We are back home. What an amazingly wonderful and awesome vacation we had in Belize. It was just as awesome as Costa Rica was the year before. Or so my family tells me. In 2024, my body was in the throngs of an internal hell, and while I was present in Costa Rica and could know there was beauty around me, my body was absolutely unable to feel that beauty.
But I sat on the lawn chair and Belize and not only saw the beauty and knew the beauty, but I could feel the beauty. The things I have had to go through in the last year to get to this place have been, truly, the hardest things of my life. And yet, dear Jesus, how thankful I am that he removed the clay from eyes and allowed me to see the prison I was living in.
It makes me wonder: why would anyone not want to remove the clay from their eyes? Why would anyone want to live in that prison? Don't they want freedom? And yet, I know, that I couldn't see my trauma until God said it was time for me to see it. He had to reveal himself to me at the time that he deemed most appropriate.
Oh to live in heaven with Jesus away from the sin that swirls around us. Oh to be free from the bondage of this world. And yet, I am realizing, we have the ability to live much freer and in much less bondage on this earth than I ever thought was possible.
There are so many things that I never, ever learned. I didn't learn about listening to my body. About allowing myself to rest. I didn't understand that boundaries were perfectly normal and acceptable and required. You can't just push your body. You can't live to please people. You, the whole essence of you is a wonderful, amazing, awesome creation!
Don't you want to live to the fullest extent of you?
I know many people are afraid to look their past and their childhood and their sin in the face. But truly, not looking at it, means you are in bondage. You are in prison. You are not feeling all the things you should be feeling. The depression that followed the horrendous anxiety was my chance to grieve the thousands of things that I never allowed myself to grieve. I pushed it down. Pushed it away. Ignore it. Don't think. Don't cry. Don't grieve.
Our children need to be taught that ANGER is GOOD! Frustration. Grief. Sadness. Fear. All these emotions are actually good. Somehow, many of us got the message that anything other than perpetual positivity is bad. And that, my dear friends, is Bull Crap. Fear is healthy. Fear is telling you to pay attention to something. We need to know what to do with our fear and how to allow it to be a part of our life in a healthy way.
I'm still learning. I will learn until the day I die. But for now, I am celebrating the woman I am becoming and how many people are joining me on this journey. I have mentioned before that there are ten other women in my Story Warriors group. And now, I am starting a second "virtual-only" group with women from all over the USA (and maybe other locations?). We are Story Warriors 2.0. We will learn to tell our story. To Look at who we really are. Because it is only through seeing our past that can we prevent ourselves from not reliving it.
I know for some of you reading this, this sounds like a bunch of mumbo jumbo. It sounds like a bunch of pseudo-science. It doesn't sound very Christian. And, oh, may I tell you that Jesus is more real and alive for me than ever before.
I now see that Jesus made our brains to HEAL. He made it where our neural pathways could be rewired. He made it that trauma won't devour us. He brought counselors and amazing people along to study these behaviors and help us understand why we are acting the way we do. I do not have to pass on these behaviors to my children! I can show them a different way.
It truly brings me such incredible joy. I still have some "hard-feelings" toward things I had to face in my past. But mostly, I am able to see those things as the pathway to me becoming who I am today. God had me go through this journey exactly when he said I should for a reason. He knew the other women who were going to be ready to embark on this with me. He knew that Cousin Cara would be perfectly ready to walk alongside me when she was.
I am overjoyed and excite to see what the future holds!!
No comments:
Post a Comment