Whining

I've decided to stop crying so much and whining. The pain operating table is incredibly painful because I am choosing to do it without any pain medication. It's tough because I have to stare at my wounds and feel the pain at the same time. I want to scream and rage and get drunk and fight and kick and holler and run and tear at my skin and throw things and rip my sins out of myself. 

The crying comes when I feel an overwhelming need to pay penance and think that crying and whining are the only ways to change anything. WRONG. 

Working on changing is the only way to change anything. I am choosing healthy over unhealthy. I am choosing to believe I am who God says I am over the filthy gangrenous pig slop of false lies the enemy throws at me. I am choosing  to believe that my behavior matters to people other than just myself. I am choosing hope over despair. I am choosing to fill myself with Christ because that's the only way to create some semblance of sanity within myself. I am choosing to eat (most of the time), exercise, sleep. I am choosing paths that have not made much sense to me up until now. 

I am giving up this idea that I know myself better than anyone because that's melodious bull shit. I am listening to people who know what truth looks like, sounds like, tastes like. I am being turned upside down and gutted until all that I am filled with is truth. I am working on not treating myself like a piñata that can only give out good things after I've self-sabotaged and figuratively let the enemy beat me with a stick.

Hope already came. His name is Jesus.

And here's some truth that feels so good to acknowledge and let out:

I rely on people for affirmation. It's why I'm nice to people. I don't want to feel bad so I flatter people to make them feel good so that I feel okay about myself. I'm not good. I am working on changing.

Things aren't always what they seem. I have a lot of pride that only God is able to fix. Good behavior can be smoke and mirrors to what's really going on.

Five Minute Friday: Broken

I could go on and on about being broken. It seems that there are times in my life where I have felt broken beyond repair and then God shows up. I have grown a lot in the past couple of years, though I am often unable to see it until people point it out. I am reminded of Jeremiah's vision about God molding us on His potter's wheel every day. He uses the same broken, marred pot to make something beautiful, and He just keeps working on us. And then I am reminded of this verse:

My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise.
Psalm 51:17

I still haven't wrapped my head around the fact that He loves us, brokenness and all. I want SO BADLY to be able to fix myself, and I've tried for years! I am addicted to alcohol and relationships and my own brokenness so much so that it is hard to let go of these things and just let Him remake me. Healing is more painful than sitting in my own dung (because at least I'm used to it). I want to be more positive but try from my own strength. I want to start admitting my brokenness to the Lord. I want to tell Him that I don't have it altogether. That's humility, and it's the only way He's going to be able to really "fix" me.

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Five Minute Friday: Belong

For years I felt like I didn't belong. The wounds from my trauma yelled at me and told me that I was different, ugly, broken and could never be repaired. Their yells were louder than the still, small voice of the Lord, that I now realize was nudging me along in truth even in the midst of my brokenness.

I went through college listening to the yells of the enemy and what my wounding told me. I quit drinking afterward and still felt like I didn't belong. Friends moved away and I was left by myself to battle the wounds of my past with vengeance.

And then, God moved. As He always does. I hadn't noticed His voice in years, hadn't felt His presence in too long.  He connected me with a group called ThirdPlace, an authentic community of 20-30 somethings and young professionals, people in touch with their brokenness and trying desperately to remember that Jesus gets all of the glory for getting us out of the miry pit. I am so grateful to feel like I belong in a group of misfits, addicts, and imperfect people. It is such a gift to be a mess and still considered God's dearly loved child.

Check out http://lisajobaker.com/five-minute-friday/ to find out more about Five Minute Friday, a community of women writers.

Five Minute Friday: Present

To stay in the present means to take whatever's thrown at you and maintain an inner calm and peace throughout. That's what I'm learning now. God is teaching me resiliency. He is teaching me how to trust Him. He is teaching me that my guilt and shame are not too much for Him to take away. He is steady, persistent, and faithful. These are things that I am not. I used to think that living in the present meant doing wild things all the time - live it up and get drunk because you don't know when you're gonna die! When I die, I want to have actually lived. One of my favorite quotes is by Henry David Thoreau. Part of it says that "I wanted to live deep and suck all the marrow out of life." The way to do this is not by doing whatever I want whenever I want. Self-control has always been the hardest virtue for me, and this has affected my health, my relationships, my self-esteem, my peace. There is a way to stay present without going crazy. It involves surrounding myself with stable people and investing in healthy endeavors so that I'm not jumping from task to task with no plan in place. Easier said than done. I am definitely a work in progress.

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Five Minute Friday: Beautiful

She touched her hair and noted how frayed it had become through the years. The gray was coming out in ways she had never imagined. She looked in the mirror to see an 86-year-old woman who was nearing the end of her life and thrilled for what was to come. Her husband had died years earlier and she remembered when he called her beautiful and longed for another to say the same. She exuded a radiance that pleased her heavenly father.

Jesus calls us beautiful even when we are broken. He longs to show us our favor in His eyes and teach us that His beauty does not come from without but from within. "The unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit" is pleasing to the Lord. How can we attain this beauty? I am learning that it is not the time that we spend with the Lord that matters but the amount of days. This is how we learn what beauty means, by taking it to our father regularly. It is in this pattern of time with Him that character develops.

He convicted me yesterday by telling me that He doesn't want me to define myself as a Christian, but as a follower of Jesus. My anxiety springs up when I believe that my inside beauty is horribly incongruent with my outside. Women love to tell other women how cute they look on the outside, but God sees what's underneath and longs to transform us into the women He wants us to be.

Check it out! http://lisajobaker.com/five-minute-friday/  Every Friday, Lisa Jo puts a prompt on her page for women to write about for five minutes.

Identity

God woke me up at 5:00 this morning to tell me that I need to be seeking my purpose and that this is not the season to get married even though everyone around me seems to be getting married. I hope He keeps waking me up early in the morning. The Holy Spirit speaks to me in statements like that sometimes, reminding me when I've gotten off track and need to be moving forward rather than backward. Replacing human approval and affirmation with God's is hard. There is a reason that we put idols in place of God - our sin makes it easier!

I drove by a house today and saw a mom carrying her son away from something. He was wailing and looked very upset. That's how I feel. It is easier to put humans in the place of God because they have lower standards. They can look the other way when we sin and it's easier for them to do so at times. God gets into the nitty gritty and pokes around in the stuff that we were previously unwilling to see or deal with. He has been pointing out my manipulative behavior and how I lead with my emotions and hardly ever think before speaking. Only He knows my heart, and so it's rough hearing that sort of conviction from Him. He points it out in a loving way, but sometimes I just want to lay on the floor and cry about how broken I am. I don't think I will ever understand why He chose to love us. I am working on accepting love rather than trying to prove God wrong. I don't know how I'm working on it. I just know that I'm supposed to be. Nights are the hardest. I become very anxious and wrapped up in my emotions. I hope God keeps waking me up at 5 am.