This is Why My Word of the Year Stuck Around

This word of the year, open, I once chose—still it creeps into everything. It bids me to continue unpacking the layers, mining the depths of what vulnerability and availability have to offer.

The year I adopted the word open, it seemed I stood at a precipice. Behind me trailed memories of being present but not present, of withholding the truest parts of me in both conversation and friendship, of hiding behind safe and polished and predictable. These memories are reminiscent, perhaps, of my Enneagram 9 nature as a Peacemaker. Yet I want to broaden my way of seeing, grow in ways that go against my grain. I want to learn to live ever more open.

Open is interruptible. It is painful to live this way—painful to the part of me that is protective of my time, my efficiency, my comfort, and my security. Yet there are these beautiful yet haunting words from Ann Voskamp inviting me to press further in: “You are as healable as you are vulnerable.” There is sweetness in the pain there for the savoring. I linger.

Here, with my hand resting on the handle of our front door, my eyes fall on the burlap of my hand-crafted wreath. The burlap circles, rounding like an oversized letter O. The color contrasts with the black of my open door. O. Open. Open door. I long to posture my heart like an open door, welcoming my neighbors into my heart, home, and life. And perhaps you do as well.

I knew something was missing

When I was small, I wanted to live a large life. An across-the-world missionary was the answer I offered when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. But the truth was that I rarely showed up for the moments that comprised my actual life. My extreme shyness and stubbornness collided, and I felt stuck and unknown.

I once thought I’d found a way to live less shy and more open. My pen lingered over the space on the mission trip application that asked if I went by a nickname. That blank space afforded opportunity, I thought, to move beyond the ways my reserved personality limited me from truly connecting with others. Write a new name, and perhaps then I could be free from the reputation I felt defined me: quiet, insecure, keen to serve, valuable but only behind-the-scenes.

It would be years before I stopped feeling always the outsider, always witnessing but not fully experiencing deep friendships and community.

I was now married, mom to three. I’d gone around the world several times and realized that mission is local as well as global. But even volunteering at church and helping lead a small group left me feeling there was still something missing.

I could show up for the moments I needed to, but still not bridge out of my comfort zone in the small moments that made up the majority of my actual life. Often, I still felt like the young teen, wishing that authentically being myself could be as easy as changing my name.

The journey into open

The year I chose the word open as my word of the year was both hard and immensely freeing. Every time I wanted to retreat, not say hi to our new neighbors, not readily offer my own imperfections, not truly let those around me in, there was the word open on display on my phone lock-screen.

Until this year I only answered a knock at the door if I was expecting someone. Now we had neighbor kids playing almost daily. I’d invited neighbors in when my hair was unwashed and my face was sans make-up. Neighbors had stepped around toys and through crumbs, seen dishes, dirty and scattered across my counter.

I never knew until I adopted open as my mantra that letting others in is the only way to free the real me inside—to live fully alive in all the moments, not just a sparse sprinkling of them.

Adopting a missional mindset, I’ve learned, is about more than going somewhere far away. It’s about more than giving God our undivided time and focus part of the time. It’s about more than living it sometimes but not all times. And it’s really not about me at all.

Leaning hard into open gave me eyes to see that mission is not about the work I can do, but letting the work He is doing in me show. It’s about surrender, not doing. It’s an organic overflow of Him inside me.

Perhaps you’re reading today, and you, too, feel that tension between maintaining an impression and letting the real you be seen. We each have our own underlying reasons for steering clear of being open, as I’ve learned from studying the Enneagram.

It may be our undying focus on the needs of others, our dismissal of our own value, our avoidance of the things that are uncomfortable, or our reluctance to be confined to a definition. It might trace back to our bandwidth or our propensity to “what if.” In the same vein, we might avoid being open in our relationships because of our hesitation to be vulnerable, our impulse to be liked, or the thought we can’t dismiss that we just aren’t good enough.

We are each invited to live open

Friend, regardless of how it pushes you against your grain, I invite you to join me as I keep leaning into open.

It’s the small baby steps—the ones that are doable—that give us momentum, that change the trajectory of our life. The direction, friends, is so much more important than the pace.

So in the small moments that make up the largest part of our actual life—let’s embrace a heart posture of openness. Let’s find little ways to show up. Be authentic. Let our less-than-perfect show. Share candidly about the things God is working on inside us.

And whether our feet are at home or afar, let’s choose open, so we can live alive and point all glory back to Him.

May these words, found in Hebrews 13:21, linger today in our open hearts:

And may he express through you all that is excellent and pleasing to him through your life-union with Jesus the Anointed One who is to receive all glory forever! Amen!” (TPT)

Let’s pray.

Lord, I feel this tension of wanting to live more open yet holding back. Would You show me how You are right next to me in the moments I pull back in fear, in the moments I dismiss the nudge I know is from You. Help me learn to trust that my heart is safe because what You say is true of me is as constant and unchanging as You Yourself are. Give me the courage to push against my grain while rooting myself deeper in You. In Your precious and holy name, Jesus, I pray. Amen.

Change your actual life in less than 5 minutes per day!

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