As we usher out 2020 and usher in 2021, I am convinced that there are multiple things that will change for all of us. We have had an extraordinary year, and as the politicians love to say “we are in unprecedented times”. Indeed we are, and things continue to be uncertain with change hitting us from all angles. Maybe for you it’ll be your job, your location, a family arrangement or more deeply a destructive mindset and attitude you’ve held onto years. One of the things that is certainly changing for me is the way I serve and edify the Church by using my spiritual gifts online.
When The Lord gave me the vision for Beloved Always back in 2016, it was BIG and it was great. I had a global perspective, and a telescope fastened onto my eyes as I sought to share truth and experience through my blog and channel with every soul who God would put on my path, both on and offline.
It has been an amazing 4 years and I know God moved greatly, both IN me and throguh me.
Over the last 4 months, I took time away from these platforms as I do annually to pray and receive direction from God about what he now desires to do, and going into this new season he is called for a change. I am convinced that His will is for me to now trade out that massive telescope for a microscopic lens. To zoom into the intricate, intimate and often implicit areas of Christianity that I myself presently struggle with, and that you may come to grapple with at some point too.
To strip away the third person, and include more personal applications and learning points in my blogs and vlogs. To reveal more of my human and sinful nature, and reject the falsehood that is too easily portrayed on social media that the one speaking has attained it and is without shortcomings. To not wait until the test is over to share the testimony but to shine light on the struggles as they come. To rid myself of excess, productions, showmanship, and strip things down to the simple, mundane, everyday things that concern us as believers, and as women.
I am just a woman in her 20s trying to live a life to glorify God in a world that seeks to glorify self, and I no longer want to perpetuate the lie that it’s okay to have multiple faces, but that we should pursue to have a single face, be of a single mind and apply that singleness of mind to all areas of life.
Since the start of 2020 I have been on a journey of pursuing authenticity and truth in every area of my life, and I am now ready, by God’s grace, to begin to extend that to you here on my blog and over on my youtube channel.
My messages are not for the obscure, unknown woman who stays veiled in the dark out of fear, and lives a life unto herself. My messages are for the woman who desires to be known, who lives as a light in a challenging culture and daily strives to live in the view of others. And though in God’s sovereign workings I may reach that obscure woman at the end of the earth, my immediate sphere of influence is right around me. It’s my family, my friends, my local church, the people I study alongside at university, the patients I see in hospitals, and you reading this right now.
I’m doing this for you, but also for me because I know that obedience is love, and my desire is to please and love God more than anything!
So though the title changes, the foundation is the same. We still boldly hold onto our identity as God’s Beloved daughters forever, but now we’re stepping into a season of personifying what that means and how that looks both in our faith and in our life, starting with me.
Joanne Olayinka 