On Leadership and wanting to throw up

So I accepted this volunteer outreach leader position at church.
I'm thrilled, exhilerated and slightly nauseous.
I see all these great leaders both in and out of church that I so want to be like, and I'm terrified that I can't.
Which should be ok, because shouldn't I want to be the leader that God is calling me to be and not the leader that God called them to be? If only I could explain that to my brain.

Ryan sent me some blogs and books to read on leadership, because I told him that I feel ill-equipped on how to be a leader and asked him for help.

One of them, waaaaaay back in the archives (because I obsessively read in chronological order when discovering new blogs) this was said:
"The mental image of a group that’s well led doesn’t have a clear and established leader. In fact, a person who identifies himself or herself as a leader, too openly, is viewed with suspicion and maybe even scorn."

I think that's where my issue lies. I feel like if I step up and say that I want to be a leader and want to be great at it that people will think that I'm "uppity" or aspiring to heights that aren't as humble as God thinks they should be. Worse still, what if there is a perceived agenda that is seen in my actions?
What if I become so crippled by these what if's that I never even get a chance to lead in any tangible way?

But I want this. Badly.
I want to learn how to lead, I want to learn to nurture vision in this outreach thing, seeing needs and then seeing crazy unique ways to fill them, ways that don't just fill the need, but that completely transform the people that help fill the need.
I want to learn to be more bold in my conversations with other people, with seeking out relationships that I can build into. I want to see the potential in other people and help them tap into a passion for serving in whatever capacity that means.
I want to be great at this. I don't want to just fill this space because someone should, I want to be in this space because I'm the one that can fill it the best and maxamize the potential of this outreach thing.

I have no idea how to do any of that.
But I will.

You gave your life to Jesus Christ

You were not the same after that.
I love Ben Folds.
I'm listening to this song called Not the Same. There's a line in it that said the above (You gave your life to Jesus Christ...you were not the same after that)
As I approach the anniversary of the night I did that I've been reflecting on all the things that are different and yet the same about my life. The way I see people and react to them. The way my mental confusion still gets the better of me and the way that old habits are still hard to kill.

But it's totally different and totally the same simultaneously.
I feel at times that I'm so blindly feeling my way through life that I can't quite pinpoint what it is that is my goal. Where exactly it is that I think I'm going.
Is that ok? I think so.
At some point should I grow up and make plans, or even (dare I say it) commit to someone beyond me in a relational way?
Some days I feel so incapable. So incompetant in even caring for myself (just a look around my house will do that to me most days)
I fell asleep with my glasses on last night. They ran away and I can't find them. I stripped my bed, moved my bed and the gargantuan pile of clothes on the floor and the glasses are no where to be found.
Maybe the kitties took them and are using them to read under the sofa while I'm at work.

Other days I feel dangerously overqualified, like I could fly if only I just put my mind to it.
It's all just so normal isn't it? This vaccilation between incompetance and capability.

I had no idea what I was getting into when I gave my life to Jesus Christ. A lot of the time I still don't.
I'm holding on for the ride and hoping I do a decent job of representing He who saved me in a very real and physical way.

It's just going to have to be ok that I may never know what I'm going to be when I grow up, or if I never finish that damn college degree that mocks me daily, or even if I never settle down and look like the married and committed.
Suppose I never met Him, this Jesus fellow? Suppose I never fell in love with Him irrationally and against every sane thought in my head at the time.
Suppose I never spoke to Steve about him, suppose Steve never told me he was an asshole just trying to live like Jesus.

So 5 years ago I gave my life to Jesus Christ, and I was not the same after that.
Which makes me the luckiest girl.

I didn't even know I was lying

When I said you didn't break me
When I said I would be fine
When I assured you moving on wasn't that hard and I had already forgiven you
I didn't even know I was lying during all of those hours long conversations dissecting the lies you knowingly told.
It surprised me today when I was working through my panic that thoughts of you once again bubbled to the surface, like my shadow you are always with me even when I can't see you.
This damage is inconvenient to even me, trying to substitute relationally that which will never truly satisfy.

I say I love you without using those words

True Danger

Left bleeding
Only a partial heart and soul
How can I go on, move on
Why should I when I have such a tattered and wasted heart
Empty with nothing left for you to take, to see

How trecherous this field of mines
The certainty that moving forward will cost me the very life I've tenuously taped back together
The life I'm not convinced I'm willing to give to this cause

Poverty, homelessness, war and disease raveged countries, famine and the lonely desperation of others
To these I will gladly give my life
There is no danger there

True danger lies in giving you me
ending up alone again
empty in this bed

Quotedely Quote Quote

Here is a quote from MLK Jr, I'm reading his autobiography right now:

I have always felt that ultimately along the way of life and individual must stand up and be counted and be willing to face the consequences whatever they are. And if he is filled with fear he cannot do it. My great prayer is always for God to save me from paralysis of crippling fear, because I think when a person lives with the fears of the consequences for his personal life he can never do anything in terms of lifting the whole of humanity and solving many of the social problems which we confront in every age and every generation.
MLK Jr.

I'm really enjoying this bio.

Key West here I come!

Well, in 12 hours I'll be heading out from cold, blustery, Cincinnati to Key West Florida!
I have my packing list, I'm stopping by to get a new book for the trip and hopefully heading to bed early since I have to be up and leaving around 4am to head to the airport.

I'd like to say I'll miss you all....but the sun and sand may lull me into forgetting all about you
(which we all know is not true but can we pretend for a minute?)

Tony Hoagland

America
by Tony Hoagland .

Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud
Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison

Whose walls are made of RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes
Where you can’t tell the show from the commercials,

And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is,
He says that even when he’s driving to the mall in his Isuzu Trooper with a gang of his friends,

letting rap music pour over them
Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers,

even then he feels Buried alive,
captured and suffocated in the folds Of the thick satin quilt of America

And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,
or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade,

And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night,
It was not blood but money That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills

Spilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—,
He gasped “Thank god—those Ben Franklins were Clogging up my heart—
And so I perish happily, Freed from that which kept me from my liberty”— .

Which was when I knew it was a dream,
since my dad Would never speak in rhymed couplets,

And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes
And I think, “I am asleep in America too, And I don’t know how to wake myself either,”

And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:
“I was listening to the cries of the past,
When I should have been listening to the cries of the future.”

But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable
Or what kind of nightmare it might be

When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you
And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river .

Even while others are drowning underneath you
And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters

And yet it seems to be your own hand
Which turns the volume higher?