 |
| My painting: Lanai in Kauai |
The other
day I was watching the movie “As good as it gets” and I paused it
for a minute because I needed to get a tissue. Then when I came back
into my room I decided that I was going to put my clothes away
because they were folded on the end of my bed.
While I was putting
the clothes away I was thinking about some of the things in the movie
that happened to be very moving to me. I have seen this movie before
but it had been quite a long time. I was so moved by things that I
don't think I ever saw before. It is like everything that has ever
happened before this in my life holds new and newly realized ideas
and most incredible significance to things that I am experiencing in
my life right now.
It seems like my life is actually made up of events that have become like pieces of a puzzle, and it seems the pieces have finally begun to
fit into the places in my heart where they are connecting together to
form this indescribable masterpiece. It feels like though so many of
the realizations are new, they have always been written within
the pages of my heart, waiting patiently for me to be open and able to experience them!
I can not even contain the amazing emotion...the beautiful emotion that I feel so powerfully and so completely! I weep over the most silly things that somehow have always been waiting for me to arrive right here in this moment at this time! Everything has been so purposeful and so divinely arranged and inspired. I am certain of this because there is nothing else that could ever have been so interwoven with all of the things that I have been healed from in my past and now reflects upon the diamond bright threads that are every strand interwoven within every fiber of my being. My heart, my mind, my will, my skin, my neurological system....all of it has been shed, and has been rewired...I am not the woman, the girl, the human that I was born into this world, but I am remade and formed from her ashes, her remains that have been burned up and left the brilliant ingredients that have become this new clay, this new material that flows through the crystal waters from the throne within my heart that my beautiful Heavenly Father lives within and lives through...me.
I am so amazed that everything that leaves me so breathless in the awe of all that has brought me into this very moment, has become the beautiful crescendo in this magnificently orchestrated symphony of my life. I am left breathless, and then revived, refilled, and overflow with all that this is...I don't have words that even begin to do justice for all that I am experiencing, but I promise that I will never stop seeking in order to convey the magically divine heart and being of the Living God, our creator, the True Master of all Universes and life!
Things that seem so random have a divine structure. I am willing to pay attention to the leading of what seem to be my hearts thoughts, yet I know and feel that this is the voice of the one who made me.
I find the most incomprehensible moments of awe that make me giggle at the wow factor that reveals just how perfect every moment is, even when everything all around seems to be shifting in ways that I never anticipated or thought I was ready for. It is through the surrender to my Lord, my savior who I know already has mapped out each and every moment and possibility that all fear cannot even invade the force field that is my heart, surrounds my body, and connects me to myself, to you, and to all!
I happened to be putting my clothes away that were laying on my bed. This seems ordinary enough. I have many Bibles and books, especially journals that I have written that I usually keep on the right side of my bed so that I can grab them easier since I sleep on the left side. So once I straightened them a bit (not totally perfect :) I sat down on my bed to resume watching As good as it gets...but before I sat down I grabbed one of my journals that had a magazine sticking out of it as if to mark a page. So I opened it and what I discovered was something that led me to the next step of awesome!
I saw a list of minerals and clay that I had been researching and connecting to some other work I have been doing on our human skin in connection to the materials our earth is made of. I read through the page and then I decided as I found my heart being suddenly re-inspired by the remembrance of when I wrote these things, I turned over to the next page and I saw that I had written about some places in the Middle East like Egypt, the Negev and had written about the materials found in the fault lines in the soil and earth in those regions. Then I flipped the page over and saw I had written a scripture.
So I grabbed one of the Bibles closest to me and looked it up. The verse was in Psalms 126:4...but I didn't just start there, I read from verse 1. When I got to verse 4 I giggled in the awe that the scripture spoke of the Negev region that I had written about before the scripture was listed. It says : Turn to freedom our captivity and restore our fortunes, O Lord, as the streams in the South (the Negev) {are restored by torrents}.
Verse 5: They who sow in tears shall reap in joy and singing!
Just before this, I was putting my clothes away I had been crying because its hard for me to contain the joy and the thankfulness that I feel for all that God continues to do in my life...I was singing a Steven Curtis Chapman song-Remember your chains, before I ever decided to pick up this journal and then open it. I had no intention of reading my journal or writing this at this moment because I was simply going to finish the little bit that was left of the movie when I paused it to go and blow my nose. As I'm writing this it kind of reminds me of a treasure map unfolding each and every step that brings me to the miracles that I could have missed or dismissed because it would have interrupted “my plan.”
I am not sure that this would have had the same effect later or after finishing the movie because I would have already moved through the crying and singing. But because it had just happened, I was more engaged and it totally stopped dead in my tracks to read in these scriptures the very things that I had just been doing moments before!
It made me eager to see what else was there for me to find that would send another wave of the most awesome flood of refreshing. It reminds me just how in sync my Lord who is the love of my life, who is my husband, and my all...we are in real time, we are now, and these are the kinds of things that have changed my entire world.
These are the moments that make me see and feel the nearness and the love that He feels for me. He is ever whispering into my hearts ears things that will show me just how close he is and has always been. These are the things that I physically feel ignite the flames of passion within me into the raging inferno, the consuming and refining fire that He is within me!
Together, we are a life transforming force in my life and He is the light that shines in and through me, that continues leading me, guiding me, strengthening me, melting me healing me, and redesigning me moment by moment. As I live willing to stop in the middle of what I think is so important to entertain the thought or idea I have, I find that my greatest miracles and moments of liberation are birthed from within my willingness to listen to myself. I take the action and then I always discover the reason, but if I waited to first have understanding of the “why” before I was willing to step and most oftentimes, leap into the places unknown and called delay or insignificance, I would never have discovered just how powerful the voice within that sounds like my own is!
So as it is, I didn't just read Psalms 126. I went on to read 127, 128, and 129! Everything within the few verses of these short chapters was so amazing to me because it was truly the reminders of things that I really needed, but had no idea I did. Everything in each verse brought my heart to life in a new way and reminded me of how far I have come, just how the Lord is guiding me and exactly what is awaiting my arrival. This is the manna, the living bread of all that Heaven is. This is the food that fills my heart and soul. It is the inspiration that is even more powerful because it came to me...though it took my willingness to stop what I was doing to open it and read.
Then as I was going to close my Bible and pick up where I left off in the movie I happened to have a marker in Joshua 3. I have many times written the dates by certain scriptures when they are super significant for me. By verse 7 was the date 3.13.11 and I thought it was interesting how the day I was reading it was exactly 3 years and 10 days ago that I wrote next to it. I read chapter 3 verses 5-17 which is the end of the chapter. To my awe once again, everything in there had a very important meaning for things that I am experiencing right now or working on in my research and life!
I can not even begin to tell you how difficult it is for me to stay in my own skin when these “random” moments happen to turn out to be the moments I had been praying to know about “xyz.” As I was rejoicing and smiling so big that my cheeks began to quiver, I saw on the page to the right of where I was reading that there was a yellow post it note.
I need to preface the rest of the story with the significance of a yellow post it note. About 6 months ago when I moved in with my amazing friends that I have been staying with I started going through the most intense emotions that I have ever experienced in my life.
I found myself looking out at all of the things that were happening and the synchronicity that was taking place in nearly every moment that I was awake. I was totally swept away in “connecting” everything that was happening to discover what it meant so that I knew what direction to go next. There was one point that I had gotten so frustrated and felt like I was hearing and seeing the same things nearly every where that I went and even in conversations that I heard around me or I would have with other people that I found myself terrified of my freedom of choice. It was like I wanted someone to tell me that I was going the right way. So I was rocked and spinning inside wrapped in the inescapable, strangling grip of indecision named “what if.”
So last fall I remember talking to my friends and telling them how frustrated I was that just when I had peace about the direction I was going, everything around me began feeling like I had just made the wrong choice, and how scary that was because I didn't understand why one second everything felt free and in the next it felt like my heart fell through my feet. I had never been in a place where I was facing that level of insecurity because throughout my journey over the past couple of years I have learned that when I make a choice, I follow through and keep my word. If I wasn't sure that I could complete something then I was honest with myself and willing to live with my choice. This was very life changing for me because I finally found the way that all of the shame and guilt and fear melted away...up to that point at least.
If I committed to something, I did it regardless of what I felt like, any problems that might have shown up in the process and I stopped making excuses to try to get out of doing something. I discovered that because I was the one who chose, that there was no more guilt or shame. Plus there was no reason for me to look out anymore and try to find someone or something else to blame if things didn't end up going the way I hoped they would. Whether something turned out or not, I knew there was nobody else to blame for whatever the end result was. I chose. That had become my greatest filter. It let everyone else off the hook and made me accountable to only focusing on me doing my part and completing what I committed to do.
So in this process I hit some unexpected bumps that spun me into fear. Last fall I had committed to something that I found almost right away wasn't right for me at that time, and because I had become so sold out to keeping my word and being honorable I didn't know how to turn around. I felt that if I changed my mind, especially so fast that it meant I was nothing more than a fraud and that all of the work I had done over the past few years was all a lie.
I knew that couldn't be true, but I was so scared of letting my Heavenly Father down and making Him look bad because I choose to “opt out” of a place I was not ready to go at that point in my process. So I told my friends kind of jokingly and also in desperation that if I am going the wrong way and am to deep in to see that I don't know I am that I was willing to listen and then I jokingly said I would accept smoke signals, yellow post it notes and a few other hilarious ways that I knew would get my attention.
It was a while before I finally allowed myself to accept that there is nothing wrong with changing my mind and discovering that whatever it is may not be right for me. It didn't mean that it was never going to be “right,” it just meant not right now.
I have learned so many things about myself through the greatest moments of delay, the unexpected, tragedy and nightmares that have rocked me to my core along this road. I have also learned that my feelings I was taught need to be overcome and to “do it anyway” no matter how I feel, has been a very destructive force in my life. I have learned that especially in church it is seen as very powerful, and almost warrior like, for you to put your feelings aside and go against whatever you are feeling. It is labeled an attack of the enemy and we are taught to be on guard because the devil uses our feelings as the door to enter into our lives through. I would say that this has been bent in a way that has caused a mass desensitization of our awareness to knowing ourselves and instead we have become more immersed in self preservation to ward off the devastation we are taught comes through the indulgences of giving into our “flesh.”
The resistance throughout my life has been the very thing that has caused me to look out to others for validation and to try to figure out which way to go next. I have learned that the only key that I have ever needed is already inside of my heart. But the only way to access it is to pay attention to my feelings. Nearly 5 years ago I had a single revelation about feelings and emotions that changed everything for me and my life has never been the same!
I don't know about you, but I grew up believing that feelings and emotions are the same. In conversations, I have heard people speak of feelings and emotions as if they are synonymous when in fact nothing could possibly be further from the truth! I had no idea that what I thought I knew was killing me because I didn't know that I didn't know.
I thought that feelings and emotions were just being interchanged grammatically to liven up the conversation or to get the point across in a different or more effective way. Holy wow, I have never been so shocked and amazed in all of my life because when I discovered the truth and the distinction between the two, I was not only set free, but I was filled with understanding and the power that comes with perspective unlike ever before.
I never would have imagined that feelings and emotions really have totally separate purposes and individually are almost polar opposites! But the dynamic power that they have when combined together becomes a force to be reckoned with. I discovered that feelings are actually neutral and have only one sole purpose. Feelings are the physiological impulses and sensations that are responsible to give us information about all that is around us. Feelings are data oriented to help us get the unbiased, objective information to help us effectively navigate from moment to moment through our sensing. It is a purely biological function that relays information to our 5 senses and when developed actually becomes the conduit of what we know as intuition-being able to receive information that is beyond the senses, a real sixth sense. I like to think of it as “The Unification” of all of our senses in connection to the world and people within the world all around us.
Emotions on the other hand are totally different. Emotions are all about our interpretation of the data and information/experiences. Emotions are basically the stories we tell ourselves about the things that we are experiencing, and the stories that we believe about what others are experiencing all around us in our every day lives. While feelings are unbiased and subjective...they relay factual data designed to give you a moment by moment heads up so that you can decide the best way to move through any environment. Feelings are our God designed human internal neurological Guidance Positioning System.
I never really knew that. In fact, I had spent my entire life desensitizing my feelings and dis-empowering my ability to trust myself! I was taught that feelings are the weapon of the enemy and he uses them to sneak in and wipe our lives out if we “listen” to our feelings and “give in” to our “fleshly” desires. This is an extreme that caused me to do the wiping out of my own life until I came face to face with understanding. I had been going against my feelings and taught to resist the long laundry lists of things that are sinful and will send me straight to hell. That fear was enough to keep me striving to do the right things and be a good Christian, but rendered me powerless to change and be delivered from doing all of the “bad” things that I had no idea how to stop doing. Then the guilt and shame that followed came in more like a tsunami than just a flood. I lived my life determined to overcome my flesh and please the Lord, yet never seeing that this overcoming was not that at all.
How can I overcome something that I don't understand. How can I ever want to stop or not like the way something feels even if its just in that moment if I don't really have a reason why. The fear of being sent to hell was not enough to change anything in my heart. It was enough to stop my behaviors for a while or in variant degrees, but the desire and the pulling toward the things I was taught are sinful was stronger than my desire not to. It seemed that the more I tried not to do something, the more it held me and found a way to “tempt” me.
Even as strong as the fear was the lure was stronger. Then afterward, the beating that I gave myself for being a lousy Christian who was weak and unable to obey even though I believed with all of my heart that I really didn't want to do that anymore or again was not only unbearable, it was inescapable.
The more I tried to quiet my thoughts and speak the word of God over my life the louder the reminders became about how much of a failure I was. The feelings coupled with the emotions were the chains that held me hostage and prisoner within my own body for most of my life. I was supposed to be set free because Jesus died in my place for my sins, and yet the very scriptures that were supposed to help me to live free, became the nets that wrapped me tightly in the guilt, fear, inescapable shame and my spiral into the depths of hopelessness, depression, self medicating, and hiding.
It wasn't until I came to a place in my life where the bottom fell out from underneath me and I became my own bottomless pit that I was willing to do anything it would take to be saved and rescued. I was finally willing to listen. I was willing to obey even though I had absolutely no idea how to submit or yield with my heart. I was an independent woman who was not going to be told what to do or controlled by anyone. The truth is that what I believed was “independence” was nothing more than me taking the bull by the horns and doing everything myself because I had been so hurt and broken by others that I was sick and tired of trusting others and then losing every time I turned around.
I was a control fanatic because I believed that if I was doing everything and making everyone do things my way, that I could prevent all of the pain and devastation that I had already experienced from happening again. I was all about I am woman hear me roar. There was no way any man was going to come into my life and tell me what I could or couldn't do. I would never be dominated again and I was determined to be heard. And I am sure that there were many people who heard me and had to put up with me and my ridiculous attitude that made me seem more like a dude than a woman.
I have learned something that continues to change my life. As a woman, God has given us the most incredible abilities and strengths. We never were weak. We just have been given a unique way of experiencing and perceiving life that compliments our counterpart, the man whom the Lord created us to share our life with.
I have found that our true strength is not in being able to go head to head with a man and act all tough to prove that we are strong or can measure up and even out perform him. Our true strength lives within our heart and is found within our femininity. It is in our tenderness and ability to care for, understand, feel, nurse and serve those we love and those around us that heals and creates an impenetrable bond to all we come into contact with. This has been corrupted and twisted into a weapon that annihilates and robs us from the divine relationship that we were always created to enjoy before time ever began. The power of unity and agreement is a power capable of creating anything that can be imagined.
However, the same unity that creates the abundance of well being and beauty is the same unity that can be used to destroy and tear down. The principle of unity and agreement is the same.
The judgment I experienced from people of all walks of life who claimed to love the Lord was overwhelming. My entire life had come crashing down and it felt like everyone in my world had turned against me or blamed me for all of the horrible things that were happening in my life. So many of my friends claimed to be devout Christians because they went to church every time the doors were open and even served in the church. But they were the first to lash out their judgment and opinions about how my children being ripped from my home and everything I was going through was punishment for turning my back on God. That it was in order to teach me a lesson as the fight for my life became a war that I was never prepared for.
I was bitter and felt betrayed because it seemed nobody understood or cared. It seemed like everyone was quick to have an opinion or judgment, but not willing to reach out their hand or heart because suddenly they thought they were better than me. I had my children taken away from me and they still had theirs. It was the most unfathomable nightmare to love my children with everything I am and then find I had gotten twisted up into a life where I desperately wanted to escape and break away, but was too scared. I didn't have a way to leave and start over. I didn't have the ability on my own to provide the basic necessities of life anymore.
Being afraid was the tool that was used against me to rip my heart out and wipe me out. It tried to erase me by making me into the worst kind of person. I have been humiliated and plummeted so deep into the darkness that kept me from being able to see how to break my fall. I know now that in that kind of darkness, in the valley of the shadow of death, the only way you can break your fall or find your way through is to feel, and the only way to feel is through the power of love. I have learned the hard way that the only thing that is strong enough to dissolve the suffocating grip of fear is Love!
I can not even contain the amazing emotion...the beautiful emotion that I feel so powerfully and so completely! I weep over the most silly things that somehow have always been waiting for me to arrive right here in this moment at this time! Everything has been so purposeful and so divinely arranged and inspired. I am certain of this because there is nothing else that could ever have been so interwoven with all of the things that I have been healed from in my past and now reflects upon the diamond bright threads that are every strand interwoven within every fiber of my being. My heart, my mind, my will, my skin, my neurological system....all of it has been shed, and has been rewired...I am not the woman, the girl, the human that I was born into this world, but I am remade and formed from her ashes, her remains that have been burned up and left the brilliant ingredients that have become this new clay, this new material that flows through the crystal waters from the throne within my heart that my beautiful Heavenly Father lives within and lives through...me.
I am so amazed that everything that leaves me so breathless in the awe of all that has brought me into this very moment, has become the beautiful crescendo in this magnificently orchestrated symphony of my life. I am left breathless, and then revived, refilled, and overflow with all that this is...I don't have words that even begin to do justice for all that I am experiencing, but I promise that I will never stop seeking in order to convey the magically divine heart and being of the Living God, our creator, the True Master of all Universes and life!
Things that seem so random have a divine structure. I am willing to pay attention to the leading of what seem to be my hearts thoughts, yet I know and feel that this is the voice of the one who made me.
I find the most incomprehensible moments of awe that make me giggle at the wow factor that reveals just how perfect every moment is, even when everything all around seems to be shifting in ways that I never anticipated or thought I was ready for. It is through the surrender to my Lord, my savior who I know already has mapped out each and every moment and possibility that all fear cannot even invade the force field that is my heart, surrounds my body, and connects me to myself, to you, and to all!
I happened to be putting my clothes away that were laying on my bed. This seems ordinary enough. I have many Bibles and books, especially journals that I have written that I usually keep on the right side of my bed so that I can grab them easier since I sleep on the left side. So once I straightened them a bit (not totally perfect :) I sat down on my bed to resume watching As good as it gets...but before I sat down I grabbed one of my journals that had a magazine sticking out of it as if to mark a page. So I opened it and what I discovered was something that led me to the next step of awesome!
I saw a list of minerals and clay that I had been researching and connecting to some other work I have been doing on our human skin in connection to the materials our earth is made of. I read through the page and then I decided as I found my heart being suddenly re-inspired by the remembrance of when I wrote these things, I turned over to the next page and I saw that I had written about some places in the Middle East like Egypt, the Negev and had written about the materials found in the fault lines in the soil and earth in those regions. Then I flipped the page over and saw I had written a scripture.
So I grabbed one of the Bibles closest to me and looked it up. The verse was in Psalms 126:4...but I didn't just start there, I read from verse 1. When I got to verse 4 I giggled in the awe that the scripture spoke of the Negev region that I had written about before the scripture was listed. It says : Turn to freedom our captivity and restore our fortunes, O Lord, as the streams in the South (the Negev) {are restored by torrents}.
Verse 5: They who sow in tears shall reap in joy and singing!
Just before this, I was putting my clothes away I had been crying because its hard for me to contain the joy and the thankfulness that I feel for all that God continues to do in my life...I was singing a Steven Curtis Chapman song-Remember your chains, before I ever decided to pick up this journal and then open it. I had no intention of reading my journal or writing this at this moment because I was simply going to finish the little bit that was left of the movie when I paused it to go and blow my nose. As I'm writing this it kind of reminds me of a treasure map unfolding each and every step that brings me to the miracles that I could have missed or dismissed because it would have interrupted “my plan.”
I am not sure that this would have had the same effect later or after finishing the movie because I would have already moved through the crying and singing. But because it had just happened, I was more engaged and it totally stopped dead in my tracks to read in these scriptures the very things that I had just been doing moments before!
It made me eager to see what else was there for me to find that would send another wave of the most awesome flood of refreshing. It reminds me just how in sync my Lord who is the love of my life, who is my husband, and my all...we are in real time, we are now, and these are the kinds of things that have changed my entire world.
These are the moments that make me see and feel the nearness and the love that He feels for me. He is ever whispering into my hearts ears things that will show me just how close he is and has always been. These are the things that I physically feel ignite the flames of passion within me into the raging inferno, the consuming and refining fire that He is within me!
Together, we are a life transforming force in my life and He is the light that shines in and through me, that continues leading me, guiding me, strengthening me, melting me healing me, and redesigning me moment by moment. As I live willing to stop in the middle of what I think is so important to entertain the thought or idea I have, I find that my greatest miracles and moments of liberation are birthed from within my willingness to listen to myself. I take the action and then I always discover the reason, but if I waited to first have understanding of the “why” before I was willing to step and most oftentimes, leap into the places unknown and called delay or insignificance, I would never have discovered just how powerful the voice within that sounds like my own is!
So as it is, I didn't just read Psalms 126. I went on to read 127, 128, and 129! Everything within the few verses of these short chapters was so amazing to me because it was truly the reminders of things that I really needed, but had no idea I did. Everything in each verse brought my heart to life in a new way and reminded me of how far I have come, just how the Lord is guiding me and exactly what is awaiting my arrival. This is the manna, the living bread of all that Heaven is. This is the food that fills my heart and soul. It is the inspiration that is even more powerful because it came to me...though it took my willingness to stop what I was doing to open it and read.
Then as I was going to close my Bible and pick up where I left off in the movie I happened to have a marker in Joshua 3. I have many times written the dates by certain scriptures when they are super significant for me. By verse 7 was the date 3.13.11 and I thought it was interesting how the day I was reading it was exactly 3 years and 10 days ago that I wrote next to it. I read chapter 3 verses 5-17 which is the end of the chapter. To my awe once again, everything in there had a very important meaning for things that I am experiencing right now or working on in my research and life!
I can not even begin to tell you how difficult it is for me to stay in my own skin when these “random” moments happen to turn out to be the moments I had been praying to know about “xyz.” As I was rejoicing and smiling so big that my cheeks began to quiver, I saw on the page to the right of where I was reading that there was a yellow post it note.
I need to preface the rest of the story with the significance of a yellow post it note. About 6 months ago when I moved in with my amazing friends that I have been staying with I started going through the most intense emotions that I have ever experienced in my life.
I found myself looking out at all of the things that were happening and the synchronicity that was taking place in nearly every moment that I was awake. I was totally swept away in “connecting” everything that was happening to discover what it meant so that I knew what direction to go next. There was one point that I had gotten so frustrated and felt like I was hearing and seeing the same things nearly every where that I went and even in conversations that I heard around me or I would have with other people that I found myself terrified of my freedom of choice. It was like I wanted someone to tell me that I was going the right way. So I was rocked and spinning inside wrapped in the inescapable, strangling grip of indecision named “what if.”
So last fall I remember talking to my friends and telling them how frustrated I was that just when I had peace about the direction I was going, everything around me began feeling like I had just made the wrong choice, and how scary that was because I didn't understand why one second everything felt free and in the next it felt like my heart fell through my feet. I had never been in a place where I was facing that level of insecurity because throughout my journey over the past couple of years I have learned that when I make a choice, I follow through and keep my word. If I wasn't sure that I could complete something then I was honest with myself and willing to live with my choice. This was very life changing for me because I finally found the way that all of the shame and guilt and fear melted away...up to that point at least.
If I committed to something, I did it regardless of what I felt like, any problems that might have shown up in the process and I stopped making excuses to try to get out of doing something. I discovered that because I was the one who chose, that there was no more guilt or shame. Plus there was no reason for me to look out anymore and try to find someone or something else to blame if things didn't end up going the way I hoped they would. Whether something turned out or not, I knew there was nobody else to blame for whatever the end result was. I chose. That had become my greatest filter. It let everyone else off the hook and made me accountable to only focusing on me doing my part and completing what I committed to do.
So in this process I hit some unexpected bumps that spun me into fear. Last fall I had committed to something that I found almost right away wasn't right for me at that time, and because I had become so sold out to keeping my word and being honorable I didn't know how to turn around. I felt that if I changed my mind, especially so fast that it meant I was nothing more than a fraud and that all of the work I had done over the past few years was all a lie.
I knew that couldn't be true, but I was so scared of letting my Heavenly Father down and making Him look bad because I choose to “opt out” of a place I was not ready to go at that point in my process. So I told my friends kind of jokingly and also in desperation that if I am going the wrong way and am to deep in to see that I don't know I am that I was willing to listen and then I jokingly said I would accept smoke signals, yellow post it notes and a few other hilarious ways that I knew would get my attention.
It was a while before I finally allowed myself to accept that there is nothing wrong with changing my mind and discovering that whatever it is may not be right for me. It didn't mean that it was never going to be “right,” it just meant not right now.
I have learned so many things about myself through the greatest moments of delay, the unexpected, tragedy and nightmares that have rocked me to my core along this road. I have also learned that my feelings I was taught need to be overcome and to “do it anyway” no matter how I feel, has been a very destructive force in my life. I have learned that especially in church it is seen as very powerful, and almost warrior like, for you to put your feelings aside and go against whatever you are feeling. It is labeled an attack of the enemy and we are taught to be on guard because the devil uses our feelings as the door to enter into our lives through. I would say that this has been bent in a way that has caused a mass desensitization of our awareness to knowing ourselves and instead we have become more immersed in self preservation to ward off the devastation we are taught comes through the indulgences of giving into our “flesh.”
The resistance throughout my life has been the very thing that has caused me to look out to others for validation and to try to figure out which way to go next. I have learned that the only key that I have ever needed is already inside of my heart. But the only way to access it is to pay attention to my feelings. Nearly 5 years ago I had a single revelation about feelings and emotions that changed everything for me and my life has never been the same!
I don't know about you, but I grew up believing that feelings and emotions are the same. In conversations, I have heard people speak of feelings and emotions as if they are synonymous when in fact nothing could possibly be further from the truth! I had no idea that what I thought I knew was killing me because I didn't know that I didn't know.
I thought that feelings and emotions were just being interchanged grammatically to liven up the conversation or to get the point across in a different or more effective way. Holy wow, I have never been so shocked and amazed in all of my life because when I discovered the truth and the distinction between the two, I was not only set free, but I was filled with understanding and the power that comes with perspective unlike ever before.
I never would have imagined that feelings and emotions really have totally separate purposes and individually are almost polar opposites! But the dynamic power that they have when combined together becomes a force to be reckoned with. I discovered that feelings are actually neutral and have only one sole purpose. Feelings are the physiological impulses and sensations that are responsible to give us information about all that is around us. Feelings are data oriented to help us get the unbiased, objective information to help us effectively navigate from moment to moment through our sensing. It is a purely biological function that relays information to our 5 senses and when developed actually becomes the conduit of what we know as intuition-being able to receive information that is beyond the senses, a real sixth sense. I like to think of it as “The Unification” of all of our senses in connection to the world and people within the world all around us.
Emotions on the other hand are totally different. Emotions are all about our interpretation of the data and information/experiences. Emotions are basically the stories we tell ourselves about the things that we are experiencing, and the stories that we believe about what others are experiencing all around us in our every day lives. While feelings are unbiased and subjective...they relay factual data designed to give you a moment by moment heads up so that you can decide the best way to move through any environment. Feelings are our God designed human internal neurological Guidance Positioning System.
I never really knew that. In fact, I had spent my entire life desensitizing my feelings and dis-empowering my ability to trust myself! I was taught that feelings are the weapon of the enemy and he uses them to sneak in and wipe our lives out if we “listen” to our feelings and “give in” to our “fleshly” desires. This is an extreme that caused me to do the wiping out of my own life until I came face to face with understanding. I had been going against my feelings and taught to resist the long laundry lists of things that are sinful and will send me straight to hell. That fear was enough to keep me striving to do the right things and be a good Christian, but rendered me powerless to change and be delivered from doing all of the “bad” things that I had no idea how to stop doing. Then the guilt and shame that followed came in more like a tsunami than just a flood. I lived my life determined to overcome my flesh and please the Lord, yet never seeing that this overcoming was not that at all.
How can I overcome something that I don't understand. How can I ever want to stop or not like the way something feels even if its just in that moment if I don't really have a reason why. The fear of being sent to hell was not enough to change anything in my heart. It was enough to stop my behaviors for a while or in variant degrees, but the desire and the pulling toward the things I was taught are sinful was stronger than my desire not to. It seemed that the more I tried not to do something, the more it held me and found a way to “tempt” me.
Even as strong as the fear was the lure was stronger. Then afterward, the beating that I gave myself for being a lousy Christian who was weak and unable to obey even though I believed with all of my heart that I really didn't want to do that anymore or again was not only unbearable, it was inescapable.
The more I tried to quiet my thoughts and speak the word of God over my life the louder the reminders became about how much of a failure I was. The feelings coupled with the emotions were the chains that held me hostage and prisoner within my own body for most of my life. I was supposed to be set free because Jesus died in my place for my sins, and yet the very scriptures that were supposed to help me to live free, became the nets that wrapped me tightly in the guilt, fear, inescapable shame and my spiral into the depths of hopelessness, depression, self medicating, and hiding.
It wasn't until I came to a place in my life where the bottom fell out from underneath me and I became my own bottomless pit that I was willing to do anything it would take to be saved and rescued. I was finally willing to listen. I was willing to obey even though I had absolutely no idea how to submit or yield with my heart. I was an independent woman who was not going to be told what to do or controlled by anyone. The truth is that what I believed was “independence” was nothing more than me taking the bull by the horns and doing everything myself because I had been so hurt and broken by others that I was sick and tired of trusting others and then losing every time I turned around.
I was a control fanatic because I believed that if I was doing everything and making everyone do things my way, that I could prevent all of the pain and devastation that I had already experienced from happening again. I was all about I am woman hear me roar. There was no way any man was going to come into my life and tell me what I could or couldn't do. I would never be dominated again and I was determined to be heard. And I am sure that there were many people who heard me and had to put up with me and my ridiculous attitude that made me seem more like a dude than a woman.
I have learned something that continues to change my life. As a woman, God has given us the most incredible abilities and strengths. We never were weak. We just have been given a unique way of experiencing and perceiving life that compliments our counterpart, the man whom the Lord created us to share our life with.
I have found that our true strength is not in being able to go head to head with a man and act all tough to prove that we are strong or can measure up and even out perform him. Our true strength lives within our heart and is found within our femininity. It is in our tenderness and ability to care for, understand, feel, nurse and serve those we love and those around us that heals and creates an impenetrable bond to all we come into contact with. This has been corrupted and twisted into a weapon that annihilates and robs us from the divine relationship that we were always created to enjoy before time ever began. The power of unity and agreement is a power capable of creating anything that can be imagined.
However, the same unity that creates the abundance of well being and beauty is the same unity that can be used to destroy and tear down. The principle of unity and agreement is the same.
The judgment I experienced from people of all walks of life who claimed to love the Lord was overwhelming. My entire life had come crashing down and it felt like everyone in my world had turned against me or blamed me for all of the horrible things that were happening in my life. So many of my friends claimed to be devout Christians because they went to church every time the doors were open and even served in the church. But they were the first to lash out their judgment and opinions about how my children being ripped from my home and everything I was going through was punishment for turning my back on God. That it was in order to teach me a lesson as the fight for my life became a war that I was never prepared for.
I was bitter and felt betrayed because it seemed nobody understood or cared. It seemed like everyone was quick to have an opinion or judgment, but not willing to reach out their hand or heart because suddenly they thought they were better than me. I had my children taken away from me and they still had theirs. It was the most unfathomable nightmare to love my children with everything I am and then find I had gotten twisted up into a life where I desperately wanted to escape and break away, but was too scared. I didn't have a way to leave and start over. I didn't have the ability on my own to provide the basic necessities of life anymore.
Being afraid was the tool that was used against me to rip my heart out and wipe me out. It tried to erase me by making me into the worst kind of person. I have been humiliated and plummeted so deep into the darkness that kept me from being able to see how to break my fall. I know now that in that kind of darkness, in the valley of the shadow of death, the only way you can break your fall or find your way through is to feel, and the only way to feel is through the power of love. I have learned the hard way that the only thing that is strong enough to dissolve the suffocating grip of fear is Love!
No comments:
Post a Comment