When God Says “Hey Wake –Up I want to show you something”

             I have been a wife for almost 15 years and a mom for almost as long, when I became a wife I decided how I wanted my life to be.  I carried in some pretty heavy baggage from my childhood, some baggage that didn’t even make sense. Why did I feel so heavy? I was never abused physically, sexually or anything like that.  All I knew was I was going to raise my kids to have a different life than I did. I was going to be the calm loving gentle mom that I desperately craved.   What I didn’t expect was that no matter how hard I tried something would happen and I would fail. I would go to bed after a really rough day of homeschooling gone wrong, flooded toilets, and a toddler that was deciding their strength could out beat mine and I would vow to myself the next day would be better. Tomorrow I will be a better mom, I will be patient and talk softly, the house will stay clean and I will get all caught up on laundry.  I could go days sometimes even weeks with really great days and then it would happen.  I would get upset and the cycle of beating myself up would continue….again.

It wasn’t until recently I was able to see this huge list of things that I was doing to cope with pain. The list was pretty big.  I would lie in my bed thinking ‘how did I not see all this stuff that I do to make myself deal?’  Avoidance, withdrawing, perfectionism, self-pity, blaming, self-justification and that is just naming a few! Slowly as I started to look at some of these things I could see when and where I started these behaviors at young age.   I could go on but I’m sure you get the point, I am realizing EVERYONE does this! EVERYONE copes with pain on some level and it comes out when situations rub us and bring out emotion. When I start looking at the things that bring out emotion I can see where the root of the pain is.
  
I am a girl who LOVES her girlfriends!
                              LOVES!
I have always loved meeting for coffee, hanging out with our kids, going for walks etc… But there is a dark side to my friendships I have never felt like I was a valued friend to someone else.  I never felt like my friendship was worth fighting for. I would place my value on different situations that would come up.  These wounds would cause me to build walls around my heart and protect myself.  If I feared rejection I would just not put myself in a place to be rejected or I would do the opposite and try to put myself out there but I would expect rejection and like a self-fulfilling prophecy it would happen. The wound would fester deeper and deeper and I would believe the lie that I am UN likeable etc. The unlikeable wound is a deep one for me I can still hear my mother’s words as a small child “I love you but I don’t like you” and from the moment the words left her lips
 I believed her and placed it on every relationship from that point on.  My mother’s words came from her own infected wounds that spilled onto her children. The sad truth of it is if we don’t get to these roots we continue to do the same to our children. L 
As I slowly continue to do inventory of my heart and as situations arise I am able to let Jesus in and have   his spirit pour over the infection.  It’s slow. It’s painful and at times extremely lonely. I know I am nowhere close to done, but I have hope that as I keep my eyes on Jesus the author and finisher of our faith he will complete His perfect work in me.

                                  Some see being broken as a flaw, but God sees it as beauty.