But as I have written lately you know that God is all about exposing right now… he is in the business of uncovering and disabling my hide, flee, escape, parachute button. So far we have targeted relationships, food, even how I dress in order to “not be noticed”. But yesterday when He asked me if He really was my Savior…I started to wonder why … If I truly believe He rescued me and saved me from danger or peril… why am I so mortified to actually go back and look at it all… the good the bad and the ugly. What am I avoiding? What am I running from? If he is my Savior then what am I afraid of?
What I am realizing is I am missing out on a whole arena to understand how much He has carried me through. By avoiding the pain, I also am avoiding the glorious, wonderful, truth that He carried me, and protected me, and provided for me through it all. He rescued me from the miry depths but unless I am willing to really examine how deep that mire was I cannot really understand how mighty He is to save. And my life is a wonderful opportunity to see His handiwork in action. And so I have begun the process….and this blog might bore you to tears over the next little while because as you know this is the place I come to sort out all my thoughts and process things… so I will probably be sharing a lot of the journey but I will give you a warning if the post is about this timeline exercise, and if you don’t care to take the journey with me you can skip the post… I understand that my life is not the most fascinating thing on the planet!
The process so far is a bit overwhelming… I have large gaps in my brain, lots of information and memories but it’s all a hodge podge. Last night I began a brainstorming notebook that I just kept jotting down events, friends, births, deaths, moves, boyfriends, anything I could remember and decided not to worry about the order of things and just start somewhere.
I am using my blank wall as the time line, decided that post it’s might be the easiest thing to use since I will probably have to move them a lot due to my lapse of memory in regards to dates etc.
Tonight I decided to start with houses… places I lived. That is sort of how I always gauge things in my mind anyway… events are never categorized by decades but by where I was living and with who.
As I started writing addresses on post it notes and throwing them up on the wall I was surprised to see how often I have moved….42 times in 40 years
How often I went back and forth between the same places like a ping pong ball….
I have always had a lot of shame about me and Bray being homeless and him not having his own room and whatnot… and so the biggest realization is seeing that along this time line, I was just about the same age as him when I went through the same thing.
My mother had lost the apartment and I lived with my best friend Beth, Merrie Miss leaders from church, and a couple of my moms friends from work. The major difference between me and Braydens situation was that my mom did not stay with me… she was with her boyfriend and I just skipped between houses and stayed there alone, but it made me realize where a lot of my shame came from when that happened. I was judging what was going on with him by how it felt to me when that happened…. And there was a lot of embarrassment on my part…and abandonment and so I threw those emotions on him and assumed that was what he was feeling… which just fed my shame spiral.
You know that verse that says “what the enemy meant for evil God meant for good”? Well in that situation I can see two ways God really used that to redeem a part of me
1) I did not abandon my son….I was with him and every night he knew he had me and I loved on him and hugged him when he cried, and cried with him, and he watched me praying daily through that situation. We walked through it together… and I did not run to some boyfriends house and make him handle it on his own…. God showed me and provided for us and gave me the strength to do for him better than what was done for me and for that I am GRATEFUL!!!
2) That situation happened so quickly that it showed me how fast it can happen to anyone. We are all a paycheck away from disaster and I realize that a little more now… I am fully aware of provision and His sustaining hand which is a blessing to me much more than it would have been. And walking through it made me see my mom in a different light. I inherited my superpower from her… and she was avoiding not because she didn’t love me but because it was painful and shameful and too hard to see me every day and how she was failing me so she would visit me on weekends and laugh with me and take me shopping to try to make up for it all. And I see it through different eyes now and am not resentful anymore to her for doing that. I wish she would have handled it differently, I wish she would have realized how strong she really was and just stuck it out but…. I had an advantage.. I was aware of a God who loved me and she didn’t know Him at that time and I think that made all the difference between how she handled it and how I did.
I am overwhelmed at the amount of moves… and when I look at the post its lining two walls… it looks kind of to me like that trail the Israelites took in the wilderness… a lot of walking and very little getting anywhere….
But I am hoping that as I dig through this with God I will start to see that it was not wasted…and I hope that the next half of my life…has only a couple more moves because I really hate packing!
I'm taking pictures... I know it is weird but want to see how it all starts to grow as I walk through the layers.... so far this is just the places I have lived:
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