The Refined Collective // Risk
Photos c/o Lydia Hudgens // Outfit: Sweater: Vetta // Levi's: Encourage Vintage // Shoes: Everlane
My bank account is low again.
No time for play. I gotta make sure I can pay rent next month. The puffy bags under my eyes are so heavy my eyes burn. But I keep pushing through. Duty calls. All I see in front of me is obligation, bills, tasks, endless to-dos— Will it ever slow down? I need it to slow down. The old familiar train begins its descent onto my chest again. At what point did this start to feel normal?
Do you know any of these feelings too?
I close my eyes and try to remember what it was like to live care free… I have this memory from when I was eight. I can close my eyes, and immediately I’m transported back to this slow, warm Sunday afternoon. My mom was playing a tennis match, and I was running around on a jungle gym close by. I was the only kid on the playground for some reason. I was curiously climbing in and through and on top of things. The only sounds I could hear were my own inhales and exhales, and the ping pong of tennis balls being smacked in the distance. Then I heard an airplane overhead, and paused. I looked up to the cloudless blue sky. The only thing up there was a plane with its billowing white tale behind it. (I thought—that must be how they make clouds). So I laid down on my back like a starfish on the rubber tire ground, and watched the airplane make clouds in its dust—it seemed to stay in my line of site forever. Long after it left, I laid on the ground staring at the clouds, listening for sounds, for what seemed like hours.
Nothing out of the ordinary happened in that moment. But merely remembering it feels like an exhale. Something about it felt so still. So quiet. So peaceful… so safe. We lived in this new neighborhood so there was a lot of construction going on around us. My brother and I would ride our bikes, and literally spend hours digging for gold—we watched too much Indiana Jones. In the Bible, Jesus loves being around children. Over and over again He talks about the idea of childlike faith—inviting the stoic and wise to be like little kids again. As children we play, we imagine, we dream—anything is possible. But then we grow up. We have responsibilities. We’re trained to dim the light of imagination and creativity because it’s not efficient or a productive use of our time. We replace the magic of a childlike faith—a belief in the unseen—with black and white logic and productivity.
Lately all I want is to recover a piece of that wonder. That childlike awe and faith. That belief in the unseen. But the older I get the more faith seems like a greater and greater risk. My circumstances, bills, responsibilities, heartaches, struggles—those things are all real. I can’t pretend they’re not. But faith is choosing to see what’s in front of me, acknowledging it, then leaning into the unseen.
“Faith is surrendering control and letting go even when it feels like everything is up to me.”
Kat Harris
Faith is seeing bleak circumstances and choosing to hope anyways. Faith is seeing the endless to-do list, but trusting the world won’t end if I take a day, week, or month off.
Faith chooses risk. The risk to… hope, imagine, create, play, run, fall, skin your knees, love, be like a child. ‘Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again,’ is how C.S. Lewis puts it.
I want to lean into the unseen. I want to trust God even though everything around me says to trust myself. I want to imagine what it feels like to fly—the wind through my hair, pretend to be Cinderella, and re-read the Chronicles of Narnia for the 20th time. I want to pray into the wind and see the stories that unfold. I want to be like a child again.It feels like such a risk…yet here I am longing to take it.
Will you join me?
XO,
Kat
This post is in collaboration with The Refined Collective Series. Be sure and check out the other ladies in this wonderful group Jessi Green, Jessica Hoffman, Kathyrn McCormick, Yvette Jain
