To Be In Need: by Olivia McKain
I have always been a very independent person. Partly because that’s just how I am, but partly because I grew up in a family that needed me to be independent. To make an incredibly long story short, when I was 16 years old my dad had to take a job that required him to move overseas. Now I want everyone to hear this, I have an incredible family that has loved me well, fought for me hard, and provided for me in every capacity they could. But there is a certain level of independence that is required of a 16 year old whose dad is in a different country all but 35 days a year. It was a necessary independence. I wanted to make things easier for my family. I wanted to be a good daughter. And in most regards I did those things well. But somewhere along the way a necessary independence turned into a desire to be completely self-reliant, and that self-reliance turned into a belief that I am my most lovable self when I do not need anything from anyone. I told myself that to be in need is to be a burden. To be in need is to risk being disappointed when people cannot show up for you in the way you want them to. It felt like the worst thing I could ever say was, “My name is Olivia and I am in need”. This belief permeated every aspect of my life, including my relationship with the Lord.
At some point, when the Lord said “Come to me all who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest,” I added my own caveat. Instead what I heard was “Come to me all who are weary and burdened, but make sure you aren’t anxious or overwhelmed by the time you get here. In fact, if you could get your resting heart rate to less than 60 BPM first that would be great.”
As I am sure you can imagine, it was a pretty exhausting way to live. Thankfully, the Lord has been incredibly faithful to me. In the last two years He has patiently and graciously shown me that He wants to enter into every aspect of my life. He has shown me that my needs, my hurts, and my frustrations with Him do not make me less worthy of grace. He has shown me that he saw all of that and stilI chose to take the cross for me. He has shown me that being desperately dependent on Him is not the worst case scenario, but in fact it is my only hope on this side of heaven. In the last two years He has shown me that there is freedom in being known by Him.
But even as I have learned those things, it has continued to be difficult for me to allow people around me to walk alongside me in the midst of hardship. When I feel anxious, overwhelmed, or whatever I deem “messy” I usually run. I don’t just mean that I metaphorically run, I mean I actively and physically remove myself from a situation until I have put myself back together. And if I am feeling up for it after I try to sort it out on my own, I’ll give my friends a reader's digest version of what I am struggling with.
To go to someone in the midst of my pain instead of after is counterintuitive to the way I have lived most of my life. It is something that has taken me a long time to do, and I’d say I have a 20% success rate at best. But in the moments that I have truly allowed myself to depend on God-fearing people, what I have experienced has been nothing short of gospel love. The Lord has gifted me with friends and family that have shown up for me, slowly chipping away at my belief that I am only good when I have it all together.
But the tricky thing is, 2 months ago I packed myself up and moved to Nashville, a whopping 8 hours from most of the people I have learned to let in. And it has been really hard. I have needed support and my only option is to trust these random people that, with the exception of a few, I have only known for 2 months. The only way anyone will know how to support me is if I tell them I need it. So let me rephrase: I have been living in my worst nightmare. I have found myself constantly faced with the choice of letting people into what I am feeling, or staying in my old patterns of self-protection and running away. There have been moments I have chosen to run; and in those moments I have been painfully aware that I didn’t want to be running. I didn’t actually want to be sitting alone in my pain, I was just too scared to be seen in it.
How long have I been choosing to be alone and tricking myself into thinking that it is freedom? Have I convinced myself that it’s better to be unknown and safe from disappointment than it is to give people the opportunity to love me? Am I willing to trust the Lord enough to let other people come alongside me?
As silly as this may sound, I just never realized that maybe I should learn to be dependent on the people around me as well. I never realized that trusting other people is an extension of trusting the Lord. That trusting my community to see me in the midst of my mess is an act of faithfulness. It takes courage. And even though I could try to do it on my own, no one has asked me to do that. God didn't create man to be alone. He also didn’t create me, Olivia Ann McKain, to be alone. Just as there is freedom in being known by the Lord, there is freedom in being known by others. And as much as I don’t like to admit it, there is freedom in the words, “my name is Olivia and I am in need.”
In the last 2 months my new community has done nothing but prove to me that they are worth trusting. They have prayed for me, laughed with me, listened to me, and celebrated me. They have asked me how I could be loved better. They have pushed me to advocate for myself. Some of them have literally followed me when I have been upset and tried to run away. They have shown me that they would like to enter in with me, but ultimately they can only do that as much as I let them. And even though they have given me no reason not to, it still feels incredibly scary to trust them with my pain. There have been more times than I would like to admit that I chose to run from my new community. But there have also been a lot of times where I recognized that I don’t have to do that anymore and more importantly, that I don’t want to. This is the part where I usually try to run. But this is also going to be the part where I try my best to not do what I have always done.
So with that being said, my name is Olivia and I am in need.
