Discerning the Big Invitations

3/30/21

Dear friend,

About nine years ago, I was in therapy for one Big Reason and another reason that was Almost as Big.

The Almost as Big reason had to do with three important relationships that had imploded in quick succession in my life in that season, and all for a similar reason: I had not been showing up in a mutual way in those relationships, which led to an imbalance that eventually proved untenable.

This lack of mutuality in relationships was not new to me. This pattern dated back to my earliest relationships.

Growing up, I was the listener for people in my life. I was the peacemaker in my family, the one everyone could count on to get along with everyone else and go with the flow. I mediated between conflicting parties in the house because I could see where each one was coming from and talk to them with an easeful presence they couldn't find with the person they were fighting with.

Unfortunately, this came to be interpreted in my heart that my value was in being there for other people and that there was usually not going to be room left for me. If you didn't directly ask me about myself, I assumed you didn't want to know.

I know now (as a 42-year-old woman) that that's an unfair assumption to make, but I believed it from a young age and came to live most relationships in my life that way. Even to this day, I have to make an effort to share myself of my own volition with other people and believe they want to know.

I hadn't yet gotten there nine years ago.

In fact, it took the implosion of those three valuable relationships in relatively quick succession for me to look at this pattern I'd always known was there. It was a moment of feeling its pain more acutely than before and finally asking, "Does it have to be this way? Might something need to change for me? Am I being invited to learn something new?"

It was painful, but it was necessary for my growth and relational health.

I'm sharing this with you to provide an introduction to the next phase of our series on discerning invitations, which has to do with discerning and living into the Big Invitations that come—the ones that often require our long-term attention and intention.

How do we know when they arrive? Will we say yes to them when they do? How will we go about living into them if we do say yes?

Here's one way I knew a big invitation had arrived on my doorstep in this situation: It felt unavoidable. I was in so much pain, I couldn't ignore it or stop thinking about it.

Also, I was paying attention. I noticed its connection to the pattern that had run so deep in my life for so long. I had thought those relationships were immune from it, but it turned out they weren't. What was I going to do now? To use the question from last week in a bigger way, What was the invitation here?

Other big invitations arrive different ways. It might be an illness. A death. A synchronicity you keep noticing. A conversation that changes everything. An opportunity that asks for your response. An idea that keeps returning. A recurring sense of unease. A non-renewed lease. (That last one is real for me right now—Kirk and I are living into a big invitation to move at the moment!)

However it arrives, it's there, inviting our response.

Next week we'll talk about the response part.

Yours in the big invitations,
Christianne