| Let's review the situation.... |
Jun 23, 2008 10:22 am
Mood: optimistic, 483 Views | I'm putting it all in perspective. The last three months have been HELL. My personal hell. I can name ten people right now who have worse things than I have been through, but this was MY hell.
I lay everything that has happened directly at the foot of the Throne and am so grateful everything happened exactly the way it did.
90 days almost to the day and more has been accomplished through this terror than in the previous 48 years of my life. Coming back to California was not my idea because this place holds ghosts for me. So I hid about as far away as I could get, where it was semi-peaceful, but still the problems lingered unfinished. When the doors to California started flying open I was scared because I knew this would be the hardest thing I have had to face so far.
Being alone so many hours of the day I had nothing to do and no one to talk to but GOD and the dog, but the dog didn't help much. I have wailed and moaned every day. I did everything but let go of all the things that were eating me alive. By the time the depression set in I knew I was either going to be down for the count or have to fight my way back up. Giving in would have been so easy and not one swinging soul would have blamed me. At least not the people that knew more than the highlights that I blogged about, and definitely NOT the counselor that recommended prescription antidepressants.
This will sound weird but I fought back by giving up. I was literally face down begging God to either kill me or do everything for me because all that I had tried to do under my own power was failing miserably.
But if I had not gotten depressed, if I had not gotten angry, if I had been too busy working to face what was really eating at me, I do not believe I would have survived this mentally intact. Never mind the physical benefits I have received. I had a job to do and it was time to do it. I disassembled bridges without blowing them up. I assembled new bridges, and I reassembled broken ones. I don't remember the exact day and hour that it happened, but I think it was June 2, sometime around noon. From the moment I set that ONE thing in motion, my life became new.
What I did was mail a letter. To my Mother. In it I explained that I would have to be moving on. It's funny because I don't remember exactly what was said but I know I wrote everything with love. I had to break the chains. I had to end it all. Immediately, she has been beating on the door but I was resolved, and it has now been peacefully quiet. I pray that in some way this will also force her to get proper help and move beyond her own ghosts.
It was that same day that I came home and almost immediately received a phone call about this job. Within days the snafu about my car was cleared up, as well as the questions as to whether I was legally married. We got our insurance coverage. My cough went away completely.
I know, I know. People can say it all would have cleared up eventually and my cough was most likely psychosomatic. But I believe God wanted my attention, and wanted me to do what needed to be done so He could use me and bless me. He wouldn't let me work away from home because I would have put everything into it's little compartment and not faced it. It would always be there coloring the way I view my world.
Soon after we moved here and my husband saw me crashing mentally, he and I had a talk after he saw a conversation in IM with my sister-in-law. When we talked I told him that I did not hold him in anyway responsible for any of what was going on that this was a battle between God and myself, and I knew it was going to happen, just not so soon. He didn't understand it at all. He felt so helpless so many times. Geez, that man loves me!
But I did what I should have done many many years ago, and am amazed that I do not feel bad about it. I feel free. Happier than I thought I could be no matter where I was living. Yesterday, my husband and I drove all over the place just talking (gas prices be damned)and I gave him my point of view and belief about these last 90 days. He said he felt that God put me through all of that because of his own past behavior and he blames himself, but that looking at it the way I put it, he can see that the hand of God was on it all the time. When what do you know....... we end up at the Save Mart Center at Fresno State College (Go Bulldogs!!!) and find that there is a Promise Keepers event there this weekend. And he wants to go.
He wants to know more about being a good husband, and pet-owner (he has no kids of his own). He wants to know more about what the Lord can do for helping him forgive himself for what he believes is unrecoverable past behavior. He wants to know what it is to just have faith and be saved. He has always believed salvation operates on a point system, like DMV, and that if you accumulated too many points there was no hope for you. I pointed out that I have indulged in many of the same behaviors AFTER I was saved, so how much more trouble was I in????? He needs to forgive himself. He needs to let go of it all. He says he can see that God has me safe and the Lord watches over me and wants the same.
He's amazed at the immediate change that I went through after I threw my hands up and my face down. We talked a little more and he said he feels alot like a dog at the end of a 10-foot chain when it comes to being accepted by the Lord. That he can only go so far and then he is choking. I said 'Well, maybe if you back up a bit, and lower your head the chain will slip off over your head and you can go farther than you ever dreamed." FREE FROM THE CHAINS!!!! He's a proud man that was raised to do all the work himself and hold his head high, but that might not be the right thing to do in this case. There's a time to be proud, and a time to be humble.
Gosh, I LOVE him. | |
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