There are lies we learn as we grow up that become the foundation of our beliefs and actions. Having good and sound sounding-boards is so important while growing up. But what happens when you are a child that doesn’t talk or open up to people?
Yes, God will help us work through our issues, graciously again and again and again until we get it right. But how much better when we have steady adults in our lives, God-fearing adults who can help shape our futures? What if we could be that to a teen or a pre-teen now….be what we wished we had growing up?
I tend to be very works-based. Partly from learning that model growing up and partly from my personality-based-tendency to people-please to gain my worth in this world.
In my pre-teen years I would religiously pray for every family member up to cousins. Until one fateful day when the death of a youngster coincided with a morning I had not prayed. And in an instant, anger and distance grew against a god that I felt was not worth it if it meant I had to help him get the job done. A skewed perception and way off the mark….but I was ten and no one would ever know that thoughts like that even existed in my brain.
Yet it has been part of my foundation for a long time. Still now at 38 I will automatically steer away from naming extended family by name on a daily basis for fear of taking responsibility for them. Our minds are amazing things – but they are also frightful things. That is why satan uses it. We do not realize how much and how often he does, and scary enough – we do not want to put in the work needed to eradicate flitting thoughts nevermind foundational ones. Yet the more we work on ourselves now, the better chance of us being available and ready to guide and mentor someone in the next generation. Usually our healing isn’t only for us. It is seeds to make bread for another.
And I hate learning about new issues I have. I hate it when the Holy Spirit illuminates something in my life. Because it feels like I am never going to get on the path God chose for me. Sometimes I feel like I have messed my life so much that I have messed up His calling on my life. That is until I sit down and ask myself: Do you want to help yourself heal, or do you want a forgiving huge incomparable Holy-of-Holy God who knows you inside and out, and has your name on His palm, help you to heal.
The answer is easy. But the walk in that direction is not.
Isaiah 55 v 6 – 11
6-7 Seek God while He’s here to be found, pray to Him while He’s close at hand. Let the wicked abandon their way of life and the evil their way of thinking. Let them come back to God, who is merciful, come back to our God, who is lavish with forgiveness.
8-11 “I don’t think the way you think. The way you work isn’t the way I work.” God’s Decree. “For as the sky soars high above earth, so the way I work surpasses the way you work, and the way I think is beyond the way you think. Just as rain and snow descend from the skies and don’t go back until they’ve watered the earth, Doing their work of making things grow and blossom, producing seed for farmers and food for the hungry, So will the words that come out of My mouth not come back empty-handed. They’ll do the work I sent them to do, they’ll complete the assignment I gave them.