Heart Change / Mourning / Identity / Bunnies / Joy — the making of a testimony

Heart change. 

We all have the tendency to fix our heart on something. We fix our heart on people. We fix our heart on passions and dreams. When your heart is solidly set on something, you never think, in a million years, that it will change. I spent 23 years of my life with my heart fixed on one thing. I heard my mom say year after year, “Sarah, if you’re meant to do something else, God will change your heart.” It never happened until one day it did.

God has a peculiar, loss-for-words way of getting you where you need to be. He doesn’t shower you with blatantly obvious hints and preparations. He doesn’t whisper for you to get ready for the change of heart. He reveals changes in the desires of your heart so slowly and subtly that one day you look around and don’t recognize yourself. You don’t recognize how something so set, so certain, so desired and adored could change in a moment. 

Mourning. 

Mourning is hard. I mourned the death of the dream my heart was set on like I was mourning the death of a family member or a best friend that I had spent nearly every day with since the age of 7. It’s difficult to find people who will speak about the death of a dream and how real the mourning process can be. The funny thing about dreams is that God gives them. In the same way He gives and takes people, He also gives and takes dreams. In the same way that you don’t know how many years you have with any given person, it is true, too, about dreams. God let me have one of the most fun passions of my life. He inundated me with hard-work, gifting, dedication, and opportunity. I have yet to fall in love, but I did have such a passion die within me that I know the gut-wrenching feeling of true heartbreak.

The wild thing about God, though, is that He knows even better dreams— dreams that we could never fathom holding. He can’t release us to those “even better dreams” and reveal those deeply hidden desires in our heart, however, until He takes and removes the old ones. Just because we have the comfort and assurance in knowing that God knows what He is doing at all times, it still doesn’t mean that unforeseen change doesn’t hurt like hell. 

Identity 

You don’t realize your identity has suddenly morphed into something until it is taken from you. My identity was in my dream, in my passion. I loved and had a relationship with Jesus and my identity was partially in Him, but somehow my passion morphed me into someone who considered herself a dancer even before a human. When the time runs out on a dream that you thought would last a lifetime, and you have embodied so much of what it is that you can’t make out a difference between you and the dream, you find yourself unfamiliar with the person you are supposed to know best. Suddenly, as your friends introduce you to others with the casual, “This is Sarah– she is a dancer!,” you experience a sting and deep sadness that is unexplained. 

Bunnies

God does funny things, though. Seemingly overnight He gave me the unexpected and abrupt urge to drive to a pet store and get a pet. I picked out a white bunny that more resembled a mixture of a micro-lamb and an electrocuted long-haired guinea pig combined. When I shared the picture of him, Amos, for the first time on social media, I got a wide array of reactions– mostly confusion on what species of animal I had taken into my home (see photos below). He has since grown into his fluff, but in the process of Amos becoming a relatively distinguishable rabbit, I realized that God had provided me the most loving and providential bandaid I had ever received. When news got out about the new bunny, people started referring to me as “the bunny girl.” In small group circles, my friends would now bring up my bunny before ever mentioning that I was a dancer. While they didn’t realize the deep internal mourning that occurred every time I felt the confusion of being referenced as a dancer again and again while I knew so clearly that my heart had changed– the people around me were no longer ripping off a painful scab as they moved from joining Sarah as dancer to Sarah as bunny girl. It was so ridiculously silly, yet it was one of the most healing things I would have never imagined. God does that. He takes peculiar things and uses them to mend broken hearts. 

Joy

Everyone wants joy, right? In the process of loss, you discover God’s true joy. In the process of finding yourself, you discover God’s true joy. I recently had someone tell me that my joy was convicting to be around. Even more than that, it is not unusual for people to make frequent, off-handed comments about the joy I hold. Comments like these always stop me in my tracks because I think to myself, “if only they knew– it hasn’t always been this way.” I know the power of joy because of the depths God has rescued me from. I hold joy with grateful, honoring hands because I know from Whom I received it. I had never experienced true depression until I was in the thick of it. Mourning the death of my dream and having an identity crisis at the age of 23 spiraled me into a deep depression. Somehow, I managed to drag myself out of bed and get to church each Sunday, and slowly but surely my relationship with God grew. The day I brought my bunny, Amos, home was the day I actually stopped taking antidepressants for good. I was seeing the joy of my God in this tiny, fluffy creature. As the wounds from my dream healed, God lit my eyes up for more and more around me and introduced new desires that had been hidden deep inside my heart. As I was forced to fall into the arms of my Savior again and again, each time I left with more joy than I had carried before. I discovered that true joy is only carried by God. You can’t find it anywhere else. If we wish to have it, we have to know Him deeply enough to carry it, too. I named my bunny “Amos” out of sheer randomness. It happened to just be the first name that popped into my head as I looked down upon him while bringing him home that first day. Later, as I was perplexed that he had the shape of an angel on his back in brown fur amidst all his white, I learned that among other things, “Amos” means “carried by God.” It has literally been the joy of God that has carried me through one of the most challenging seasons, and I know it will be the joy of my God that carries me through the next.

It’s wild and funny and mind-boggling and wonder-inducing and fall-on-your-knees-in-worship of God prompting that this was just a teensy breadcrumb of what God would continue to unfold in my life once I surrendered to His new path. That, however, is a story for another time.

“Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.”

Psalm 37:4

Dance photos by A.Deran Photography