Child of God

Sarah blogs at Acceptingtheunexpectedjourney and talks about learning through life’s complexities. I talk to her about her claim being a child of God, marriage, motherhood, unconditional love, and patience in her faith.

Welcome to my series on practical faith. I have said countless times that it is easy to memorize scripture. It is even easier to preach it and text it. Faith is challenged when the rubber hits the road. It is a different ball game to put faith into practice. However, people notice unconditional love, when you serve them and do not want anything in return and just be there for them. It is this part of practical faith that fascinates me.

Sarah, welcome to my blog. I want to know a little about you?

Hi! My name is Sarah Styf. Despite being a California baby, I spent most of my life raised in the Midwest. When I married my husband, we stayed in the Midwest for thirteen more years but traded Michigan for Indiana. We became Midwest transplants to Texas five years ago and we love the warmer winters. We have two amazing kiddos (11 and 9) and two middle-aged dogs. I’m a high school English teacher and yearbook advisor who loves to write in my “spare” time.

You make a bold statement on all your social media channels that you are a child of God. Talk to me about this statement. What does it mean? How can we embrace it in our hearts and minds?

Being a child of God means that, that is my first identity. I love Jesus, I love the gospel, and I believe that should drive my every action. Sure, I’m sinful and I screw up (a lot), but at the end of the day, how I approach the world and how I treat people should reflect that identity. I want the rest of the world to know that God loves and forgives us even in our brokenness. Jesus came to rescue the lost. I think that a lot of people have forgotten that and need to remember that in their interaction with others.

Walk me through your dating relationship. How did it evolve to marriage and to husband and wife? I am sure it is a perfect marriage?

Jeff and I met shortly after we graduated from the SAME high school. There were only about 250 in our graduating class, but because I was a junior transfer, we somehow never met. Mutual friends introduced us just because they wanted me to hang out with them after closing at McDonald’s. Honestly, it was a really rocky start, especially since I was headed to Nebraska and he was staying in Michigan. But when we finally started officially dating, we worked out the distance. Our marriage has been nearly 20 years of growing together. I often say that long-distance was terrible but it made us better. We both spent time discovering ourselves and having our own adult lives (as much as college kids can) before we got married and had to learn how to grow together. And we have to work on our marriage constantly. We aren’t perfect, but we are perfect for each other. God knew that which is why I’m pretty sure we didn’t meet until after graduation. We never would have dated if we knew each other in high school. We were too different at that point in our lives.

Motherhood has its own expectations. Anything about it surprised you? What have you learned from that experience?

I didn’t know the depth of the love I would have for my kids and just how different my relationships would be with them. I’ve worked really hard to keep communication open with them and be honest with them (in age-appropriate ways) about everything. I have such deep conversations with my 11-year-old daughter and I hope that she always sees me as someone she can come to. It is the hardest and most rewarding job in the world.

My daughter and son teach me every day about unconditional love, patience, and myself …This is a powerful statement on your blog. Help me understand this statement?

I see so much of myself in both kids in different ways. I’ve learned a lot about my own personality watching them grow up and it’s helped me better understand why I responded to things as a child as I watch them. And being a parent takes so much patience because when our kids are holding up a mirror to us, it is hard to accept. And they are unpredictable. I often struggle with my own kids in ways that I don’t struggle with my teenage students because those kids are the same with each group that comes in. Teenagers are teenagers. But your own kids grow up and they keep changing the rules. Just when you think you have them figured out, they grow up and change again.

I was unemployed, my wife was diagnosed and my mother became very sick. Talk about a perfect storm. I dug deeper into my faith, deeper in my relationships with other people. Talk to me about the challenges you have faced as an individual and how you have overcome them?

I moved during some pretty important periods in my life, particularly during important parts of my adolescence. It is something I still struggle with because trust and relationships were disrupted enough times that I struggle with that as an adult. When we moved to another city while our daughter was a baby, I found myself regressing into my teenage self because I didn’t want to move but we had to move as a family. That was a really dark time for me personally but we worked through it as a family. I really started writing again at that time. We struggled to get pregnant with our daughter, and now I feel the need to be open about that because so many couples suffer through that in silence. We shouldn’t be embarrassed to talk about something that impacts thousands of couples a year. My faith and my husband are with me all the time. God guides me but my husband has supported me through some really difficult emotional times.

I see bumper stickers of ‘I love Jesus’ many bloggers have ‘love Jesus’ as their mantra. Talk to me about the practical aspects of ‘loving Jesus’. To me means loving others unconditionally and serving. I have to say in our individual western culture, Christians are failing.

We need to treat people the way we want to be treated. We need to treat all people like human beings deserving of life. I believe Americans take too much pride in our individualism. Human beings are supposed to be dependent on each other. That is how we were created. We need other people to function as a healthy society. And yes, we need to embrace serving each other. Unfortunately, our current political division makes what should be a natural outpouring of our faith in a political statement, and that needs to change.

There is something catchy about your blog ‘accepting the unexpected journey’ What do you mean by this?

Everything in my life has been unexpected and I write about my life. Using that as the anchor for my blog helps me circle everything back to the idea that life is a journey and we don’t get to plan it, we just have to live it the best we can.

As an extrovert this whole social distance and isolation are making me struggle, what about you as an introvert?

Being an introvert makes it a little easier because I’m not freaking out about seeing everyone, but I do miss my closest people. And when we were all tightly quarantining, it was ROUGH. We were all on top of each other and no one had any personal space or alone time. I really miss alone time.