Okay sisters, friends, mamas and warriors...this is how this whole thing happened. First, I probably need to tell you a little bit about me.
I'm Lisa. I'm a wife, a mama of four, a nurse of 20+ years, a leader, and apparently now I'm creating planners, building websites, writing blogs and talking about writing a book. Which still makes me laugh a little because this is like an introverts WORST nightmare! Not MY plan!
Seriously. Because who am I to do this? What makes me qualified to encourage other women? To write something somebody might actually read? To create something and put my name on it? I have wrestled with that. A LOT.
But somewhere along the way God started showing me something...I'm not qualified because I've figured it all out. Good Lord I haven't! I'm here because I have lived some things. And more importantly, I've watched God meet me in them. My life has not been picture perfect. Not even remotely.
I've experienced sexual abuse, neglect and a broken home, I've battled depression and anxiety, I've carried bitterness that almost ate me alive.
I've been the wife trying to figure out whether my marriage could survive betrayal–and what forgiveness even looks like when somebody has broken your heart.
I've been the mama watching my child struggle with addiction and serious mental illness and realizing there are some things this mama cannot fix.
I've sat beside my dying brother as he took his last breath after watching addiction take so much from him.
I've struggled financially. And when I say I struggled, I don't mean "we needed to tighten the budget this month" I mean–we cant afford to by the toilet paper to wipe our bottoms and the lights are cut off and there goes the repo man with the van struggle!
I have scream, I have cried, I have been angry, I have questioned God, I have wrestled with unforgiveness. I have had seasons where I didn't recognize myself anymore. And there were times in my life when the pain became so heavy that I wondered whether I even wanted to be here anymore and planned how to end it.
At 38 years old, I found out that the man I had believed was my biological father my entire life...wasn't. Yeah, that happened too. Whose your daddy got real real for me...And strangely enough something that could have completely shattered my identity ended up becoming one of the most unexpected blessings of my life.
There is so much more to all of those stories-and maybe someday we'll sit down and talk about them too. But here is what I need you to understand before I tell you about this planner:
I didn't create Held because I have a pretty life. I created Held because I know what it feels like to be in the middle of a messy, chaotic, overwhelming, holding on by an already very thin frayed thread of one.
BUT THEN God started doing something...There was this bible study.
And there was a woman named Kris Goertzen. I didn't know then what Kris would eventually mean to my life or that God was using that bible study to start something that would reach much further than I could see at the time. But He was. That study made me dig deeper.
It challenged things I believed about myself. It challenged the way I saw God. It made me start paying attention to what He was doing in my life instead of only focusing on everything that was going wrong.
And little by little God did what God does. He changed me. I really wish I could tell you there was a magic prayer I said and the Heavens opened up and suddenly Lisa Marie had her entire life together. No ma'am. It has been a process. IT IS STILL IN PROCESS.
But somewhere in that process, I started creating something. And here is the funny part. I was creating it for me. I needed a planner that could hold my actual life. Work, family, appointments. Goals. Meals. Finances. The 9000 things running through my brain at any given moment. But I also needing something that continually brought me back to GOD like Kris taught me.
I didn't need another tool teaching me how to squeeze twelve more things into an already exhausted life.
I needed something that helped me ask:
What actually matters here? Where is God in this? What am I praying about? What am I learning? What am I carrying that maybe I was never supposed to carry alone?
I wanted to follow what Kris's bible study taught me. So, I started making pages. Then changing pages, Then adding pages. Then taking things away. Then changing them seventeen more times because apparently that's who I am. And eventually I looked at what was sitting in front of me and thought...wait a minute. Maybe this isn't only for me.
At first it was crowned and called. I loved that name. Actually I STILL love what it means. Crowned by grace. Called by God. Because everything I have lived through, i believe that with my whole heart that our worst moments don't get to decide who we are.
Our mistakes don't get the final word.
Our trauma doesn't get the final word
Our past doesn't get the final word.
GOD DOES.
But while I was creating the planner, something else became clearer. One word kept meaning more and more to me.
Held.
Because when I look back over my life, i realized that most of the places where God did the deepest work in me weren't after everything had been resolved. They were in the middle of it.
The middle of my marriage struggle.
The middle of motherhood.
The middle of grief.
The middle of financial fear.
The middle of healing.
The middle of waiting.
The middle of praying and wondering when–or whether –the answer was coming.
The middle of knowing God had put something on my heart while simultaneously thinking, Lord...are You SURE You meant me???
And I started realizing: The middle isn't just the place we have to survive until we finally get somewhere better. God is there too.
Psalm 139:5 says: You hem me in, behind and before, and lay Your hand upon me.
That verse has gotten ahold of me. Because think about what that means. He's behind me. He's already before me. And His hand is on me right here. Which means I don't have to know exactly where i am going yet. I don't have to have everything figured out. I don't have to pretend I am not scared. I can be unfinished. I can still be healing. I can still be becoming. And I can still be completely and unquestionably HELD.
So...that's what this is. Yes, Held™ is a planner.
And I am ridiculously proud of that planner. But Held in the Middle is bigger than a planner. I want this to be the place where we talk about the real stuff. Faith when faith is hard. Marriage. Motherhood. Healing. Leadership. Money. Purpose. Grief. Dreams. Starting Over. Forgiveness. The things we are afraid to admit. The things God is teaching us.
And probably some things that make us laugh until we pee a little because, well...we are women and apparently that's a thing in my life now as well.
I want to write. I want to have conversations. I want to speak to women. I want other woman to not feel alone like I did. And one day, I want to hold a book in my hands called Held in the Middle and probably bawl my eyes out when I realize God actually did all of this with a woman who once wondered if she had a life worth living let alone anything worth saying.
But I am not there yet. I'm still in the middle too. And maybe that is exactly why you're here. Because I am not inviting you to follow me because I have arrived. I am inviting you to walk with me. We will figure some things out. We will probably get some things wrong. We will get back up. We will laugh. We will cry. WE will pray. We will open our bibles. We will remind each other what is true when life gets loud. Can I get a whoop whoop for Philippians 4:8!
And we are going to keep becoming the women God created us to be.
So if you're somewhere in the middle right now...pull up a chair girl. You belong here.
You don't have to clean yourself up first. You don't have to have your testimony wrapped in a pretty bow. You don't have to know what's next. I sure don't.
But I know who does. And after everything I've lived through there is one thing I can tell you with certainty:
He has NEVER stopped holding me. And sis...He's holding you too.
–Lisa