways, it doesn't feel like a huge change. However, if you've gone to university or if you ever talked to someone who attended college, you know that maybe the biggest change happening is internal.

Meeting new people terrifies me. And college is filled with new people. New people who don't know me, don't know people who know me, haven't heard things about me, only know me from stalking my Instagram.

A reason why meeting new people is so frightening to me is trust. For the first several weeks of university, I was paralyzingly anxious because I didn't believe I could trust anyone. Too many high school experiences told me I was bad at choosing the right people to trust.

At the heart, I couldn't trust myself. I looked at my track record and determined my discernment had failed one too many times.

One Monday night, I lost it. That afternoon, I had gone with my mom to pick out new glasses. We also bought groceries.

I was walking up the hill from Freshman parking and realized I had walked up a hundred million stairs and forgotten my groceries. With a less than perky attitude, I trudged down the bricks, got my groceries and walked back up the stairs. When I got back into my pod, I realized I left my cans of beans.

After four weeks of being fairly emotionally stable, I started crying over two cans of beans. One thing I've learned in 18 years of life is crying is very rarely caused by just one thing. As I questioned why I was crying over beans, I came back to the issue of trust issues.

I had been home all afternoon, where I was safe and secure. Then I drove up a couple highways to a place that felt unsafe and insecure. I was sobbing because I didn't feel known or loved. I was angry and bitter and hardened because of all the friendships that had broken me before. What had I done wrong? What was wrong with me?

Shame made me hide. I hadn't been good enough in the past, so I buried anything I saw as insufficient. I stuck everything I didn't like about myself--sin, likes, dislikes, personality traits--in a box and shoved it behind my dresser.

Some friends of mine who graduated from DBU have a saying "fully known and fully loved." That phrase came to mind while I was crying about my beans.

For the next week, I kept thinking about those words. I never knew five words could be so hard, so challenging. I had to decide. I could live in shame and fear, or I could live in truth and love.

That shame was so easy to fall into, the fear easy to hide behind. As long as I wasn't seen, I wasn't betrayed. Easy wasn't fun, though. Easy wasn't fulfilling. Easy was burning me from the inside out. So I took those five words--fully known and fully loved--and slowly started living them.

On Monday, I got new glasses and I am not exaggerating when I say I do not look like the same person.

After more than two years of wearing the same pair of glasses every single day, I got new frames. Y'all, my vision is bad. I can't go a day without my glasses on. So the dark purple frames I got right before my 16th birthday sat on my nose every single day. I couldn't imagine myself without those glasses. They were as much a part of my face as my eyebrows.

My new frames are clear and big. It seems like a small difference, just a different color. Let me tell you, they are not the same.

I look in the mirror, and the first thing I see is my face. For years, all I could see looking in the mirror were the thick, dark frames shading my eyes. Most of the people I know now have only known me in those glasses. I hid behind those frames, defining myself by my poor vision, my inability to see clearly.

Fully seen, fully known, fully loved. You cannot experience the love of others if you don't put down your mask and come as you are. I've kept myself from having deep friendships because I've been petrified by the idea that all my past hurts were caused by something intrinsically wrong with me. That fear hindered every current relationship.

Grace follows honesty. Honesty requires courage. So here I am, in my dorm way past my usual bedtime, writing a blogpost about how scared I am and fragile my confidence is. I'm so far from perfect, from a life figured out. I think, though, these glasses brought a little more clarity.

So I'm taking the risk. I'm being a little bit braver. I'm choosing to trust. I'm choosing to be fully known that I may be fully loved.

also, I became a hipster. whoops.