Still A Wildflower

Author: Tiffany Matheson

  • Relentless Pursuit

    Relentless Pursuit

    I keep coming back to Psalm 139.

    It has always been one of the most beautiful Psalms to me, but I think I understand it differently now than I did years ago.

    God examines my heart.

    He knows everything about me.

    He knows when I sit down and when I get up. He knows my thoughts before I even understand them myself. He knows what I am going to say before the words ever leave my mouth.

    He goes before me.

    He follows behind me.

    There is nowhere I can go where He isn’t already there.

    And somewhere along the way, I think I forgot that.

    I started comparing my relationship with God to my relationships with people.

    When my life blew up, people judged me.

    People fled.

    People who had once been part of my life wanted nothing to do with me. People talked. They gossiped. I felt the looks when I walked into a room or saw someone in public.

    There were a few who stayed beside me, and I will never forget them. I will never forget the texts, the calls and the way they acted like Jesus to me.

    But so many didn’t.

    And somewhere in all of that, I think I decided God must have left too.

    If people who claimed to love me could walk away because of what I had done, surely a holy God wanted nothing to do with me.

    So I hid.

    But here’s what I wish I could go back and tell that version of myself:

    GOD NEVER LEFT!

    Not for one second.

    In fact, when I look back now, I realize He pursued me even more relentlessly.

    Some of the darkest times of my life were the times I felt God the most.

    And it wasn’t always the warm, comforting side of God that I wanted to feel.

    Sometimes it was conviction.

    Sometimes He made me painfully aware of what my choices had cost.

    Sometimes He showed me things about myself that I didn’t want to see.

    He didn’t shrug His shoulders at my sin and say it didn’t matter.

    It mattered.

    I had broken His heart.

    And He loved me enough to show me that.

    But somehow, even His conviction was smothered in love.

    That’s the difference I didn’t understand back then.

    People judged me and walked away.

    God convicted me and came closer.

    People talked about me.

    God talked to me.

    People saw what I had done and decided who I was.

    God knew every single thing I had done, every thought I had thought, every motive buried inside my heart—and still pursued me.

    Relentlessly.

    Psalm 139 says:

    Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?

    I know the answer to that now.

    Nowhere.

    I couldn’t outrun Him.

    I couldn’t disappoint Him into abandoning me.

    I couldn’t wander somewhere He wasn’t willing to follow.

    Even when I made my bed in the darkest places of my life, He was there.

    I wish I had understood that then.

    I wish I hadn’t confused the judgment of people with the heart of God.

    I wish I hadn’t allowed the whispers, the stares and the opinions of people to convince me that I needed to hide.

    Because if I could go back and stand beside that woman now, I think I would tell her:

    Don’t mistake their absence for His.

    Don’t mistake their judgment for His voice.

    Don’t hide from the One who already knows everything about you.

    He knows the whole story.

    He knows what you did.

    He knows why you did it.

    He knows what it will cost you.

    He knows who you were.

    And He already knows who you are becoming.

    You don’t have to run from Him.

    He’s already there.

    And years later, when you finally look back over all the places you’ve been, you’re going to realize something you can’t quite see right now.

    You thought you were trying to find your way back to God.

    But God had been pursuing you the entire time.

    Relentlessly.

  • Twelve Years Is a Long Time

    I wrote a devotion about the woman in Mark 5 many years ago.

    Back then, twelve years was just a number in her story. But today, reading the story of the bleeding woman, those twelve years stood out so much more.

    Because it has been twelve years since my own life blew up.

    Twelve years.

    There is something about living through a number that changes the way you read it.

    Mark tells us about a woman who had been bleeding for twelve years. We don’t know her name. We don’t know how old she was. We don’t know if she had a husband or children or what her life looked like before the bleeding began.

    We just know that she had suffered.

    For twelve years.

    She had gone to doctor after doctor. She had spent everything she had trying to get better. And Scripture says that instead of getting better, she had gotten worse.

    I wonder how many times she thought, Maybe this will be the thing that fixes me.

    And it wasn’t.

    Another doctor.

    Another disappointment.

    Another year.

    Until one year became five.

    Five became ten.

    And ten became twelve.

    Twelve years is a long time to suffer.

    I understand that differently now.

    My suffering doesn’t look like hers. I haven’t spent twelve years physically bleeding. But emotionally, there were years when it felt like the life was being drained right out of me.

    Twelve years ago, my life blew up.

    Some of it was because of choices I made. Some of the pain was mine to own. Some came from what happened afterward. There was loss and shame and guilt. There were relationships that changed forever. There were consequences I couldn’t undo.

    And somewhere along the way, twelve years passed.

    There were years when I ran from God.

    Years when I was angry.

    Years when I hid.

    Years when I wondered whether the woman I had once been was gone forever.

    And there were years when God quietly began putting pieces back together.

    That’s why I read her story differently today.

    This woman had heard about Jesus.

    That’s all it took to awaken something inside her that twelve years of disappointment hadn’t completely killed.

    Hope.

    She believed that if she could just touch His clothes, she would be healed.

    So she went.

    Imagine the courage it must have taken simply to enter that crowd. She pushed through people until she was close enough to reach for Him.

    And she touched His garment.

    Immediately, the bleeding stopped.

    After twelve years.

    Can you imagine that moment?

    The thing that had defined her days for more than a decade was suddenly over.

    She could have disappeared into the crowd with her healing.

    But Jesus stopped.

    “Who touched my clothes?”

    Of course someone had touched Him. There were people everywhere. His disciples made sure to point that out—as if Jesus didn’t know.

    But Jesus wasn’t going to let her leave believing that all she had received from Him was a healed body.

    He wanted her.

    The woman came trembling and fell at His feet and told Him the whole truth.

    And Jesus said something to her that I can’t stop thinking about now.

    “Daughter.”

    We never learn her name.

    But we learn what Jesus called her.

    Daughter.

    For twelve years she had been known by what was wrong with her.

    The bleeding woman.

    The unclean woman.

    The suffering woman.

    The woman who couldn’t get better.

    Jesus gave her another name.

    Daughter.

    And maybe that is what I understand now that I couldn’t have understood when I first wrote about her years ago.

    Sometimes healing isn’t God returning us to the person we were before everything happened.

    Sometimes healing is discovering who we are after it.

    I spent a lot of years wishing I could go backward.

    Back to the woman before the affair.

    Before the divorce.

    Before the church fallout.

    Before the shame.

    Before I disappointed people.

    Before I disappointed myself.

    I wanted God to somehow erase the story.

    But He hasn’t.

    Instead, He has met me inside of the blowup.

    And somewhere during these twelve years, I stopped asking Him to make me the woman I used to be.

    I’m starting to understand that He is making me someone new.

    Maybe you have your own twelve years.

    Maybe it’s three.

    Maybe it’s twenty.

    Maybe you’re still counting.

    Maybe you’ve tried everything you know to fix what hurts and somehow you still find yourself carrying it.

    The woman in Mark 5 reminds me that the length of our suffering does not determine the ending of our story.

    Twelve years wasn’t too long for Jesus.

    Neither is yours.

    And neither was mine.

    Maybe the greatest miracle isn’t that we get our old lives back.

    Maybe it’s that after everything we’ve lost, everything we’ve done, everything we’ve survived, and everything we wish we could change, we reach for Jesus and discover He hasn’t lost sight of us in the crowd.

    He stops.

    He sees us.

    And He calls us closer.

    Not by our failure.

    Not by our shame.

    Not by the thing that happened twelve years ago.

    Daughter.


  • Apparently 53 Has Its Own Set of Rules


    I don’t remember agreeing to any of this.

    Apparently somewhere around 53, the rules change and there is no handbook for it.

    Let’s start with hormones.

    What the hell is going on with this body of mine?

    Actually, is it even mine anymore?

    Because there are days I would genuinely like to climb out of my own skin.

    And the hot flashes.

    Can we talk about the hot flashes?

    Hot flashes should seriously come with a handbook.

    Congratulations! You’ve reached this exciting stage of womanhood. You will now spontaneously combust for absolutely no reason.

    One minute I’m hot.

    Not regular hot.

    HOT.

    Like, get these clothes off my body immediately hot.

    Five minutes later?

    I’m freezing.

    Apparently my internal thermostat has completely given up and is just pushing buttons at random now.

    Then there’s the brain fog.

    Some days I feel like I’m walking around inside a cloud. It’s this weird, hazy, almost out-of-body feeling where I’m functioning, talking, working and doing all the normal things…

    But part of my brain is apparently buffering.

    I don’t know how to explain to my husband that an alien has taken over my body!

    And sleep.

    I vaguely remember sleep.

    Before 53, my head would hit the pillow and I’d wake up eight hours later.

    That was it.

    I did not appreciate that nearly enough.

    Now I have trouble falling asleep. Then I finally fall asleep, wake up because I have to pee, and spend the next however-long trying to convince my brain that 2:47 a.m. is NOT the appropriate time to review every decision I’ve made since 1989.

    Some nights I swear I’m awake more than I’m asleep.

    And while my body is apparently going through some sort of hostile takeover, something else happened.

    My kids grew up.

    Like…all the way up.

    They’re out there doing adult things. Building their own lives. Making their own decisions.

    They don’t need me the way they used to.

    And the strangest part?

    I’m not the #1 woman in their lives anymore.

    And that’s exactly how it should be.

    I wouldn’t want it any other way.

    I have beautiful, smart daughters-in-love whom my sons adore. I raised my boys to grow up, build lives of their own and hopefully find women they love. I prayed for these young women and God faithfully answered.

    And now they’re doing exactly that.

    But nobody really prepares you for how beautiful and weird that transition is.

    You spend decades being needed.

    Mom, where are my shoes?

    Mom, what’s for dinner?

    Mom, can you take me…

    Mom, can you help me…

    Mom.

    Mom.

    MOM.

    And then one day…

    They’re fine.

    And now I’ve entered another strange stage of 53.

    Waiting for grandbabies.

    Some days I cannot freaking wait.

    Give me the babies.

    I want the snuggles. The smell. The tiny clothes. The little person calling me whatever grandmother name they eventually decide and hope it doesn’t make me sound 87. Im thinking Nonna.

    And then there are days when I look around at this absolutely crazy world and think…

    You know what?

    I’m good waiting.

    Because having grandchildren means putting another piece of your heart out into a world you can’t control.

    I’ve already got four giant pieces of mine walking around out there.

    I’m not sure my nervous system needs another one just yet.

    So here I am.

    53!

    Hot.

    Cold.

    Tired.

    Foggy.

    Occasionally wondering why I walked into a room.

    Watching my kids build lives that don’t revolve around me anymore.

    Waiting for babies I’m desperate for and perfectly happy to wait for.

    And trying to figure out exactly what the rules are for this part of life.

    But here’s the thing.

    I actually really like 53.

    Sure, I’d like my hormones to calm the hell down and I’d appreciate eight uninterrupted hours of sleep again.

    But 53 has given me something I didn’t have when I was younger.

    I’ve lost a lot of my give-a-$#*^ about nonsense.

    And let me tell you, that is incredibly freeing.

    I don’t have the energy for drama anymore.

    I don’t want to spend hours analyzing why someone said what they said, what they meant by it, whether they’re mad at me or what I should have said differently.

    At some point, you just get tired.

    Not physically tired.

    Although…yes.

    Obviously that too. 😂

    You get tired of carrying everyone else”s stuff that doesn’t belong to you.

    Other people’s moods.

    Other people’s opinions.

    Other people’s negativity.

    Other people’s expectations of who you’re supposed to be.

    And eventually you arrive at this beautiful place called:

    I JUST DON’T CARE.

    Not in a mean way.

    Not in an I don’t care about anybody way.

    More like…

    I’m finally learning what deserves my energy and what doesn’t.

    And this is a whole new world for me because I am a people pleaser.

    I’ve spent a good portion of my life making sure everybody else is okay.

    Are you happy?

    Are you comfortable?

    Are you upset with me?

    What can I do?

    What do you need?

    How can I fix it?

    Apparently at 53 you start realizing:

    Other people’s happiness is not my full-time job.

    Who knew? 😂

    I’m learning to let things go.

    I’m learning that someone can be disappointed with me and I don’t have to immediately fix it.

    Someone can misunderstand me and I don’t have to write a 14-page dissertation explaining myself.

    Someone can have an opinion about me…

    and I can go water my flowers.

    Honestly, I think this might be my favorite part of getting older.

    I like the simplicity I’m learning to choose for my life.

    I like staying home.

    I like gardening.

    I like quiet.

    And apparently, I like chickens now.

    I have three hens.

    Darla. Dot. And Pepper.

    I had absolutely NO idea how much work three chickens could possibly be.

    They’re chickens.

    How hard could it be?

    Apparently very.

    I have a love/hate relationship with these ridiculous birds.

    I love them.

    I enjoy watching them.

    They make me laugh.

    And they can piss me off faster than you would think three animals with brains the size of peas should be able to.

    But there’s something about going outside, watering my plants, checking on Darla, Dot and Pepper, puttering around my yard and just being home that makes me happy.

    And maybe younger me wouldn’t have understood that.

    Younger me was busy.

    Raising four boys. Working. Church. Bible studies. Serving. Trying to keep everybody happy. Trying to be everything everybody needed me to be.

    53-year-old me?

    She’s starting to understand the beauty of a quieter life.

    Not a boring life.

    A life I actually get to choose.

    Maybe that’s the trade-off.

    My body is getting weirder.

    My kids need me less.

    Sleep has apparently left the building.

    My metabolism and I are no longer on speaking terms.

    But for the first time in my life…

    I need less too.

    Less noise.

    Less approval.

    Less drama.

    Less explaining.

    Less trying to make everybody happy.

    I want more time at home.

    More flowers.

    More laughter.

    More time with the people I love.

    More date nights with my husband.

    More mornings outside with my coffee.

    And yes, apparently more chickens.

    Although three is enough.

    Seriously. Three is enough. 😂

    I don’t have this stage of life figured out.

    Some days I’m embracing it.

    Some days I’m googling, “Is this normal at 53?”

    And some days I’d just really like to sleep through the damn night.

    But I’m beginning to realize that getting older isn’t only about what I’m losing.

    There’s a lot I’m gaining too.

    Confidence.

    Perspective.

    Simplicity.

    The ability to let shit go.

    And maybe most importantly, the freedom to finally build a life around some of the things I actually want.

    So yes…

    Apparently 53 has its own set of rules.

    Some of them are ridiculous.

    Some of them I’d like to return.

    But some of them?

    I think I’m going to like very much. 🌼

  • When You Start Trusting Your Own Voice Again…

    About twelve years ago, I lost my way.

    That’s a story for another day. And trust me, it’s a story.

    I made choices that hurt a lot of people. Not strangers. People I loved. People who loved me. My own flesh and blood.

    There isn’t a prettier way to say that, and I’m not going to try to find one.

    But here’s the strange part.

    Somewhere in losing my way, I found more of myself.

    That doesn’t excuse the choices I made. It doesn’t erase the hurt I caused. Both things can be true. I can deeply regret parts of how I got here and still recognize that somewhere along that messy, painful road, I started becoming more honest about who I was.

    The problem was, I didn’t trust her.

    I think somewhere in the aftermath of my choices, I stopped trusting myself.

    I lost my voice because I wasn’t sure anymore that my voice deserved to be trusted.

    I lost my daily walk with God. I lost everyday life with my kids. I lost pieces of a life that, at one time, I probably assumed would always be there.

    And shame moved into all those empty spaces.

    For a long time, guilt and shame consumed me.

    Maybe part of me believed they should.

    When you’ve caused hurt, there’s this idea that carrying the weight of it forever is somehow proof that you’re sorry enough.

    So I carried it.

    And I ran.

    I ran and hid from God.

    Not literally, of course. I knew He was there. I knew the verses. I knew all the right Christian answers.

    Heck, I had taught some of them.

    There was a time when, from the outside, I probably looked like a woman who was really after God’s heart.

    I went to church twice a week. I led Bible studies. I went on mission trips. I served at VBS. I served the homeless. I organized women’s retreats. I stood at the front door of my church and made damn sure that whoever walked through those doors felt welcome—no matter where they came from, what they looked like, or what their story was.

    And I loved it.

    I miss every single bit of it with all of my heart.

    Those were good things.

    Beautiful things.

    But I’ve learned that doing all the things that make us look like we’re after God’s heart isn’t necessarily the same thing as actually knowing His heart.

    Because then my sin wasn’t private anymore.

    The things I had done wrong weren’t tucked safely between me and God.

    They were out there.

    For people to see.

    And when your sin becomes public, you learn some things about grace.

    You also learn some things about Christians.

    Some of the deepest wounds I carry from that time came from other Christians.

    There is a wound that we create ourselves that is hard to explain. When everything you already know is wrong within you is suddenly exposed for everyone else to see, it burns something deep into your heart.

    The reputation is gone.

    The image is shattered.

    People have decided what they think about you.

    And when I was already drowning in my own guilt, I took their judgment and piled it right on top.

    Eventually I couldn’t tell the difference between conviction and shame.

    So I hid from God.

    Which is kind of crazy when you think about it.

    I knew about grace.

    I had taught about grace.

    I believed in grace.

    I just wasn’t sure there was enough of it for me.

    Shame told me there wasn’t.

    Shame told me I had disappointed God too deeply.

    Shame told me grace was something I could tell other people about but no longer had the right to claim for myself.

    And for a long time, I believed it.

    But over the last five years, something has started changing.

    Slowly.

    I’ve released a little more.

    And then a little more.

    Not because what happened doesn’t matter.

    It matters.

    Not because I’ve decided all of my choices were okay.

    They weren’t.

    But because I’m beginning to understand there is a difference between taking responsibility for what you’ve done and sentencing yourself to a lifetime of shame because of it.

    And strangely enough, learning to trust my own voice again didn’t begin with listening to myself.

    It began with listening for God.

    I started seeking Him again.

    Not performing for Him.

    Not serving to prove something.

    Not leading a Bible study.

    Not sitting in a church pew twice a week.

    Not organizing another event or going on another mission trip or doing all the things that once made me feel like I was doing Christianity right.

    Just seeking Him.

    And let me tell you, it hasn’t always been pretty.

    It’s dirty.

    It’s messy.

    It’s hard.

    And it doesn’t always look like what we Christians think seeking God is supposed to look like.

    Sometimes there isn’t a Bible study.

    Sometimes there isn’t worship music playing in the background.

    Sometimes it’s just a woman sitting in the wreckage of her own choices asking God:

    Are You still here?

    Do You still want me?

    Is there really enough grace for this?

    And little by little, I started hearing Him again.

    Or maybe I finally realized He had never stopped speaking.

    God wasn’t the one hiding.

    I was.

    And that brings me to a question I’ve had to wrestle with:

    If God has grace for me, why has it been so hard for me to have grace for myself?

    I don’t have a perfectly wrapped-up Christian answer for that.

    I’m still learning it.

    I’m learning there is a difference between repentance and living in perpetual punishment.

    I’m learning that forgiveness doesn’t mean pretending there wasn’t damage.

    I’m learning that owning what I’ve done doesn’t require hating the woman who did it forever.

    And I’m learning that maybe I understood grace intellectually for a very long time.

    But needing grace?

    Desperately needing to believe that the grace I had talked about, taught about and offered so freely to everyone else was actually available to me?

    That has taught me something entirely different about the heart of God.

    There is a lot we Christians still need to learn.

    A lot about grace.

    A lot about forgiveness.

    A lot about loving people when their sin isn’t the kind they can conveniently hide.

    A lot about what it actually means to be after God’s heart.

    Because these days, I don’t look as much like the Christian woman I once thought I was supposed to look like.

    But I think I understand the heart of God more now than I did when I was doing all the right things.

    Maybe being after God’s heart has a whole lot less to do with looking like we have it all together…

    and a whole lot more to do with discovering that He has been after ours all along.

    And somewhere in all of this, I’ve started hearing another voice again.

    Mine.

    She’s different now.

    She doesn’t have all the answers.

    She doesn’t need everyone to agree with her.

    She’s still learning when to speak and when to be quiet.

    She’s still learning to forgive herself.

    She’s still learning to trust herself.

    But she’s there.

    And the more I listen for His voice, the less afraid I become of mine.

    I’m starting to trust her again.

    She just has some scars now.

    And maybe that’s okay.

    Maybe the wildest, most beautiful things don’t grow untouched.

    Maybe they grow through the dirt.

  • Here I Go Again…

    Well, here I go again. Another blog. Another adventure of writing.

    I love it, but I have to admit, it’s intimidating. Writing puts you out there. It asks you to be vulnerable and transparent and to share your heart.

    Life is full of valleys of heartache and mountaintops of full hearts and joy. I wanted a place where I could share all of those moments. The joy, the sorrow, the ordinary days and the extraordinary days. The happy moments, but also the sad ones. The beautiful parts of us as human souls and, yes, the ugly parts too.

    I am a woman in her fifties with grown children and parents who are aging. It’s a place in life I think most of us look forward to. We imagine that by now we’ll have figured some things out.

    And here I am, kinda struggling in it.

    I have four amazing sons. I have been so blessed by my children. Raising four boys was hard, but looking back from this side of it, it was incredibly rewarding.

    I’m sure if you ask A, J, N & M they would remember me yelling all the time or grabbing the wooden spoon. But I hope they remember the home-cooked meals. Sharing our goods and bads around the dinner table. Bedtime stories. Me being their biggest fan at their games—and there were so many games. Summers spent at the waterpark. Trips to Big Bear to sled in the snow. The kisses on foreheads when they were having a rough day to our mother and son date nights. 

    All of these memories I cherish in my heart.

    Now I get to enjoy the young men they have become and the daughters-in-love they have given me. I prayed for these daughters. I prayed that each one would be the perfect fit for my son’s heart, and God has been faithful.

    And while my children are building lives and families of their own, I find myself on the other side of life too. My dad will be 80. My mom will be 79.

    Life keeps changing.

    Maybe that’s part of what has brought me back here—to writing.

    Years ago, I wrote a book called Return to Me: What if God Hates Religion? At the time, those words came out of the life I knew then and the things God was teaching me then.

    But a lot of life has happened since I wrote that book.

    And I’ve changed.

    My family has changed. My relationships have changed. My understanding of faith has been challenged, stretched and, in some ways, stripped down. There are things I believed I understood back then that I see differently now. There are other things I wrote that I believe more deeply today because I’ve had to actually live them.

    Maybe that’s what this blog is really about.

    Returning.

    Returning to God. Returning to ourselves. Returning after disappointment. Returning after getting things wrong. Returning after life doesn’t turn out exactly the way we thought it would.

    Because life isn’t lived amongst the wildflowers.

    It’s lived mostly being the last wildflower left.

    The wilderness of ordinary Tuesdays, quiet prayers, difficult conversations, tending chickens, waiting rooms, backyard gardens and comfy living room couches.

    And maybe if we look closely enough, we’ll find that God has been planting something amongst the wildflowers all along.

    That’s what I want to write about here.

    The things I’m learning now. The things I thought I knew then. The questions I still don’t have answers to. Marriage and motherhood. Grown children and aging parents. Faith and doubt. Joy and heartbreak. Getting older. Starting over. And finding God in places I wasn’t expecting to find Him.

    I don’t know exactly where this blog will go.

    But then again, I don’t exactly know where this season of life is going either

    So here I go again…