Audience of One.

What sweater?  What color?  What table?  What desk? 

What earring, what lipstick, what shoe, what's said?

The freshman pressure of college had gotten to our heads...

Emily and I sat on the old, brown tweed sofa, trailered down from Gun Lake and nestled under our wooden loft in the dorm room.  Both of us were frazzled and frustrated -- with ourselves, with this feeling, with the pressure under which we were living.

The cute clothes, the clear skin, the conversations we were hoping to make.  All of it swarmed around us like bees in a hive and we were becoming just one more frantic part of it.  Something needed to change...

We stopped.  We talked.  We challenged.  We changed.  Sitting right there on that couch.  We made a vow to each other, and to God, to live with an Audience of One.  To live in a way that our lives matched the call of our hearts, knowing our heads were the connector of the two.

So on that couch the rule was made:  One outfit.  One outfit per day.  What you put on in the morning, what what you wore that day.  The whole day.  

We knew our heads had turned astray our hearts, and our closet routine had gone all a-rye for the sake gaining the interest of others.  We wanted the guy in chapel to notice our shirt, and the girls in English to notice our skirt, and the athletes at dinner to notice our shoes...  So we stood at the closet... thinking and changing...  minutes wasted: analyzing, staring, wondering... all over which cardigan to wear!  Then there was still the moments in the middle -- anxious all day if we fit in with our hair and makeup and clothes and disposition!

So the vow was set, and the discipline was made: an Audience of One, learned by one outfit a day.

And what relief and joy and wholeness God granted!

No longer was college life consumed with fitting in, but with feeling alive and free and finding who He meant us to be!

This story has found its way into so many conversations, now twelve years later.  I relay it in Small Group, in girl talk, in my own head...  For still today, it's one outfit a day.  What began as discipline became freedom and a foundation in Christ.

What appeared as a war of clothes,
Was a war over my heart.

But God won,
And on that couch he taught me,
To live for an Audience of One.