"I can do everything through him who gives me strength." (Philippians 4:13 NIV)
It feels like God is making me an empty vessel. I am being emptied of the life I have been living and filled with a purpose that I never knew would alter my perspective on everything that life pertains. I feel nauseatingly unsure of the next steps I will make in the world, but inside me the door of faith has opened and I do not hesitate to look back, I am so close to my destiny. I feel in the middle of a stormy sea, unsure of exactly how to progress on my path, but there is a silent reasoning inside of me, it is His voice. I am ok.
I’m not going to lie, the experience of being cleansed is thoroughly unsettling. God is releasing my past and letting me deal with it, revealing more of the pain but somehow enabling me to handle it. He is letting me let go, He is helping me move on, but I had to remember the reasons I kept myself in bondage to my demons. The past has come to my attention, my experiences that have shaped me, are flashing before my eyes and I am able to identify why I have ended up where I am today. I must learn where those voices of pain and hate came from and know that they are the past shadows, keeping me trapped and I no longer need them in my future. It's time for me to move on and let go.
Today has been difficult, in all honesty Iv been quite depressed, which I hoped wouldn’t happen now I had the main focus of my life on God. However, the worldly worries and cares I had with me last year are still here now: I'm overweight, my house needs cleaning, I'm not a good enough girlfriend and a selection of other attacks on my mind. I cant ignore them though, they won't go away. In focusing on God I also need to somehow make time and enthusiasm to keep fit and keep my house at least slightly clean and tidy, but I think the key is not taking it to the extreme, a lesson I am yet to learn. All of today the thoughts of how useless I am have kept me trapped behind the same door I have grown accustomed to hiding behind and in the end I just lay down on my bed and talked to God about how confused I was about my life and could He help provide motivation for me to complete the basic tasks without feeling overwhelmed. This did not happen instantly, instead I felt compelled to continue to read Matthews Gospel in the Bible. I did this for a couple of hours and found a verse that seemed to resonate within me:
Strangely, this seemed to put everything in to perspective. Of course I am still going to battle with the desires of this world, the need for perfection in all areas of my life, but that is because I am still renewing my mind. As uncomfortable as it will be for me to give up the life that I know and the demands and expectations that go with it, it is necessary so I am able to live a life towards God and kingdom realities. I will have to lose my life, my often unrealistic pressures I put on who I am supposed to be to the rest of the world and learn to live towards another reality. It is the road less travelled, it does mean loss of self but gain of a life that truly represents Christ in me and I in Him. This is the life I have chosen, but of course as shown above, it comes at a price to the self I am so used to living with.
I love being a child of God, but it is no easy journey that I have elected to go on. It requires much more thinking, honesty and humility than any other path I have chosen to follow in the past. It is one that is shaking the very belief systems that I have built my life on and breaking down attitudes I didn’t even realise I possessed. It is tough because the world and its standards of acceptance, fight for my attention, all promising me the happy every after I still seem to be searching for. If I lose enough weight, keep my house sparkling, be a rosy perfect girlfriend, speak Spanish, play the piano and bake a perfect cake, then happiness will be mine. But all I have done over the years is add more and more expectations to the plate so that in the end I have buckled under the weight of the ideal life I am trying to create but never quite making it past the writing of lists. I have been stuck in the planning part of my life for as long as I can remember but now as I finally find a way that will let me let go of these pressures, they have come back taunting me with their final offer.... acceptance. I will be liked, I will like myself my brain tells me, when I have completed all of the tasks above and more. That little voice keeps telling me I cant really expect to be loved and honoured when I am lazy and useless and never complete anything. Its the voice that I have allowed to rule over me for far too long. I let it become what it is, I fed it with magazines, television shows and comparing myself to others. I let this created world of my idea of perfection stop me from ever even starting a life, because there was too many pressures and ideals for me to choose from. I created a character that no amount of hard work and years of determination would ever be fulfilled because she was never meant to be. She was created to take me away from who I really was, to distract my attention from finding out more about the real me and ultimately to remind me of what a failure I was. The battle between her and I still continues, even now, even when I am desperate to escape from the clutches of the world I was trying to create.
So....what can I do? The only way I can battle this head on is to have complete and perfect faith in Gods ability to save me from myself. I have to believe it, I have to follow it, because if I give up I'll be back where I started, in a life that traps me into a false sense of living. I continued to read the Bible today and in it found the focus I needed to put me back on the path of hope and glory. I also managed to make a relatively healthy lunch, cleaned my kitchen and bathroom and sorted through my emails. There are a million other things I could beat myself up for not doing, but I did the most important thing of all, I spent time with God, both in prayer and in reading His word. As I did this, the pressures of the world around me seemed to disappear and I became me again, I could breathe and I regained focus and perspective on my day. God did give me the motivation to get the things done that needed to be done and to leave them at that. Till tomorrow......
Love Always.x
No comments:
Post a Comment