“I just don’t understand how they could do this to me.” I have heard this said so many times over the years and recently have said it myself several times. When someone you have loved for many years decides to act in a way that destroys the relationship you have with him or her, the pain you feel can overwhelm you and trigger a multitude of feelings and questions. You may feel like I recently did: stuck in a pit of quicksand, slipping a little deeper every time I tried to answer another “how could he” question. As much as I would like to know the answers to each of the questions I think of, I have decided it may be best if I don’t understand them and can never answer them. Isaiah 55:3,6-9 says, “Come to me with your ears wide open. Listen, and you will find life….Seek the Lord while you can find him. Call on him now while he is near. Let the wicked change their ways and banish the very thought of doing wrong. Let them turn to the Lord that he may have mercy on them. Yes, turn to our God, for he will forgive generously. ‘My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts,’ says the Lord. ‘And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine. For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts….'” Nowhere in this passage does God instruct us to study so we may understand the thoughts and actions of other people. Nowhere does He say we will understand what other people do or why they do it. What He does tell us is that we need to listen to Him and study His ways. The more we understand God’s ways, the less we will understand the ways of man including the men or women who hurt us. Stop trying to understand how someone you love could do something that hurts you deeply. If you understand it, you are capable of doing it yourself. You are almost always better off not understanding it and not being capable of it. This is almost always the only way out of the quicksand.
Tag: failure
New Happiness Despite Old Circumstances
If someone had told me a year ago that I would be where I am today, I would have told them they were crazy. Not only would I have never allowed things to spin this far out of control, I would never have been able to survive as things are now.
If someone had told me six months ago that everything that my life was would be gone in three months, I would have told them they were as wrong as wrong could be.
If someone had told me three months ago that I would soon be happier than I had been in over two decades, I would have told them they had no idea what they were talking about and obviously didn’t know me very well. At that time I was too devestated to really, truly function or see any possibility of happiness in my future.
Guess what. In each of these instances I would have been the one who was wrong. When I look back on the multitude of major changes that have taken place during this difficult time in my life, I visualize a big box that my life was carefully packed away in. Some of my life was packed neatly and organized and some was simply thrown into the box with the rest. Regardless of how or when it was placed in the box, each item was very valuable to me. Once my whole life was packed away to keep it safe, someone snatched the box from the place l had hidden it for safety. They flipped it upside down and shook until the entire box, my life, was empty, handed that empty box to me, stomped on much of the contents and then smugly walked away.
I felt lost at first, frozen and unable to think. After some time had passed, I knelt down on the floor and began to try to put everything back in the box, but the box seemed much smaller now. After a while I realized that the broken pieces of my life wouldn’t fit in the box any more. I had a difficult time fitting everything in the box before it was dumped and was now faced with the task of trying to shove every broken piece, big or small, into a space never made to hold so much. It couldn’t be done.
With tears flowing down my face, I removed each broken piece of my life and spread them neatly around the floor beside the box. I gazed upon them and mourned my losses. How could I continue without these pieces of my life whether they were whole or broken? I tried desperately to find a way to glue the shattered pieces back together. I insisted I would succeed, but after a while I realized I was lying to myself. No amount of glue or tape could ever fix these shattered pieces and make them whole again, and they could not fit back into the box I held no matter how I tried. I didn’t know what to do.
I knew I couldn’t go on without these pieces but they couldn’t be fixed. I cried and I cried…a lot, and then I began to pack the unbroken items back into the box. Even these unbroken pieces were marred in some way by scratches, bruises, dents or cracks, but they were still intact despite their scars. As I placed the last of the unbroken pieces of my life into the box, I saw something through the tears welled up in my eyes. My box was full and not because it was smaller. My box had grown in size and the scarred but unbroken pieces of my life that now resided in this box had grown, too.
The box I packed my life into was completely full and it no longer seemed like anything was missing. The shattered pieces on the floor around me were no longer important. I had thought for over two decades that each item I had packed away was extremely important and irreplaceable. I had packed each of my precious “belongings” away to protect them, but all that I had really accomplished was to hold on to them for two decades longer than God wanted me to. These things had no real value and actually lowered the value of the other pieces of my life.
My life outside of my imaginary box has changed considerably. Some of the changes were painful to live through but each and every one of them was needed and has brought me to a new place in my life…a new place where I feel respected, wanted and loved.
Isaiah 43:2 says, “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze.”
I thought I would not survive the complete change my life has been through; but, as it says in Isaiah 43:2, I did not drown or burn. I made it and I am happy for the first time in many, many years.
Shifting From the Winds to the Eye of the Storm
Have you ever lived in a geographic location where you have to deal with the threat of possible hurricanes? The weather guy has made his prediction that it’s a category 2 now but may strengthen and make landfall as a category 4 in the next 24 to 48 hours. Should you run to the store and stock up on bread and bottled water? Should you go to the nearest gas station and fill your vehicles and multiple gas cans…just in case? Should you evacuate and hope everything is still standing when the storm is over? Should you just stay put and not worry about anything because these things usually end up proving to be much less than predicted?
In recent months, I have found that my life has almost always consisted of preparations for the next “hurricane,” but in the last few years I have not been preparing as I should. It took the most recent hurricane for me to realize just how ill-prepared I really am. Four weeks ago, I moved out. I left my husband whom I have been with for the last 25 years, and I am now living with my 22 year old son. I was not really prepared for this hurricane at all. At first, I thought the storm would completely blow over and dissipate as real hurricanes often do. I was wrong. The hurricane force winds are still blowing all around me as they have done for years, but one thing is very different. I don’t feel those winds. I am sitting comfortably in the eye of the storm. I can see the winds, but they can’t touch me unless I allow myself to shift from the eye of the storm back into the actual storm itself.
Every day I spend out of the winds makes me realize a little more just how hard and how long they have been blowing. I think I have been trying to stand upright in the strongest of hurricane winds for most of my life. For years, I have fought to hold my life together using my own strength, but I have always known my own strength would never be enough. I have always known that God was the only One strong enough to hold anything together, but I have consistently fought giving Him control. Oh, I say all the right things: “I have given everything in this situation to God and will accept whatever He does to fix it.” In reality, I may give it to Him, but I keep my grip firmly on one little corner and eventually pull the whole situation, no matter what it is, back on my own shoulders which have proven time and again to be too weak to carry the burden.
I am a fixer by nature. I fix other peoples’ problems all the time. I have many people who come to me at the first indication of a problem and ask for my advice and help. I’ve been told I give good advice. I help everyone else prepare for whatever hurricane they are living through, but when it comes to my own hurricanes I have consistently found myself ill-prepared. I know where I need to go for hurricane provisions, but I have avoided gathering those provisions because I was afraid I would not find the answers I wanted mixed in with the bread and bottled water. I was terrified that I would read Scripture and pray and realize that God never wanted me where I was and definitely wanted me elsewhere. I have been terrified for a very long time, I think because I have known for a very long time that God did not want me to have ever stepped into the path of these particular winds. I walked right into these hurricane force winds on my own and begged God to calm the storm. Of course, He would calm the storm because He does not condone divorce, right?
God did not calm the storm. He did not stop the winds. He did not provide any way to survive in the storm. Instead, He gave me numerous opportunities to walk out of the storm on my own, but I ignored those opportunities. I was stubborn and stayed just to prove I could and used Scripture in the wrong way in order to excuse my bad decision. I should have left at year two, at year five and at year twenty, but I didn’t. I waited until twenty-five years were spent trying to stand in winds that no one can truly stand in. For now, I will live my life in the eye where the winds cannot touch me. I will use the hurricane provisions that God has generously supplied and remember, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. (Philippians 4:13)”
Worry
Worry…I think this one word describes my worst problem, my biggest failure. I worry about everyone and everything. I worry about my children, my husband, my extended family, my friends, my coworkers, my neighbors, my marriage, my faith, my job, my finances, my church, my Bible study group, my education, my community, my nation, my blog… I even worry about the fact that I worry too much. I guess you could say worrying has become an addiction in my life. I truly never realized until I typed that last sentence that I had an addiction to worry.
Jesus was very clear in Matthew 6:25-27 when He instructed us not to worry. “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who among you by worrying can add a single day to his life (Matthew 6:25-27 NIV).” Jesus didn’t give a complicated sermon. He didn’t weave it into a parable. He didn’t hesitate or stutter. He gave His message clearly when He instructed us not to worry because it won’t do any good. No matter how much time and energy you devote to worrying, you will never gain any advantage in whatever situation you are worrying about. You will simply waste time…time you never get back, time that could have been used productively, time you may have enjoyed, time forever sacrificed on an alter of the great deceiver, that serpent who told the first lie that triggered the first worry.
Worry does two basic things. It tears down and it builds up. It tears down the realities of your present and the possibilities of your future. It tears down your relationships. It tears down your potential accomplishments. It tears down your self esteem, your self worth. It tears down your immune system and destroys your health. It tears down much that should have been and forever robs your future of those should-have-beens that now may never be.
Worry tears down everything you allow it to, but it must have at least some measure of your permission for worry to be this devastatingly powerful. You must hand your authority over your own life to worry in order for it to be able to tear down anything. You made a decision, consciously or unconsciously, to allow your mind to be controlled by worry. Worry doesn’t have a mind of its own. It must hijack yours before it can do anything. How much it tears down is up to you.
The second thing worry does is build up. It builds walls between you and those around you. It builds walls between you and God. It builds walls as tall and as strong as you allow it to build. If allowed, worry will build walls so tall and so strong that you will feel encased in an impenetrable room with no doors or windows. You can hear the activity on the other side of the walls but never be able to live life beyond your worry-built walls.
In his letters to the Philippians the Apostle Paul instructed them, “Be anxious (worried) for nothing but in prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus (Philipians 4:6-7 NIV).” Paul knew what he was talking about. He suffered persecution and imprisonment for his faith. When I think of all Paul faced and persevered through because of his faith and service to God, I feel guilty for all the worrying I do. The guilty feelings don’t automatically erase my natural tendency to worry, but they do remind me that I need to pray my way through my worries and make a conscious and consistent effort to refocus my mind and heart on God’s grace and mercies and put my faith in Him.
I leave you with a quote by George Muller, a preacher from a another generation. “The beginning of anxiety is the end of faith. The beginning of true faith is the end of anxiety.”
forgiven faith 