Pesky little chippers they are, these things that would rob me/us of the peace and freedom of living in the love of Christ. They used to run me ragged. They pounded me into a deep depression – a fog of forgetfulness. I hardly knew who I was
in all of it. Life was, to say the
least, miserable, at best dull.
And even now the hounds of hell pursue me relentlessly. But it is of no consequence. It is irrelevant.
To live from a heart perspective does not remove pain or
distress from one’s life. It sort of voids it.
Do I feel the aching nerve pain in my head every day that
has been one of those hounds of hell? Yes. But I do not live from there. Pain is not in control of who I am or how I am.
Do I feel the pain and ache of loneliness in my life after giving myself to the task of raising children only to find I am alone on this earth once again? Absolutely. Does it cause me to be any less in love with Jesus? Absolutely not.
Can I look on another human being with compassion and
understanding of their pain and loneliness?
Of course. The difference is that the one thing I have, that I can offer to them, that is truthfully worthwhile, is hope. But I will not pass on prison to others in disguise as freedom and hope and life and light. This is heresy. I would not let go of love so
easily.
For I have awakened. The light of God’s love has shown brightly into the dark recesses of my broken and wounded heart. He has set me free from
the bondage of living at the mercy of the circumstances and feelings that were my plague, my prison, my misery.
But more than that, He has set me free from the ache of believing my heart was not worthy of, nor ever going to be, healed and
whole. He has opened my eyes to truth and love and freedom and the beautiful mystery of His real plan of redemption. I see a God who is unwilling to allow me to remain captive, unwilling to allow my heart to remain broken, unwilling for my
eyes to stay blind.
It is categorically the largest illumination in my life: a major tectonic shift. You see, God loves
me.
Those words although having always been true have not rung true to me before because of the blindness of living from the perspective of my human mind. It is difficult to connect mind body and spirit. How was I to know
that the instrument designed to make that connection resided here in my chest, His secret weapon against confusion blindness loneliness and pain? The very sanctuary of His presence – the portal by which we might connect.....
And to think that all the years of my life, now nearly 58, I've sought to kill it. My heart was above all else my enemy. Or so it seemed. For it deceived me endlessly, dragging me here and there in search of..... What? I dare say that I did not even know. Love would have been the word I’d have used then, but now that word is so far inferior in the way I perceived it to be than it is now. And I think that whoever may read this and find themselves going line by line may not allow for the impact
of the truth of what that word signifies.
It is so much more than what its reputation has been.
The pursuit of the destruction of my heart has led me into the devastation of a life that I can’t even express just now. I’ve written for a while of what lurks within
my soul. Poison. It was poison. Aimed from my very hand at the core of who I am in an attempt to destroy the darkness there.
The depth of hatred for myself is difficult to conceive of. Yet I recall the drivenness towards that destruction vividly. On one hand it saddens me deeply, but on the other it speaks to the strength I’ve been given. A two edged sword to be so strong. I know that He created me –
purposeful, intentional, specifically to be who I am. Nothing gets by Him. I’ve always believed. Always known His existence. Always been angry at Him for the life I’d been given. I blamed Him for it all. And why not? He is in control, right? Yes. He is. He has not for one moment in time lost control of His creation. This is the most fundamental truth that I’ve always known.
So what then? I’d have never admitted it to anyone because my heart loathes to cause pain, but I thought Him to be a harsh master requiring more than I was able to give. Indeed a cruel joke that I was the butt of. ‘Let us make man in our image, but let’s make him imperfect and therefore unable to live up to our standard’ was my understanding.
Of course I’ve learned more scripture since those unformed thoughts were wedged in my mind behind the ever pervasive rule of being good enough. I never was going to be good enough. I knew it. He knew it.
Everyone else knew it. Why, oh why do we all play this game of pretending to be good enough? Better yet, why are we pretending to try to be good enough? Isn’t it obvious that it’s not possible?
Anyway, those were the feelings if not formed into thoughts that I supposed were truth. Those were the standards I lived by. The unspoken rules that we must pretend to be trying to be good enough. I hated that. I rebelled against it. I could not reconcile the thought of a ‘loving God’ who would require us to live such a lie. Where was truth?
So my life was a teeter totter rocking back and forth between rebellion and submission to what I thought was how to be. I was miserable. I did not want a life like that.
Of late I’ve come to be thankful for my strength. Thankful even for my rebellion, though it took me places that should have, but for some reason didn’t, destroyed me. What a wonderful crazy delightful impossible God He is to use me against myself. I must take a moment to laugh here. Hidden behind the façade of those rules was deep and everlasting love, trying to break through, crack the glass exterior of my heart, and allow me to see reality. I think, were it not for this stubbornness and willful strength in me that I’d have withered long ago into the mush I desired to be.
You (if there is a you reading here, hahaha) may be asking what
this truth is and how it may be found. Well His timing is, as always, perfect. His tools, more than likely, different for each individual. As different as the individuality of snowflakes falling in winter storms are different from one another.
In my case during a time of searching, still searching,
trying to make the pieces fit, a book. Now, I think that years of preparation had to have occurred for this particular book to have such an impact as it did. But “Waking
The Dead” – an appropriate title indeed – was the very thing, at the very time of my readiness, that was an answer to questions I’d had forever, without even knowing it.
So now. After devouring the light, being the proverbial starving person here, it set and settled into the void. Since then it’s become part of my DNA, so deeply does it connect within me as truth.
God my Father creator of heaven and earth is no masochist. He really is love. And wonder of wonders, I am the object of that love.
Words on paper. Nothing
could express the depth of that statement to another human being. Nothing I can write I’m sure. But perhaps give a hint. A glimmer of the possibility. Hopefully a nudge towards the discovery of the truth.
What was a mangled bloodied broken wounded foul stench of an infected excuse for a heart that lived within me, has become the place where Glory resides. I cannot dismiss the presence of such beauty. I cannot expel
what has become the core of my being. I have no desire to separate from such depth of connection with all that is Love.
Life is now right. The pesky hounds of hell are irrelevant to my existence. They hold no meaning any longer.
Only Love abides.
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