Caterpiller's need and Butterfly's Trust

This week has been a lot better. I felt better because I shared what was going on in my life and was more transparent with the people around me. Trust is soooooo hard!!!! Trusting God for who he says I am and trusting the new nature I have is difficult. One of the key points of The Cure is that we don’t see ourselves as we truly are. If we have accepted Christ’s redeeming work on the cross than we are as righteous as we are going to get. The example from the book is a caterpillar and a butterfly. The DNA of the caterpillar is the exact same as a butterfly even though the outsides look nothing alike. When we accepted Christ to save us from death, we were changed. In that instant we became righteous, period. We did nothing to change ourselves, God did. 2 Corinthians 5:17 NLT “…those who have become Christians become new persons. They are not the same anymore, for the old life is gone. A new life has begun!” Like the caterpillar it grows and eventually matures into a butterfly. It does nothing to change itself. God is working in us and changing us from the inside out. It isn’t our work that is changing us. Philippians 2:13 NLT “For God is working in you, giving you the desire to obey him and the power to do what pleases him.”

Trusting others and earning others trust is a hard thing to do. Letting people love me by trusting them with the “true me” is something that I haven’t allowed. I build up walls and fortresses around my heart to protect it and to keep others from hurting me as badly as before but they also isolate me from having my needs met. It is a lack of trusting God to meet my needs that I put up walls and wear masks to appear that I’m ok. In The Cure they says this, “The spiritually immature are not loved well, but it is not because the fail. They are not loved well because they fail to trust the love of another. Because they trust no one, their needs aren’t met.” I have been trying to understand how to love others because I know that I can’t love others the way they should/need to be loved. I know that it is only through God’s love that I could ever hope to meet other’s needs and love them the way that Christ loves us. But how can I love others when I haven’t fully accepted God’s love of me? One thing that really resonated with me from Chapter 6 was this “Needs give us the capacity to feel loved. We know or experience love when our needs are met. Every day we need to be loved. Every day our God is committed to meeting our needs for attention (God’s servant love); acceptance (God’s unearned love); security (God’s committed love); trust (God’s faithful love); guidance (God’s directional love); protection (God’s jealous love); and significance (God’s affirming love).” So do you trust God to meet each of these needs in you? I know that I don’t yet.

Pain, Guilt, or Shame + The Cure and GOD = Healing & Forgiveness

So I’ve started to read through The Cure by John Lynch, Bruce McNicol, and Bill Thrall, which I mentioned in my last post. It has been validated some of the things that I’ve been thinking/feeling, it has explained some of the healing process that I’ve gone through in Washington, and pointed out that I still need to go through the healing process some more. We sin. We sin against others, we sin against ourselves, and we sin against God. Sin is not something that we were created to deal with. It causes us pain when we sin and when we’re sinned against. We try to manage the sin and the results of sin (pain, guilt, or shame) but we can’t and it only winds up causing more problems. We’ll never heal the pain when we are trying to manage our sin on our own. There’s nothing that we can do to erase sin other than to accept and trust that Jesus paid the bill for us. Healing comes with forgiveness, but first we have to come to the end of ourselves and admit that sin has happened, either I’ve sinned or someone’s sinned against me. There are consequences for sin and we need to face up to those consequences, it’s the truth and we need to stop hiding the truth. We need to be honest and humbly tell God everything about it. It is painful and scary to confront my sin or the sin that someone else has afflicted on me, the consequences of that sin, and to honestly tell God everything about it, how I felt leaving no stone unturned. This process is hard and is a lot of work but the rewards are so much better than trying to hide the sin or burring the hurt, guilt, or shame. There’s a lot more than the little bit that I’ve talked about from the book and I know that I didn’t say everything that they said about forgiveness and healing, so get the book and read it.

"Reminde Me Who I Am" and "The Cure"

Lately I’ve been dealing with feelings of depression and suicidal thoughts. It’s been discouraging because I thought that I was passed this and that God had broken the hold they had over me. As I’ve been thinking through these thoughts and feelings and realized that it is true that God has broken my bondage to depression and suicidal thoughts. I felt that the suicidal thoughts weren’t mine or coming from me necessarily but they do come out of the human broken part of me that wants to take the easy way. These thoughts of suicide, the urging to take the easy way, is Satan attacking me because I am growing and maturing and that’s a treat to him.

Also, these thoughts find room to grow in the dark when they’re kept inside of me, when I’m trying to do it on my own. I shared with my mom the thoughts that I was having and how I was struggling the feelings and thoughts lifted. Sharing with my mom gives me another way of fighting Satan’s attacks on me because she can pray for me and she can give me emotional support.

The last couple of days I’ve been trying to work out why I’m going through depression again. I realized that there’s more stuff for me to deal with in my life and that I started on the road to healing when I went to Washington. Part of the healing that started was learning who I am, my identity. I like listening to Air 1 Radio and they air little mini interviews with artists about the inspiration/message behind a specific song of theirs. Jason Gray talks about his song “Remind Me Who I am” and how it’s about our identity. Read Jason’s post HERE. It goes right along with the first 2 chapters from The Cure by John Lynch, Bruce McNicol, and Bill Thrall that I started reading. Both of these reminded me of one of the things that I learned (haha who am I kidding, I’m still learning this) in Washington. When I am centered in God’s love for me and allow myself to believe what he says is my identity then fear won’t rule my life, the fear of rejection, the fear of not measuring up to expectations of me, the fear of whatever it is.

1 John 4:18 from the New Living Translations, “Such love has no fear because perfect love expels all fear. If we are afraid, it is for fear of judgment, and this shows that his love has not been perfected in us.” 

I’m still being perfected.