HEALING WHILE YOU'RE HURTING

This healing process after my surgery has confirmed something that the Lord taught me years ago about healing. At the time it really helped me to bear the heartache that otherwise would have been completely unbearable and for some, would have driven them to end their life. I know because I considered it myself during that season.

The first 4 weeks were of course filled with a lot of discomfort, followed by straight up pains and soreness as the meds wore off. In the 3rd and 4th week I was wishing I still had some of the narcotic pain meds and that somebody would have told me I'd need them! I swore I would have kept some back had I known it would be like that 3 to 4 weeks AFTER the surgery!

I was caught off guard by the pains and went to the doctor to make sure I was okay. The nurse reassured me that these new pains were a part of the healing process. They were an indication that I was right on schedule with my healing. These "new pains" I was feeling were from ligaments and muscles "waking up", no longer under the influence of the drugs that were given to me to deaden them before they cut me open. Things were stretching back into place, tightening back up, coming back together, sometimes feeling more like they were being torn apart, and causing quite a painful stir in the process.

I had bad days out of the blue, then some really good ones. More bad days, and good until one day I woke up and knew that all of the worst is over. It was like I had been suddenly healed, but I know it didn't happen all of a sudden. The healing was happening WHILE I was hurting. The whole time I was feeling pains that stopped me in my tracks and make me moan and grunt, my body was healing.

The same is true of your emotional healing. Healing doesn't happen separately from pain. Your healing is IN your pain because it is a part of the process. With every tear you cry, you are crying tears that will never and can never be cried again. So let them flow if you have to, and through each tear, thank God that healing is taking place.

Many people miss this because they are too busy lying and trying to look stronger, and unaffected by what caused the pain but they are only cheating themselves out of the true beauty that God is trying to pull out of their ashes. Denying your pain is also denying yourself the opportunity to sense the loving Presence of the Lord, Him comforting you, embracing you, and holding you close.

I've said it before that if heartache is squeezing you, squeeze it back. Squeeze it until you get your blessing out of it. Choking back your tears and pain robs you of your blessing and how your gifts and ministry will benefit from what you've endured. Don't deny what you feel. Give it the respect that it deserves because any and everything can't just walk up on you and hurt you. If something hurts you, it's because it meant something and you can gain something from it. The whole time pain feels like it's killing you, it's actually also leaving you. So let it out, let it hurt, then let it go.

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Single Living Series: Faces of Rejection

So a funny thing happed on the way to the market today.

as I was searching for images of rejection, the majority them,

and I mean like 99% of them looked a little something like:

Because for the most part we can’t hide it when we are not interested.

But when I found the pic that best showed how rejection felt to me

and a lot of other women through the years,

most of the time, it looks more like:

 

Because of the mind games men play, and sometimes

the assumptions, reading more into things,

and jumping to conclusions that we do

 

Or sometimes it looks a little something like:

Because for some reason, for many men it’s easier for them to

dog you or disrespect you than just tell you

that they don’t want what you want...at least not with you

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Single Living Chronicles: Addiction to Rejection

Some people are more in love with being rejected than they are with the idea of being in love with someone who will love them back. I used to believe that I constantly chose men who rejected me. I learned that because I had already rejected myself, whether the man wanted to or not I was going to see to that he rejected me. Rejection was my crack. I was hooked on the heartache. Like Taylor Swift I always saw the end before it began. But more pathetic than her, I usually never saw much of a beginning. I was so ready to be in pain that I just went ahead and cut to the chase.

You can’t accuse another person of doing to you what you’ve already done to yourself long before they came along.

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Single Living Chronicles: His Loss? Not Necessarily!

When men reject us, because we simply are not what they are looking for, we console each other by saying, “It’s HIS loss”.  Uh….sweetie, not if he didn’t want you to begin with. You can’t lose something you never wanted to keep in the first place. You just let it go.

So in reality, even though it’s painful at first, it’s not his loss, or yours.

It’s just that neither of you was God’s best for the other. How bout dat?

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Emotional Bullying

 

Bullying Definition

Bullying is unwanted, aggressive behavior among school aged children that involves a real or perceived power imbalance. The behavior is repeated, or has the potential to be repeated, over time. Bullying includes actions such as making threats, spreading rumors, attacking someone physically or verbally, and excluding someone from a group on purpose.

 

The Lord dropped something into my spirit a few years ago and I’m reminded of it today.  “Don’t let the enemy bully you in your emotions.”

One thing I’ve learned in my 52 years is that many people who are bullies as children do not grow out of that behavior into adulthood, and people who tend to be easy targets for bullies don’t always grow out of that tendency into adulthood. You can find bullies and victims of bullying even in the workplace as adults.

When discussing bullies one thing that is usually said still rings true, “They do you that way because they know they can. As long as they can get away with it by you not standing up to them, they will continue to bully you. As long as they can get a rise, a reaction out of you they will continue to entertain themselves with your reactions.” Something else I’ve learned about bullies is that when you stand up to them, stand up for yourself, even if you “lose” the fight, you’ll still earn their respect and they will often find someone who will remain the victim.

When you think about it, where do you think the behavior originates from?  God, or the devil? So when we recognize the author of that behavior we can better see how the enemy will do the same thing to us emotionally. 

He knows that he can say certain things, cause certain things to happen, use people to say or do certain things to get a rise or reaction out of us.  When we show him that at the least sign of something we don’t like we resort to complaining and self-pity, [Proverbs 24:10] he learns how to perfectly time his attacks and with every attack he adds in a special little something extra: Some negative suggestion that he whispers to you so you can start repeating it in your frustration. As you agree with him in your heart and with your words you become a perfect target for his bullying. Not resulting in black eyes or other physical bruises, but in your emotions, dragging you down every time you think you might be about to see some type of daylight.  Learn to FIGHT. SPEAK UP. STAND UP. GUARD YOUR HEART BY KEEPING A HANDLE ON YOUR EMOTIONS. There’s nothing new under the sun. Everybody is dealing with mess they’d rather not deal with. Put on your big girl panties or big boy boxers and put your spiritual dukes up and fight. Use that power of life and death that’s in your tongue and come out of the role of being a victim to the devil’s bullying.

I saw a quote that said, “I got hated on for being myself, so I started hating myself”. When you think about it, doesn’t that describe the enemy of your soul?  He hates you simply because of who you are! A child of the Most High God, a Royal Priesthood, an heir of God and a joint heir with Christ. You’re on your way to the place he got kicked out of when he showed his tail. You’ve been promoted into the spot that was left vacant when he lost his position in heaven. Of course he hates your guts and his mission is to convince you to hate yourself just as much by trying to convince you through life’s trials and the lies he tells you about yourself. He wants to badger you to the point that you feel like this is just the way it is, or that you somehow deserve or are the cause of the abuse, so you just join his club. Don’t let him do that to you! He’s doing it because you allow it. He’s doing it simply because he can. It may sound like I too, am accusing you for what he’s doing to you. I understand that feeling. I used to feel that way at first, but it’s really not the case. I’m simply shedding a light on the trick he’s been playing on you and getting the same results over and over. [Hosea 4:6] [2 Corinthians 2:11] If he can keep your spiritual eyes black, blue and swollen shut from his verbal beatings they will never be opened to see him for what he is. If he can keep your attention focused on what he is saying instead of that God has said about you, you will never have your faith increased by hearing the actual truth about who you are.

 

So check yourself before he makes you wreck yourself.  Check your emotions. What are you feeling? What are you hearing when you feel certain things in your emotions?  The things that you are hearing, are they in line with how God says He feels about you in His Word in scriptures like [Jeremiah 29:11] or are they more in line with what the Word says about what the enemy wants to do [John 10:10]? Are you experiencing anxiety or peace? Do you feel abandoned, or loved?  It’s really simple. As we begin to retrain ourselves to think and speak according the Word we will find ourselves spending less time entertaining what the enemy is doing and being entertainment for the enemy, and more time walking in complete victory. 

 

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DELAYED ACCORDING TO WHO?

In recent years it has become more and more common to hear someone say. "DELAY DOES NOT MEAN DENIAL." As I was thinking about my surgery situation, this phrase came to mind and I got to thinking.  When we say “delay” who are we referring to that is or will be affected by this so-called delay?  It’s certainly not God!  We call something a delay when the timing of it coming to pass doesn’t match our expectations. We say it’s delayed when we thought or hoped it would happen by a certain time, but for whatever reason it doesn’t.  For us, things are delayed due to circumstances beyond our control. 

But no circumstance is out of God’s control. God is not affected or impacted by time. He is not governed by it. He created it for us. It helps us to measure life and seasons.

We say something is delayed because we assumed something, but it didn’t pan out the way we assumed. The Lord will tell us that He is going to do something and we begin to immediately calculate a deadline. We begin looking at present circumstances and assume that because of this or that, the promise will or has to come to pass by this time/date.  One major piece of information we neglect to consider though, is that God didn’t tell you when it was going to happen, only that it’s going to happen, so how can we declare something to be delayed when we were never given a due date? Rarely are dates involved in His promises because I believe, a lot of the condition of the fulfillment is our obedience to what He has instructed us to do in order to be positioned to see the manifestation of those things. So then delayed doesn't mean denial, it means somebody disobeyed.

DELAYS ARE USUALLY UNEXPECTED.

I had no thought whatsoever that I would be waiting 3 or more months to simply have a surgery that is so common that most of us probably are in close proximity to at least two women who’ve had one. Just like my surgery seems to be getting delayed more and more, a total of about  5 months, we all experience delays in our lives. Flight delays, the start of a concert or wedding, traffic delays due to accidents or inclement weather, etc. We can experience a lot of frustration from these delays, even to the point of rescheduling other things that are affected by the first delay. We are caught off guard by delays and sometimes have to stop and regroup to keep from allowing the frustration of the inconveniences to get the best of us. But God is never caught off guard. He’s never shocked or surprised. He’s never left scratching His head and wondering what His next move will now be. From before the foundations of the earth were laid, He knew the exact moment that each of His promises to you would be fulfilled. He just didn’t fill you in on the date and time details.

Another major factor to consider when thinking about why something in our lives may be delayed is that we have to remember, even though you may be involved, even play a key role, THIS ISN'T ALL ABOUT YOU. These so called delays are making room for so many other things to take place. There really is a bigger picture being painted by our all knowing God. I’m reminded of the birth of my youngest daughter and how I had to wait 14 years to get pregnant with her because the Lord knew that my oldest daughter wouldn’t be born for another 13 years. To me I was delayed over 13 years in getting pregnant, but to God, it was all a part of His master plan and it was all done in PERFECT TIMING.

This “delay does not mean denial” is something I actually have come to dislike because I’ve come to understand that DELAYS DON’T EVEN APPLY TO GOD.

Instead I'm learning to stop and ask God to "Reveal to me what's really happening here. Help me to see anything that I may be missing."  I said to Him even about my surgery, "If you have a specific reason for allowing this, I surrender to your reasons, but if not, I don't want to wait any longer." That's pretty much all any of us can say, "Lord this is what I desire, but if You have other plans, I surrender to Your plans. You know what I don't know."  

Keep in mind that He always has your best interest at heart.  His thoughts toward you are of peace and not of evil. Even though the way His plans play out can sometimes be painful to you and seem to throw a wrench in your plans,  (Isaiah 55:8) they are not motivated by a desire of God to hurt you, but to give you an "expected end". There is a place He expects you to end up in and that's what all of this is about. The expected end result that He desires for you. (Jeremiah 29:11) Another translations says, "a future and a hope". My personal translation says, "something to look forward to".

So how do we handle these delays? Well I've already given you a direction that your prayer to Him can go that will help keep your mind right and attitude right. Another thing we can do, and that I plan to do during my current "delay" is to take advantage of the additional time I may end up having prior to the actual surgery. Any additional time I may be gifted through this delay can be spent working on my weight and anything else that will cause me to feel better going into the surgery and cause my recovery to possibly be better. I suggest you do the same. Make the most of your so called delay, and then prepare yourself for the moment when the Lord shows you that everything was actually timed impeccably in your favor. 

Same Message, Different Wording

If there is a door that you feel you could or even should be able to walk through but for some reason you can’t, then maybe you should consider that the reason God is determined to keep that one closed is that it’s not YOURS. Having the ability to do something does not automatically mean that it’s your actual calling. It’s probably just a gift or set of abilities that is in your life to support your true calling.  Stop crying about the door God refuses to open for you and turn your attention toward whatever door He is waiting to have swing open for you. Having mastered something doesn’t necessarily mean you are to never do anything else.  Mastering something may be the sign you need to let you know it’s time to move on to something else. We say, “When God closes one door He opens another”, but at the same time we spend so much time wrestling with the door knobs of those closed doors. Turn around, open your eyes, and ask God to order your steps to the doors He will refuse to close in front of you instead of weeping at the one He refuses to open for you!

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The Pain of Recovery

Bishop Jakes said, "Sometimes the pain of recovery can hurt worse than the pain of the injury."

He ain't nevva lied on that one. The healing process can be deceiving because the healing can be so painful that it makes you think that the opposite is happening. But the Lord has had to remind me of something He said to me years ago, "The whole time you're hurting, you're healing. Whatever is squeezing you, squeeze it back until you squeeze your blessing out of it". Like in childbirth, it's not easy to bear down on the same pain that's so unbearable. But you've got a baby in there trying to come out. The pain means, HE/SHE IS COMING! So you have to COOPERATE with the pain, TEAM UP with the pain, in order to birth what's in you trying desperately to get out and that the enemy is trying just as desperately to kill before it gets out.

It's not so much YOU that he's trying to kill. It's what's IN you. I'm reminded of Job when the devil went to God for permission to attack him. God told him, "Just don't touch his LIFE". In other words, you can kill everybody close to him. Kill everything that belongs to him. But you CAN'T KILL HIM. 

It's the same with you and I. He's not trying to kill YOU, because He knows He can't get that kind of permission from God. Honestly, he doesn't have as much a problem with you being alive as he does with you being effective, productive, relevant, encouraged. So if he can kill what's IN you, your drive, determination, passion and your very faith, by killing everything around you, what belongs to you, getting in as many relationships as possible and killing those, that's what he's after anyway. He wants to convince you that you are left with nothing to live for, and he wants you to blame God for it. 

What did Job's wife say to him? That it would be better for him to CURSE GOD and DIE. Why not just die? Because the enemy didn't go to God and tell him that if he allowed him to take away everything from him he would die. He said he would curse God. THAT'S what that whole book was about, getting Job, or trying to get Job to curse God. But Job passed the test. Yes, he cursed the day he was born, but that brother didn't curse his GOD. Instead he BLESSED HIM. Even when the ONE person close to him who survived all the calamities, was the one who offered the so called solution to his problem: Curse God and die. Even when his friends came and sat with him and pretty much accused him of being unrighteous, or hiding some kind of sin which brought all this upon himself. He passed the test. With all they claimed to know about God, they didn't know that sometimes God will turn the devil loose on you. They didn't know that some storms of life, some trials can't be rebuked away because even though they came from the devil, they came with God's specific signature of approval and instructions. They didn't understand that sometimes, some things only happen so that God will have a stage on which to perform. Even with a bit of rebuke from God like, "Hold on Job. Who you think you talkin to bruh?", he still passed the test. Because he didn't curse his HELP. The Lord Himself became Job's "cheat sheet", and helped him to NOT do the very thing that satan wanted him to do. With the passing of the test came double everything he'd lost.

But don't think that in the mean time Job didn't have to go through the healing. Those sores had to HEAL. The bible doesn't talk about "immediately" or "straightway" his sores were healed. So it's safe to believe that his physical healing was a process. A painful, uncomfortable, inconvenient, itchy (because when sores heal they ITCH) process. The twice as many cattle didn't just magically appear. He had to start somewhere and mate animals and wait for them to be birthed, with each mama animal experiencing the discomfort of those births.

Somebody had to give birth to all those children who replaced the ones he lost. Nobody carried all of those babies at once. Unless there was a multiple birth in there somewhere, each of those babies was carried separately, birthed individually, each with their own pain to the mom.

I've never really known of a preacher/teacher who likes to talk about Job.  There seems to always be this behind-the-scenes fear that if they preach about him they'll end up suffering on another level because of it. But we're so silly. We're suffering anyway! A brother like Job can help us to understand better what's happening, and why it's REALLY happening and the kind of outcome we can look forward to.

There's something about the severity of pain that can distract you to the point of blindness and deafness, where you can't see the hand of God in the situation, or hear Him as clearly as you would without the pain. But by the time that same pain begins to subside, it can also HELP you see and hear God more clearly than you would have without the pain. Imagine that! There's something about the severity of pain that will make you go from cursing the day you(or someone else) were born to being eternally thankful and grateful that God saw fit collaborate with the devil to rip your heart out.  But you have to past the tests first, and there are two of them: The pain of the injury, AND the pain of recovery.

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Divorced and Better Than Ever

1.  Divorce is a type of death: It’s the death of something that we thought or hoped would live forever...our marriage. (According to scripture the only death that should occur in marriage is the death of one of the spouses, not the marriage itself.) The difference between the death of a marriage and the death of a person though is, depending on the situation, you might think that it would have been better if the former spouse had just DIED. But instead you have to see them, deal with them about the children, the financial issues that need to be settled, etc. So basically you’re dealing with a dead situation, but with a live person that you may sometimes wish was dead.

2.  Time to cry/grieve: Allow yourself to grieve. In the Five Stages of Grief, this first phase is called DENIAL/SHOCK. At first, you may not feel any grief, sadness or regret, and it may cause you to believe that you are unaffected, or like God is “supernaturally carrying you through”.  *But this is actually just a part of the process. After that initial phase of denial/shock/euphoria passes you will begin to feel a wide range of emotions. Don’t think that just because you’re the one who left, that you won’t grieve. Grief is a natural response to the death of something. What are you grieving? Loss. Loss of what??? Because you might say that YOU were the one who left and you have no regrets. Even with no regrets there is still a grieving of the loss. Loss of what you hoped for. Loss of what should have happened. Loss of what marriage is supposed to be. Loss of all that you imagined. Loss of the good it was before it went bad. Loss of YOUR marriage because now, you have become a statistic.

However it hits you, let it hit, whether in quiet tears or like a Mack truck. Let it out. Let it hurt. Let it go. This is not the time to try to be brave, or to try to be what you may think bravery looks like. You already are brave. You were either brave enough to make the difficult decision to end something that never should have started, or to walk away from something that was draining the life out of you, or you were brave enough to keep living after being left by the one you thought would always be there for you. Holding back the grief doesn’t make you more spiritual, but makes you more of a ticking time bomb that’s going to go off on the wrong person at the wrong time and in the wrong place. Holding it back causes roots of bitterness to grow from not having dealt with the hurt properly.

3.  Pray for healing and choose to forgive: When you feel hurt, pray for healing. When you feel anger or rage, confess forgiveness. To forgive is a CHOICE. It’s the choice you make in response to the COMMAND to forgive. In your flesh you can’t forgive. But the power to succeed is in the command to do. This is basically saying that even if you don’t have the ability to do something, once God asks you to do it, the ability to do it in IN the command to do it. All that is required is your obedience. The ability is not something you can receive by a cloud coming into your room and surrounding you, or some out of body experience. It’s not something anyone else, even God can do for you.  But God gives you the grace to forgive. A key to forgiveness is that if you’re waiting for the hurt and anger to stop before you forgive, you’ll never forgive. Depending on your fragile emotions that can change with the wind will keep you in a place of constant pain, anger and bitterness.

4.  Embrace your new normal:

a.   You may find yourself feeling more isolated than ever. Suddenly it is just you, or you and your little ones, and you may find yourself in a place where you expected more support than what you are receiving. This can come as a surprise and it can really be hurtful, but there are blessings in your isolation waiting to be bestowed upon you.

b.  The greatest blessing, I believe is that you can get to know yourself outside of a relationship…outside of being attached to someone who can heavily influence or maybe even control what you do. You need to know who YOU are. Learn the sound of your OWN thoughts inside your OWN head! What do you like or dislike? Narrow it all down to who you really are without any input from another person. For many of us, this is something we failed to do prior to marriage. Shortly after my divorce I began to notice this happening to me. I was mildly surprised the first few times I heard myself think, “I don’t like that”. I had to pause and allow myself to HEAR myself. I heard myself say or think that I didn’t like something ALL BY MYSELF!  There was no influence from my husband or anybody at church. It was just me saying, “I don’t’ like that”. It was amazing.

5.  Let God talk to you about YOU: Who you are in God is not predicated upon whether or not you have a husband. That is a requirement, stipulation, or restriction we place on ourselves. It does NOT come from God. If you believe that you need a husband in order to be all God has created and ordained you to be, you will put your life on hold, waiting for a man to come along and validate you and give you permission to do what God ordained you to do before the foundations of the earth were laid. Our relationships with God and His assignments on our lives are personal. If it is His Will for you to work with a husband in ministry, you will. But that doesn’t mean your husband has to come and say that it’s okay. God is the one who gives the OK. You need to be walking in your call. Your true mate is in your calling, your assignment. Your mate is in your PURPOSE.  If a man can give you your calling, he can take it back from you. If he can give you permission, he can shut you down.

6.  Ask God questions about EVERYTHING!: Here are some examples of things to ask Him about. Let Him teach you about what you could have done differently. This is not saying that what happened is your fault, but with any failed test you want to find out what answers you got wrong, because you want to be better prepared for the next test. It may be an issue with your study habits, or maybe you rushed through it, etc. The answer to this question may take you back to who you married to begin with. Why did you marry them? What was your state of mind? What were your thoughts and beliefs about yourself? If you discover negative thoughts or beliefs about yourself, ask Him to help you change those thoughts. He may go back to your childhood and point out to you the very moment your thinking shifted for the negative. What were your expectations going into it? Allow Him to teach you if any of those expectations were unrealistic? Were you expecting your spouse to fill a void that only God can fill?  Did you marry someone who was expecting that of you? Ask God about your own behavior during the marriage. A lot of our behavior is shaped by our beliefs and expectations. This is why many are over before they start, doomed from the giddy up. Ask Him about anything you want that has to do with relationships, and what you need to know and understand about yourself, and who you are and who you were created to be. Allow this time for God to help you to get acquainted with yourself and make the necessary adjustments that will help you walk in wholeness.

Things to Consider: An Unfair Advantage?

Years ago I heard someone define jealousy has “having the belief that someone has an unfair advantage over you”. When I thought about the times that I have felt jealousy towards someone that is what it boiled down to every single time. Somehow I felt that life circumstances, or God had given them an advantage that I didn’t have.
 

I have learned that the only people who have any kind of advantage over anyone else are the ones who simply put God first.  HE is the only advantage that any of us can really have. If we have an advantage over someone else it is only because we are taking advantage of Him while others are not. It’s not that God likes them and dislikes you or likes them more than He likes you. His love is no greater toward one than it is another.  God has no respect of person. What He has offered to one, He has offered to all, which is Himself. The issue is that all will not take advantage of what He has offered.

 

We are often so busy people watching that we become offended by other’s success or happiness.  We tend to focus on what others are doing or accomplishing, and not who has helped them to do or accomplish it. We look at what people have and it causes us to feel that somehow God made them better than us. Because our focus is on people and not God some of us have trained ourselves to believe that in order to get what we want we have to take advantage of and use each other for our own purposes.  Meanwhile, the one who has fully and freely given Himself to us for this very purpose sits by, unused. His heart breaks for us while we hit one brick wall after another, fall into one pit after another, lose one good relationship after another, whether it be friend, business, or romantic. His heart breaks for us while we sit and do nothing, feeling sorry for ourselves because we have taken the success of someone else to mean that we are not capable of success.

 

If everything you need is placed in front of you, and everything I need is placed in front of me, I can’t feel slighted or overlooked because you take advantage of what’s in front of you while I don’t do the same with what’s in front of me. I cannot allow my fascination with what’s going on with you, to override my fascination with discovering and walking in all He has created me to be. There are advantages in God, but He has given no one an unfair advantage. He has simply offered Himself to all of us. Those who take advantage of Him and all that comes with Him will reap the benefits. Those who do not take advantage of Him will not see the manifestation of many things that they desire, can imagine in their hearts, and even some things that He has spoken, because some things that God has spoken require some action or obedience on your part.

 

What I’m about to say may taste bitter in your mouth, but will be sweet in your belly if you receive it. When you do feel that the Lord is extending favor to another and not to you..when you feel that He is slipping them helpful notes under the table right in front of you...when you feel that He is sharing secrets of success with them that He is not sharing with you…it could be that that’s exactly what’s happening!  If you consider the fact that He has made Himself available to them as well as to you, and they have taken advantage of it and you have not, what would you expect? Would you honestly expect their life and their outcomes to look like yours? That my friend is what would be unfair and unjust of God! He has promised that those who seek Him will find Him. He has promised that if we call unto Him He will show us great and mighty things that we don’t even know about yet. He has promised that when we have searched for Him with all our hearts we will find Him. He has promised that while we are yet speaking, He will answer us. He has even told us that He is able to exceed our wildest dreams. So if you are seeing nothing great, receiving no answers to prayers, have not seen any expectations exceeded then it is time to take an honest look at yourself and what it is that you could have taken advantage of but for whatever reason chose to ignore.
 

The truth about jealousy is that it is an after- the-fact smoke screen. Although it has been known to be the cause of horrible things, it’s more of an affect than it is a cause. It is a result of your blurred vision and lack of understanding of how God operates and who you really are in Him. It comes into play after you have passed up opportunities to take advantage of the fact that you have a God you can pray to and receive answers.  If you didn’t feel that someone had an unfair advantage over you, and if you took the time to seek after God to find out who He created you to be and what His plan is for your life, jealousy wouldn’t be an issue.  If you allowed Him to reveal to you all the wonderful gifts and abilities He placed in you, you would never feel that someone else has more or better to offer than you do. You would not measure what you think is great favor on them by what you feel you are lacking.  You would be too busy enjoying the life that He has ordained for you to live. So what do you say?  How about we get busy enjoying that life that God has ordained for us to LIVE!

When I Got Tired (pt 2)

I filed for a legal separation so that child support payments could start right away. It wasn’t much, but my point wasn’t so much about how much child support would be, but about being one step closer to divorce. Quite a few people thought I was crazy for leaving him and the things we had and even thought that I was lying on him when I would talk about what it was like living with him.  I guess that like him, they were caught up in the image.  Didn’t they know that I created the image they saw?  It didn’t have to be real.  It just had to be what I created.  But because of what they saw from a distance and the outside, they concluded that I was crazy or as he put it, under the influence of witchcraft.

I chose to go to my mother’s house. She later told me that when she saw me coming up on her porch I looked like was running from the “pure dee devil”. Me and my babies slept in her extra bedroom for a few weeks until my brother came and took the bed because he said he needed it. I wondered if part of the reason he did that was to try and force my hand, figuring that if I had to sleep on the floor I would take my butt back home to my husband where I “belonged”.  Church folks do stuff like that sometimes.  They take it upon themselves to put you in positions to do what they think you should do. Well, all I have to say about that is, “Sike!” I took quilts and blankets, pillows and sheets and I slept on my mother’s living room floor with my babies for 3 months.  My mother told me that I “slept like them babies on that floor”, so I couldn’t have been lying about the things I said I had gone through with him. She said if I had been lying, I wouldn’t have been able to sleep so peacefully.  I had no idea that she would come in sometimes during the night and sit in the chair next to us, watch us and go back to sleep. I did wake up a few mornings and wondered when she had come in and sat in the chair.  I guess I was “sleeping like them babies” not to notice someone coming into the room and sitting over me in a chair.

From there I went to a roach infested 1 bedroom apt. When I say roach infested that’s exactly what I mean. I only put a few can goods in the cabinets and when I would go to open the cabinets, I would have to step back because whenever I opened them, roaches would leap out. There was also a mouse that traveled back and forth between the first and second floors, and plumbing that flooded the hallway right outside my door. But I was at peace.  From there we moved to a 2 bedroom apartment with horrible LOUD neighbors (who I knew from a church I used to go to). My babies had to get used to the noise without thinking that something bad was happening. My entire living room and hallway was flooded at least twice because the neighbors on the two floors above me put the wrong things down their garbage disposal. But I had peace. In the mean time I had to file bankruptcy because of so many bills that had been accumulated during the marriage. I didn’t realize at the time that when he was encouraging me to have credit cards in my name, it was insurance for him in the event of a divorce. From there I bought my first home on my own only to end up in a bankruptcy and foreclosure, to a duplex, back to my mom’s house where I’d slept on the floor for 3 months. Only this time it was after my mom had passed and I had bought it.

When you get TIRED, you’ll get the hell out.  It won’t matter how much he buys you, or what you have to walk away from.  You’ll go to a shelter, a one room studio, move in with someone and sleep on their floor, sleep in the bed with your babies, put up with roaches for a while, anything to have peace of mind and safety. When you get tired you’ll change your mind about what’s worth fighting for. You’ll come to the conclusion that YOU are the thing that’s worth fighting for, and if you have little ones, they are worth for, not some image that you’ve created for the sake of keeping up appearances. When you get tired of dying, you’ll choose to live.