Oh, Glory to God! Many tears today. Tears of great worship earlier at church and now, tears of reconciliation.
Here is a verse to get us started off: Exodus 20:12 Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.
I have heard preaching on this commandment and many times, we leave off the part, "So that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you."
Do you see how important it is to do this? Maybe to lengthen your life? And how could that all be true? Does God really kill people off like that?
Well, unforgiveness will "kill" you and everything around you. And yes, I believe our lives are shortened because of the stress of unforgiveness and bitterness, leading to cardiac issues and cancers. There is the very touchy subject of bad health choices including over-eating as a tool to soothe our pain. This kills a little more slowly, through type II diabetes, hyperlipidemia and hypertension.
Part of the Holy Spirit filling me 16 months ago, is that if you let the Spirit work in you, you will go through a process. This is painful. Many people don't let this process happen. They end up born again, but wearing masks and miserable again. The process begins when you feel the Spirit tug on your heart to open it up and let the past be healed, situation by situation.
Are you brave enough to let the Spirit clean your house? Sweep out the garbage? I am. And I did. And it is still happening.
In my personal experience, I had other people barely let me finish my sentence when I would share that I was going backwards and dealing with my past. So quickly they would say, "You know, you shouldn't have to go back to the past as Jesus has already forgiven you of that". Or I have heard, "Don't look back too long on those items". I heard this after only a few months of conversion!!! Be on alert that if someone doesn't let you finish your sentence about a faith item, or they rush to give you an answer, they are not waiting on the Holy Spirit themselves. They are talking out of their flesh. Get your eyes on Jesus and keep them there. Read the Word daily and keep it that way. You are worth it.
If I would have listened to that, I would not be where I am now. The Lord works in His timing, not man's. I want you to be aware that listening to "man" in many situations after you are living and walking in the Holy Spirit, is dangerous. There are so very, very many born agains that stopped at their salvation. They did not complete the process, which takes the rest of their natural life to do. And there are many born agains that are not living and breathing the Holy Spirit Life. It is a cheap version of Christianity. This is a life lacking true, raw faith. The kind of faith that raised Jesus from the dead.
God has the ultimate best for you, and typically it will not be exactly clean and easy to continue to be sanctified. Yes, it will be worth it. Yes, you will glorify God for the tears and cleansing. I am a witness to this!!
My day today included listening to my dad's Korean war stories tape. I have not heard my dad's voice since the day he died in July 2000. It was sweet to hear his voice. It felt just like yesterday. He taped this in approximately 1994. What a step for me. I was on the floor in my bedroom, at Jesus' feet, crying, as I was listening to this. That is a wonderful place to be. Don't stop at getting down on your knees. If you are lead, drop all the way down to your face on the floor at His glorious feet. How precious. The late pastor Adrian Rogers, as a young boy, actually dug a hole in the ground and put his face in the dirt. If you understand this act of humbleness to God, as I do, I am very happy for your mature Christian journey.
Also today, I listened for the first time to a cassette where my mom taped me playing the piano in 1995. She and dad were talking and laughing and I could hear my voice as well. It was incredible to finally listen to that tape for the first time, today, as well.
What Satan means to destroy, we can reclaim. If I would not have continued my journey to my painful past with my childhood, I would have bought Satan's version of the past.
You see, when I grew up, I didn't feel things were right in many ways in our home. But, it is all you know. It was not very good at times. It was really weird. But, after leaving the house at age 18, that was my "normal". And there you go. You get married and you end up marrying people who also have strange family dynamics and you both just keep repeating another generation that did not deal with the problems. And then comes items in our lives such as divorce, alcohol abuse, emotional abuse and neglect and inappropriate everything else.
Are you a hypocrite to call this out in your home and stop it? I used to think so. That is a lie of Satan. But, our Lord gets ahold of you, and if you decide to rewind to your childhood, you see that you can be honorable to your parents, at the same time you take a stand in your own home.
Did I always honor my parents? Unfortunately, no. If you read my previous blogs, you will see that. I rebelled. Now, it is so refreshing to take off the mask and admit that I rebelled. It is wrong to rebel. Period. I did not honor my parents by not listening to them.
After I got "saved", I did the typical reactions that you do. Just as when you grieve a death, I believe there are stages of painful growth after being born again. I got mad. I got mad at denominations of churches that I attended for not leading me to Christ. I felt lied to. Why didn't anyone tell me about this? Why are not churches opening the Bible during service? Why don't churches use the term "born again"? Why didn't the church read all parts of the Bible in our weekly readings?
Do I still have grave concern about many main denominations of churches because of these flaws? Absolutely, yes. Am I mad because of my situation? Not any more. You see, I had to find Jesus myself. He was still knocking on my heart, through all of that dysfunction of the "church".
Now, on to my parents. Did I think they could have been a better example to me? Yes. Do I understand why they weren't. Yes. They were mirroring their parents! They were just surviving most of the time due to their own problems.
Do I want to live like my parents? No. But, I do want to take the good things they did and expand on them instead on magnifying the things I do not agree with.
They are not here to defend themselves. They are deceased.
I took out two letters my mom wrote me prior to her lung cancer death. She died a horrific death, but luckily Morphine kept her painfree. Her handwriting is very poor. My mom suffered incredible anxiety during her last 7 months of life, fighting cancer. That, in itself is a living nightmare to witness. What Satan blinded me of, is that I read these letters and put them in a drawer for years. I could only see snipits of negative from them. How unfair! You see, I took them out a few weeks ago and cried over them!! They were loving and lovely and complimentary. They were intimate and fresh and touching. Satan will blind you from the Scriptures, but he will also blind you from finding beauty in things. Things that will cause you to advance in your faith. He knows you well. Demons have been studying humans since they were flung from heaven. And they have been studying you since birth.
Let me say this: If you have been offended in any way: Sexual abuse, spousal abuse, infidelity: What many of us do is drop into a depression instead of anger. And I understand that this is actually very unhealthy. We get depressed instead of getting angry at a person that deserves to hear our appropriate anger. I did this many times in my life. I saw loved ones do this as well. It didn't solve anything in the end and the abuser did not face the wrath of what they did.
Our culture has us walking into the Halloween shop for another mask everytime we face a roadblock. When we will start solving things?
My trips to the cemetary are so wonderful now. I cry so hard at times, though. I wail out to God at times. Not mad at God, just cry. But, I am so in love with my mom and dad now. Healthy love. My mind of Christ now allows me to just drift into the good times and good ways they tried to protect us from the world. Those daggers of pain don't come very much at all now. The Lord keeps revealing the love they had for me in so many instances. The tree house we made as a family, the way they loved me to play the piano for them, the way my mom loved me to do her hair and makeup and nails. My dad having me help him chop firewood. Small talk with dad. Cleaning dad's barbershop for a quarter.
My rebellion has run its course. I rebelled against God and my parents and if I could change both, I would. But, I cannot. What I can do is change my home, now. To be a good example for my children. Ask my adult children for forgiveness for my past mistakes. Show them a woman in love with Jesus Christ. A Bible reading, weeping, changed soul, who happens to be their mother.
Would you join me, brothers and sisters in Christ? Will you clean out your closets for your generations to come? Even if you will face resistance, tears and pain for a short time? Will you be that kind of warrior? And end up loving your childhood for what it was, for what it did for you to now have eternal life? Our parents gave us life. Let us just tweek the recipe of life for the next generation of Jesus Followers.
God Bless you all.
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