During my first year of being a photographer, I got hired to document a wedding at an incredible estate half way between Ottawa and Montreal.  It was the middle of September by this time.  The days had begun to get shorter…the nights had begun to get colder…and I was now four months pregnant with Hudson.  After close to ten hours of shooting , it was very late in the night when I finally headed home.  The sky was black…the gravel roads winding through the rural area were completely empty…and a thick fog had descended upon everything.  The instructions seemed pretty simple at the time.  Just a few turns would take me to the highway and an hour later, I would be back in Ottawa.  I had them written down…printed them off the computer…etched them to memory.

But somehow, in all of this simplicity, I got lost.  I felt like every turn I made, was the same one I had just taken five kilometers earlier.  I was surrounded by dark forests, completely vacant roads and not a single distinguishable landmark in sight.  I eventually pulled over on the side of the road to double check my directions and figure out where I had gone wrong.  Meanwhile, the only cell phone we had at the time was sitting on my desk back home with a dead battery.

And that’s when it happened.  That’s when the car died.  Completely.  Out of nowhere.  Nothing worked.

I sat in the driver’s seat, barely able to see ten feet in front of me through the night fog, while every element of my vehicle just shut down.  I was lost.  Really lost.  I had no idea where I was…no idea where to go…and furthermore, no idea how I got there.

First, I panicked.  Then, I cried.  Finally, I just got out and walked.

I wiped my tears away, took perhaps the deepest breath that I’ve ever taken…and I walked.  I walked through the cold…through the fog…through the darkness.  I walked through the uncertainty.  I scared the crap out of myself on more than one occasion and eventually, I found a house.  A tiny little house with an older couple doing their dishes in the middle of the night.  When the man answered the door, I fell into a pile of tears on his front porch.

I was found.

The more I get to know God, the more I think He works this way a lot in our lives.  He watches us spend our days constantly making wrong turns…constantly going in the wrong direction…and often times, losing sight of where we’re going.  Losing sight of everything around us for that matter.  And so God steps in and takes action.  He brings us to a complete halt on the side of the road and forces us to consider a different option.

Something that I’ve struggled with for most of my life is comparison.  Mixed with perfectionism, this cocktail has been my drug of choice for as long as I can remember.  I see someone in all of their beauty…in all of their certainty…in all of their accomplishments, and in turn, I see all of my brokenness.  As a result, I push towards being better…but because my only understanding of better is perfect…then I inevitably fail.  I then proceed to see everyone who isn’t failing…and the cycle continues.

I feel like God has been calling me out on this lately.  That He’s begun showing me the glitches in my system…the frailty of such logic.  I feel like God is tired of watching me lose my direction.  He’s tired of watching me aimlessly spin my wheels.  So I feel like He’s pulled me over on the side of the road to say “Gen…this isn’t working.  It’s time to get out and walk.  I know it’s dark.  I know it’s scary.  But it’s time to stop…”

This coming Wednesday, is the beginning of Lent.  A beautiful season of reflection and sacrifice.  And this year, I’ve decided to give up Facebook {insert nervous withdrawal twitches here!}.  Because here’s the thing…as much as I love Facebook {and I do love Facebook!}…it also nourishes my addiction and feeds the beast of my insecurities.  It provides the perfect outlet for comparing my worst days to everyone else’s best days.  And sometimes, being so readily plugged into everyone’s life makes it too easy to forget about my own.  It just becomes too easy to forget that – even on days that seem really hard…I’m still making progress – and even on days that seem like I’m constantly hurting…I’m still healing.  And so…it’s time to get out and walk for a bit.  In the fog of uncertainty.  In the fog of insecurity.

Back when I was stranded, I remember that first moment of deciding to get out of the car to be the hardest.  The scariest.  And it feels the same way now too.  I’m afraid that I won’t be missed…that no one will even notice I’m gone.  I’m afraid that this blog will never be read again and that my words will simply vanish into the night.  That they will simply blend in with the rest of the darkness…never providing the light that I always hoped it would be.  Even for myself.

But as I write this, it occurs to me that I haven’t yet told you the most beautiful part of my story…

So, this amazing couple – these strangers – took me into their home to get warm, to finish crying and to make some phone calls.  And once I had found a tow truck to take me back to the city…we piled into the couple’s car to head back down the long, dark dirt road in an attempt to find my own.   About four kilometers away, there it was…slightly slanted in the ditch…dew starting to collected over the surface.  It seemed strange to look at it from the warmth of another vehicle knowing how scared I had been just a couple of hours before.

We parked in front of my car, settling in for the potentially long wait as the tow truck tried to find us.  The couple decided to take a quick look at the engine and battery to see if we could get it started in the meantime and just like that, within seconds, the car started.  Perfectly.  As though nothing had ever happened.  I stood there on the road, my own headlights blinding my vision, feeling half relieved and half furious all at the same time.  What the heck had happened?  How did I end up here – on a dirt road in the middle of the night – because of a car that apparently wasn’t broken at all??

In retrospect, I know exactly what happened…

God saw me getting lost in the darkness.  With every wrong turn, I was getting deeper into the forest.  Farther away from where I wanted to go.  Further from help…further from home…further and further from being found.  So He stopped me in my tracks.  Because sometimes we don’t even realize that we’re lost.  And other times, we know we’re lost, but we just don’t realize how lost we really are.  We mean well.  We want to go in the right direction.  But all the turns seem the same.  They all seem headed in the same direction.

Nowhere.

Once my car started working, we called to cancel the tow truck and the estimated two hour wait that came along with it.  But the new challenge was that I still didn’t know where I was.  It’s hard to get where you’re going if you don’t know where you’re starting.  My new friends did though.  They knew where we were…because they had never left.  They had been there all along, so they knew exactly where I needed to go.  But they also felt that I had been through enough for one night and that I had spent enough time alone in the dark.  So they led the way.  The guided me all the way back to Ottawa.  To my front door.  To my husband.  To safety.

First they found me.  Then they took me home.

And that is so often how God works.  He lets you walk through the dark so that you can {finally} fall on your knees and ultimately, be shown the way.  He – so often – wants to show us the way.  The way to our dreams…the way to our great love…the way to becoming the very best version of ourselves.  But we tend to follow everyone else’s directions…our own directions…the wrong directions.  Then end up surprised when we find ourselves lost.

So, I will spend the next six weeks trying to follow His direction as best as I can.  And I believe that means taking some time to walk alone.  To wipe my tears away…take a deep breath…and walk down the road surrounded in the all encompassing fog that is my own insecurity.  To get through my day without using comparison to open up my wounds of inadequacy.  To realize that the only perfection I will ever see in this life is my perfectly forgiven imperfection.

It’s time to get out of the car.  It’s time to venture into the darkness.

And best of all…it’s time to let myself be found again…