He Walks With Me

"We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair" (2 Corinthians 4:8 NIV)

I went to my nan and granddads yesterday and stayed over with them for the night. I also got to spend time with my cousin who I hadn’t actually seen for over ten years. That’s why I didn’t write yesterday, I think God understood that my devotion needed to be elsewhere and it truly was. I love my whole family so much, that it sometimes consumes me entirely. I am so lucky and blessed with the beautiful people who are close to me and I am more thankful now than I have ever been, for their existence in my life.

There are still many days as my entries show, when life becomes too much for me to deal with and I struggle to find hope to go on. I often beat myself up for my appearance, my attitude and the fact that I am currently unable to return to work, a job which mostly, I absolutely love doing. The words worthless and disgusting are not very far from my mind on these days and Faith can often be hard to come by. But, as I have pointed out before, apparently it is in these times that the Lord most wants us to succeed. Not that he purposely wants me to go through one bad episode after another, but in another way, he is giving me opportunity after opportunity to find Him.

I never really deal with the tortuous alleys of my mind, I just find something new to become obsessed with, usually things that provide instant gratification or take my focus on what is and move it to what could be. I think we all do that to an extent. Focus on the new hobby/quest for a partner/diet & fitness or anything else that essentially focuses our mind on future outcomes. Now, I am not saying that that isn’t a good thing. In fact, I joined Slimming World this week, but that is because I need to improve the relationship I have with food and prevent the medication increasing my size further than it has already. What I am referring to here, is the fact that to deal with my pain, I learn to look into potential new life situations for me. In amidst that, I would see councillors and so on who would help me reflect on my past so I could try and deal with different things that happened and led to these episodes.

In none of these scenarios was I able to look at the present and deal with that. There was no stopping to smell the roses, because I refused to be still enough to see them. Believe me, I have read a ridiculous amount of books about inner peace and focusing on the Now, but in reality, the lessons evaded me. It was too hard and seemed unrealistic to expect that being miserable and looking at the present could help me. Then, after a couple of months or sometimes a year or so of being ok, that focus on the future and on the past would catch up with me again and throw me into a pit of despair.

God has undoubtedly been on this journey with me, I just wasn’t willing to seek the lessons I needed to find. Since asking the Lord into my life, I have seen significant changes in who I am and what I do. My family has become closer, because I have stopped long enough to see how lucky I am to have them. They don't have to fit into my ideals of a perfect life, they are who they are and that both humbles and amazes me. I am not wallowing in my pain, but learning to love again. I am learning that I am so fortunate, that if I just stopped and looked around me, I would realise the beauty of what is here in the present.

My home is starting to look like a home, why, because I am making small changes one step at a time and because I am blessed with the most patient and wonderful man you could possibly imagine. He has put up with a lot of my demands, but now I can start to give back to him. I am not insisting upon immediate changes and punishing him when they don’t come to fruition. Instead, I am learning to let it be. To just be in love, to let the rest flow along in the passage of time.

These changes are slow and it is a gradual process, but every step I take closer to God, my focus becomes more on the beauty of the present than the pain of the past or projected image of the future. My Lord is my companion, I feel Him urging me on when my spirit is low. I have had to go through these tests over and over, while He waited patiently for me to come back to Him. This is a statement which I would struggled to write, even only a month ago. I realise that God does not punish me, he just provided situations where I could find truth and happiness again and enjoy my life once more. I am not naive, so I do not doubt that there will be harder times to come, but I understand Him now. These hard times are so that not only can I grow closer to Him, but so that  I can learn to live how I was intended to. With love and patience towards myself and to others.

In this hard time, I have learnt that God was never far away, I had just had to look inside myself and find Him. In turn I have found my way out of this suffering through Him and that to me is what being saved is all about.  

Love Always.x