About three weeks ago, I had a perfect world. Everything was going great! Serving in church, hanging out with friends, loving God, work and life in general. Life was grand...and then the other shoe dropped.
I started noticing that one of my friends was pushing me away, avoiding me, ignoring me. I'm the type of person that has no problem with one of my friends coming to me and talking to me if they have an issue with something they see. But this was something I wasn't prepared for.
Rejection hurts beyond belief, especially when it comes from a close friend, a family member or a significant other.
The reason why I'm mentioning this is that God has started a new work in healing my already shattered heart. He's dredging up stuff from my past that I thought I'd taken care of, but in reality, I'd only stuffed it down into the deepest dredges of my heart and buried it under cement and locked it up so tight that not even I knew that it still existed. But God did.
I remember getting really stressed out over the situation and would recite over and over in my head what I would say to my friend if I saw him. Most of it was blunt, hurtful and just plain mean and it was born out of the hurt in my heart and not of God or how He wanted me to approach this situation.
I had opportunities to approach my friend and just "let him have it" as he so well deserved in my mind. But I was still hurting from the rejection that I'd received and unfairly I thought. So I hid my hurt behind a rigid facade of I'm ok all by myself.
In reality, I was not ok. And no one is ever ok all by themselves. I was hurt, hurting, confused, angry and prayed a lot! I think it took me a week before all the hot air was blown out of me (in my mind in prayer of course) and I could finally give the situation over to God and let Him come and minister to me.
I have a hard time letting go at times and the fact that I could not talk to my friend during the time I was hanging on to this junk for dear life, says that God was in control and not me. Had I approached my friend during this state of mind that I was in, I would have probably created more problems and it could have resulted in me having one less friend in my life. And that was not acceptable to me.
When I finally was so frustrated with the situation and myself for thinking about it so much was when I could finally lay it down at the foot of the cross. I realized that night that I wasn't in control and that I was hanging onto something that I should have not been hanging onto in the first place.
I slept better that night than I had in a week of all this going on. In the morning, God revealed to me what had been going on with my friend as far as our friendship and what he was dealing with. Let me just say right here that I'm not at liberty to reveal that, but what it did do was take all the wind out of my sails and I felt nothing but empathy for my friend.
Turns out, he was in a place that I was not all that long ago when I was dealing with issues of the heart. All the anger that I'd had was gone. All the hurt that I'd had about the situation was gone. In that moment, I saw him as Jesus saw him. A human with a broken heart.
The point of telling this experience is to give you a bit of insight into what's going on inside of my own heart.
As a child, I hid the rejection that I received from my peers, from my friends and even from my own family. Most people experience rejection at some point in their lives and if we're not careful, it can ruin people's lives.
God has been slowly and painfully removing that rejection that has hidden and grown and festered itself in my heart. Let me tell you that the heart pain is not fun and there are days where I wish with everything in me that I had some physical pain to go along with it. I can deal with physical pain... I have a very hard time dealing with heart pain.
I call it heart pain because it's a mixture of mental and emotional pain. It's not one or the other - it's both at once.
But, even though it hurts, I would rather be here with God dealing with it now than to have it affect myself, my ministry, my friends, my family or my future later on down the road.
Putting up walls doesn't help. Doing that just leaves you in a cage inside of your own heart where no one is allowed in and can make you feel like you are alone in this world. We are never alone, but it feels like it. You can be standing in a sea of people and feel like you're the only one there.
Let me tell you right now that there is hope for you. Jesus loves you and all you have to do is ask Him into your heart and to help clean out all the gunk that stops up the life that flows. He's at the door of your heart and knocking. All you have to do is open your heart. I know it's easier said than done, but it is such a relief not to have to carry those burdens any longer.
God has been working on taking the lies and the deceptions that I have believed for so long out of my heart and filling the empty place with His Beauty. It has been an experience for me to feel beautiful for the first time ever in my life.
I started noticing that one of my friends was pushing me away, avoiding me, ignoring me. I'm the type of person that has no problem with one of my friends coming to me and talking to me if they have an issue with something they see. But this was something I wasn't prepared for.
Rejection hurts beyond belief, especially when it comes from a close friend, a family member or a significant other.
The reason why I'm mentioning this is that God has started a new work in healing my already shattered heart. He's dredging up stuff from my past that I thought I'd taken care of, but in reality, I'd only stuffed it down into the deepest dredges of my heart and buried it under cement and locked it up so tight that not even I knew that it still existed. But God did.
I remember getting really stressed out over the situation and would recite over and over in my head what I would say to my friend if I saw him. Most of it was blunt, hurtful and just plain mean and it was born out of the hurt in my heart and not of God or how He wanted me to approach this situation.
I had opportunities to approach my friend and just "let him have it" as he so well deserved in my mind. But I was still hurting from the rejection that I'd received and unfairly I thought. So I hid my hurt behind a rigid facade of I'm ok all by myself.
In reality, I was not ok. And no one is ever ok all by themselves. I was hurt, hurting, confused, angry and prayed a lot! I think it took me a week before all the hot air was blown out of me (in my mind in prayer of course) and I could finally give the situation over to God and let Him come and minister to me.
I have a hard time letting go at times and the fact that I could not talk to my friend during the time I was hanging on to this junk for dear life, says that God was in control and not me. Had I approached my friend during this state of mind that I was in, I would have probably created more problems and it could have resulted in me having one less friend in my life. And that was not acceptable to me.
When I finally was so frustrated with the situation and myself for thinking about it so much was when I could finally lay it down at the foot of the cross. I realized that night that I wasn't in control and that I was hanging onto something that I should have not been hanging onto in the first place.
I slept better that night than I had in a week of all this going on. In the morning, God revealed to me what had been going on with my friend as far as our friendship and what he was dealing with. Let me just say right here that I'm not at liberty to reveal that, but what it did do was take all the wind out of my sails and I felt nothing but empathy for my friend.
Turns out, he was in a place that I was not all that long ago when I was dealing with issues of the heart. All the anger that I'd had was gone. All the hurt that I'd had about the situation was gone. In that moment, I saw him as Jesus saw him. A human with a broken heart.
The point of telling this experience is to give you a bit of insight into what's going on inside of my own heart.
As a child, I hid the rejection that I received from my peers, from my friends and even from my own family. Most people experience rejection at some point in their lives and if we're not careful, it can ruin people's lives.
God has been slowly and painfully removing that rejection that has hidden and grown and festered itself in my heart. Let me tell you that the heart pain is not fun and there are days where I wish with everything in me that I had some physical pain to go along with it. I can deal with physical pain... I have a very hard time dealing with heart pain.
I call it heart pain because it's a mixture of mental and emotional pain. It's not one or the other - it's both at once.
But, even though it hurts, I would rather be here with God dealing with it now than to have it affect myself, my ministry, my friends, my family or my future later on down the road.
Putting up walls doesn't help. Doing that just leaves you in a cage inside of your own heart where no one is allowed in and can make you feel like you are alone in this world. We are never alone, but it feels like it. You can be standing in a sea of people and feel like you're the only one there.
Let me tell you right now that there is hope for you. Jesus loves you and all you have to do is ask Him into your heart and to help clean out all the gunk that stops up the life that flows. He's at the door of your heart and knocking. All you have to do is open your heart. I know it's easier said than done, but it is such a relief not to have to carry those burdens any longer.
God has been working on taking the lies and the deceptions that I have believed for so long out of my heart and filling the empty place with His Beauty. It has been an experience for me to feel beautiful for the first time ever in my life.
For almost my whole life, I have always believed that I was a bother to other people, someone to be ashamed of, ugly, unloved, stupid, the black sheep of the family. I was such a people pleaser for the longest time that I didn't even see that they were using me as a mat to wipe their dirty feet on. I was used and abused in every way, shape and form possible.
I've spent most of my life in hiding. Day after day I would come home from school and go up to my room and spend the rest of the evening with my nose buried in a book. I would go to bed and get up only to do the same thing I did the day before. I had what I call fuddy duddy status at 7 years old because of the abuse that my heart suffered at the hands of others.
But wouldn't you know? This stuff didn't just happen to me. It happens all the time, every day to thousands, millions of children around the world. It happens all around us but yet we live in our little bubbles and think that everyone and everything is just fine and dandy when it's really in chaos.
The funny thing is, is that I have been called to love the people in the church with the agape love of God. My name means love which is all that 1 Corinthians 13 implies. And because I have been called to this particular ministry, my heart needs to fall in line with God's will. Which is the reason that He's been digging into the deepest reaches of my soul and heart and surgically removing what should have never been there in the first place and replacing it with His love and the peace that passes all understanding.
So even though my life would be considered in the midst of ongoing chaos, I am at peace. I know that God has my back and that His loving arms are wrapped around me tightly, jealously. God tells me every day how much I mean to Him and how I am His. His princess, his Beauty. For God created me in the image of His Beauty. And it's His light that I will let shine throughout the whole of my life.
Just because things get hard sometimes doesn't mean that I'm going to run and hide away from it all again. I'm done running and I'm done hiding. It's time to let the love of God shine through the way that He intended me to shine.
Just let me say one thing before I close this session of my blog. It has not been an easy road. And God is not a quick fix. For me to get to this point in my life, it has taken three years. Three years of trying, making mistakes, failing, falling - and getting right back up again. Most of the time there are people there to help me through the hard times, but then there are the times when it's just me and God and most of the time I have to depend on Him to carry me through those times. Let me tell you, God has never failed to carry me. I trust and depend on God more today than I have ever before in the whole of my life. I would rather go through one day with Him in immense heart pain than to go through all of my days being merry without Him. Is it worth it? Absolutely, but that is a question that you are going to have to answer for yourself.
As always, I write of my experiences here to help others. I hope that in some way, shape or form that something in this blog has touched your heart. Most people know that I am on FB if you need someone to talk to about the things that you are going through. If I don't answer right away, it's not because I don't care, it's because I'm praying about what God wants to say to you through me. Have
RSS Feed