You're here for the duration

Lord, I say to friends "you can talk to God and He will talk to you, just do it".  Some come back to me later and say, "I heard nothing, I got nothing, what am I doing wrong?".   It just isn't logical for me to keep saying this to them just because I've come to a stage where I can finally hear You.  I forgot how long it took for me to get here.  What was it?  20, 30, 40 years?  How long did I scramble trying to get answers from You when the question was weighty and important?  How long did I search for ways to get those answers?  Each search seemed to gain a tiny nugget of Truth that I carried into the next search as I continued onward, always seeking.  Each nugget gave me insight but didn't give me answers.  Some nuggets lead me to other searching that appeared to give me answers only later to discover that there were answers I thought were true which turned out to be my own musings.
It was difficult, Lord.  It was truly difficult.  As I look back on all those years and see me stumbling around in the dark like some blind woman with Tourette's it strikes me as comical on the one hand, bizarre on the other, and yet I begin to eek out a strange path that oddly pieces together intricately and uniquely personal to my own character.  Suddenly I am amazed by the genius pattern that emerges as I see Your hand in each stumble, each straying, halting step, and each misguided search. 
You let me wander on my own personal adventure completely unhampered by restrictions and yet never leaving my side for one moment while slipping steps in front of me that would eventually lead me to You.  I didn't always take them, but You kept slipping them in there.  One after another after another, each leading in a positive direction but completely my decision to chose each time and never condemning me or being insulted Yourself if I turned away from one and took the wrong step.  You only added another and another. 
Now here I stand before You able to hear Your voice, feel Your presence, and 'know' Your intentions in a way that I cannot put into words adequately enough to help another find this communication. I can't tell the secret because it was not my achievement.  It was Yours.  It was Your heart in response to my need to hear You.  It wouldn't die.  No matter how far off the mark my arrow shot; no matter how disappointing my 'near revelation'; after the tears fell again, I came one more time to the beginning stepping stone; the same one I visited over and over - named 'I need to hear God', and began again.  Except each time, I had another nugget of Truth in my repertoire of knowledge.  I hadn't a clue with to do with it, but I knew it would be important so I kept it.
Like the one I learned from witchcraft; the lie is hidden in the predominance of Truth.  What does one do with that nugget?  It is True and it is there somewhere but it doesn't help to find it the next time.  The only thing that helps to find it is to be able to hear from You.  Funny, how I needed to learn the pitfall before learning the solution.
I ache to tell the secret.  If only I knew a simpler way than the one I took.  What can I say?  "Chase your tail like I did for 40 years and if you still want to hear His voice, you'll get there"?  No.  That isn't always true, either.  I know people who learned to hear Your voice quickly.  They didn't have to chase anything.  Somehow they 'took' the right steps You laid in front of them and arrived quickly.
I shake my head it amazement and chuckle.  They are so far ahead of me.  Yet, are they?  Ha ha!  It isn't always what it seems to be.  There's another nugget of Truth. 
Oh, well.  I'm so overwhelmingly grateful and thankful that I can sit in Your presence.  Nothing, nothing, nothing can shake that away from me.  It's like granite.  Once it's placed, it would take an awfully large crane to move it; and if it's a big enough piece then there just isn't a crane big enough.
Like Easter Island.  Remember those statues?  We don't have anything in our modern world that can handle those babies.
That's what You are to me.  A statue on Easter Island.  You're here for the duration. 
Thank you.     

just so glad

I'm just so glad, Lord.  I'm glad for all those years.  You know; the ones I've regretted and looked back on all my mistakes and my ignorance of you . . . and I've seen it all through tears of shame and misery.  But no more.  I'm just so glad, Lord.  Just so glad.

You shine a different light on it all.  And in that light I hear the music we used to play on records and listen for hours; you know, Bob Seger and Journey; as we washed dishes, mopped the floors and cooked meal after meal.  The kids were little and the jobs were hard.  The money never went far enough and my joy never lasted a whole day.  I didn't think I was doing it right.  I lived in shame that my kids deserved better.  I apologized to them.  But I put them to bed with a hug and a kiss and told them I loved them and told them to believe in You.

But now I'm glad, Lord.  I don't regret anymore.  I can hear the music and remember the moments when I found a slice of contentment; when old friends were near and we scuffled through it all together; always believing that somehow it would all be OK.  That we were doing the best we knew how and that the kids would always know that; so they could believe. 

And I'd pray with tears in my eyes, "God, I love them so much and I know I'm not doing this right.  But I'm doing the best I know.  I'm so alone and so lost.  Please, God.  Please love them and take their wonderful little hearts and fill them with good things; and let them grow knowing that You are always there, always loving them.  And don't ever leave them.  God, please make all my mistakes turn out OK in their lives.  Don't let them suffer because of me.  Thank you, God.  I can't do it.  But I know you can."

And now I'm glad, Lord.  Now after all those . . . seems like thousands of years . . . I can see backwards.  I can see it now.  It was big as day.  It was huge as the sun.  It was in the middle of the pain and the mess and the day-to-day.

It was your great, big, awesome, powerful Hand.  There it was.  Always there.  Never leaving.  Always there.

Now I'm glad.

are you kidding me? I did that.

It popped into my mind out of the blue and was just as clear as if it happened yesterday. I was 26 yrs old again and my Momma had just died. I was so heartbroken and devastated, not to mention afraid. Yeah, even at 26 it frightened me that my Momma was gone. Who would be praying for me that I would be safe? Who would I call when I was confused, hurt and alone? I had a husband and I had children, but there's no one like your Momma. And I wasn't sure that God heard anyone else except my Momma.
In remembering that moment, I also remembered the decision I made in that fear. It was this: "I will continue to walk forward and try to raise my kids, but I know I will be a terrible Mom because I don't know what I'm doing, so I'll just hope that loving them and praying for them will be enough and God will do the rest."

It wasn't such a horrible thought/decision except for the part that I would be a terrible Mom. Looking back on that moment from 30 years later, I can see how that one thought trailed through my life and haunted me. But I didn't remember it until yesterday. I wondered why I couldn't be a good Mom, or why I thought I was such a bad one. And OHHHHH the guilt. Guilt is an evil, ugly, cruel companion that will never go home until you expose him for the liar he is.
Seeing this scenario yesterday, I welcomed it like I welcome my feet touching the ground after flying. Finally I know where this came from. I'm stunned that I did it. I'm usually more analytical about my thoughts and decisions. But I remember the emotional trauma I was experiencing at the time. My thinking was far from clear and I was desperately grasping for something to "ground" me and take away the fear.
I know that fear comes from my evil enemy. It never comes from God. And I also know that I can actually "TELL IT" to leave me by telling "him" that he's a liar and that I am a Child of God full of God's love and protection. It took me a long time to learn this. But it has released me from many emotionally "freezing" episodes of fear. And I have found such wonderful peace in doing this.
But I didn't know these things back then. I didn't recognize the lie and I didn't recognize the fear. I only knew that I was living in desperation.
Blame is usually the next step in our society. Find the source and place the blame. But we don't seem to understand that this piece of the process is the smallest part of healing. Nor do we seem to realize that it doesn't take hours of tears and additional re-living trauma to place the origin of the trauma, the lie and the result of believing it.

My revelation came from a simple statement I had made to God in prayer the day before. I had asked Him to show me where this "terrible Mom syndrome" had come from. I didn't travail in prayer. And when the revelation came, it was a simple scene that popped into my mind while I was busy doing something benign. When I saw it, I didn't stop what I was doing and grab my chest as my heart palpitated. No. My reaction was "are you kidding me?". "I did that."
My next step, I already knew, was to simply renounce that old decision and cast it into the sea of forgetfulness never to be retrieved.
By that I mean, that I will not blame myself, berate myself, carry guilt over it, and suffer any consequences for it. I refuse all of that in Jesus name. Why would I treat it that way when we usually expect those reactions as the normal course of human emotion to spend lots of time "dealing through it"?
I won't because I don't have to. Jesus set me free from the bondage of emotionally "dealing through it". His healing was not the result of that course of action. His healing was a result of my faith that He is real and that He not only made healing available to me, but that He did it already 2000 years ago and all I have to do is claim it as my own and believe that it is done.
This whole trauma and life-long lie was the result of my enemy taking advantage of my weakness and seeing it as an open door to tell me a lie that I wasn't mature enough to recognize. So, it's not my fault. I will not carry any fault for it. Not only did Jesus make my healing available, but He also healed the results of that lie - at the moment I recognized it and placed it in its proper category. (In my weakness, He is strong).
Why do we think that we can fix anything emotional by "working through it"? Where did we get this power to heal ourselves? Recognizing the source of the problem and placing blame doesn't do anything for us except when it is approached through Jesus' terms of healing.
See it, Place it, Renounce it, and be Healed.

Too simple for you? Yeah, I know, I battled that argument years ago and persisted in fighting emotional issues the "normal" way for so long. Then I realized how much time I was wasting. We have work to do promoting the Kingdom. And this is part of it. Healing is simple. It really is. Just do it. You have the faith the size of the mustard seed. Use it. And if for some unknown reason your healing doesn't manifest in some area, keep believing and keep walking forward. You WILL know why later. He promises that to us.