Stronger

It has been exactly four weeks since I posted my last blog. I have been working on two other entries but I just haven’t felt moved to post them. With all this time gone by, many things have happened and I have been overwhelmed with all the topics I could write about. Some things have been difficult, both emotionally and spiritually taxing. Other things have been fabulous, filled with unbelievable joys and amazing blessings. I will probably have to write more than one blog to share the most important things…but here is one.

For a couple of those weeks, memories of an old and familiar sort came slipping back into the forefront of my mind. It’s funny, when you remember something that you never actually forgot, just how the present events of your life can change the flavor of those memories and readjust the light by which you see them. The present experiences can shed a new light on the past, changing and deepening our understanding of who we are today. Why do we the things we do? Why do we see the world the way we see it? Why do we relate and interact with others in the manner that we do? It all goes together.

These memories have occasionally produced a grieving process in me over the way my family has been. However, this time I did not grieve over those lost family dynamics that I always longed for, simply for the sake of having those loving, ideal relationships that I had the “right” to enjoy like so many of my friends did with their families. No. This time, I had to grieve over the way I have turned out as a result of those relational deprivations.

There are so many things I do not like about myself, things that would not exist in me if things had been different. Personal struggles and negative traits that I have acquired as a result of things being the way they were. I know if it wasn’t this set of issues it would be something else, but I kept thinking that “something else” would have been made up of normal, easier issues. And yes, I used the word normal. There IS such a thing as normal in such instances.

I have been thinking of a certain song, and lately coming across, multiple times, the Bible verses it is based on. Don’t worry about your life ‘cause if you hold it too close you’ll lose it. (Rebecca St. James) I have found that I really haven’t been holding on too tightly to things that I have in my life, but things that I do not have. I have been holding onto my “right” to have had a whole and close family. My “right” to be emotionally secure. My “right” to have healthy relational skills.

These issues are the things I struggle with about myself now. Usually I don’t worry about these things this much but they became much more apparent and particularly difficult all at once and they overwhelmed me. I was so frustrated that I thought, “If these things in my past had gone right then I wouldn’t be dealing with these stupid issues now. I wouldn’t be so emotionally unstable and relationally handicapped. I wouldn’t be so awkward, insecure and complicated.”

Most significantly, my struggle traces back to this fact: certain hurtful things that occurred in my family, during my growing up years, are what planted the negative seeds deep inside me that resulted in the most crucial struggle I have in my relationship with God now. My perception of Him has been so wrong, but it has been hard to see anything else when this image of Him has always been the primary view I have been exposed to. I know what the Bible says about Him and what His character is really like, but I have not operated on default as if I believe that. I have automatically interacted with Him as though He were entirely different from what I know Him to be.

Although I know He forgives me, I behave as if He will not take me back without holding my sin against me and making me feel guilty for it. When I have made even the slightest mistake, my first gut-reaction has been to run away and cower in fear because, surely, at the snap of a finger, He would abandon His approving smile and begin to scream at me in His wrath. When I ask for forgiveness, my perfectionist nature tells me that, because He can see so clearly into my future, He knows how soon I will commit the same act again, rendering my apologies pointless and unacceptable until I really change. I have believed that I am a second-rate child of God; that I just came along with the package deal and have no real purpose in the Kingdom of God. And I have believed that He doesn’t really care to know me at all.

These are the lies I have lived by from my childhood. I have had an influence in my life that has pounded these messages into my heart, not on purpose, but through hurtful actions and unmeant words. In addition, I know the enemy has been sure to reinforce these lies again and again. Consequently, I have been torn, mixing the God I know Him to be with the God I have projected Him to be. I have held Him at an arms length, not realizing that His heart has only been breaking for me to come to Him as I am.

“For You formed my inward parts; You wove me in my mother’s womb. I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; wonderful are Your works and my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from You when I was made in secret and skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth. Your eyes have seen my unformed substance and in Your book were all written the days that were ordained for me, when as yet there was not one of them.” Psalm 139:13-16

He doesn’t want me to go away and leave Him alone, to shut up and not be a bother. He loves me. He made me. I have tried so hard, for most of my life, to mind my own business and not rock the boat. To be invisible when, all this time, He wanted me to stop hiding from Him and beating myself up, because it is certainly not His intent to beat me up. His intent is to love me and use me for good things. We were born to be a part of something holy. (Stellar Kart) I am no exception to that.

Since this most recent grieving process, I am again accepting the way things have turned out. The way I have turned out. Because, thank the Lord, I am not stuck this way. He is the only One who has the power to change me.

No, my life has not turned out perfectly or even as clean as others I know. But it is all for His purpose. I see now that not everyone was made to deal with the same things that I have dealt with. I was chosen to handle these things. I was equipped to handle these things. Some people were not made to reach their fullest capacity of use by having a squeaky clean life, just as others were not made to reach their fullest capacity of use in having a heinously messy life.

Let’s face it though, everybody’s life is at least a little messy. No perfect story makes it onto the bookshelf. Life is messy. My life is messy. And although I can imagine some really great scenarios of how wonderful and perfect my life could have turned out, after allowing myself to run through some realistic alternatives, I ended up seeing that none of those alternate lives would be capable of all the things that my life is capable of now. I see how the life I have lived is more usable to God in the lives of others than the life I would have chosen for myself. And, ironically, those things that hurt me can be used, in many ways, to make me better in the long run than if I had been completely shielded from experiencing anything. They have made me stronger. They will make me stronger. He knows that this is gonna make you stronger, stronger. (Mandisa)