What is it about this place? I have such a sense of dread even on the two and half hour trip there. The interstate quickly runs out at the beginning of the trip and then all you have are those beautiful country roads going through those tiney South Georgia towns with nothing but a gas station or two. My favorite aunts funeral summoned me there. I immediately began to feel peace leave. The familiar conversations from my mother and my sister in the back seat telling their favorite stories that travels down the the ruts of my brain that scream of shame and guilt, All the while I leave the niceties of conversation, "really??, or yes I remember that, uh huh", to my husband, who is well rehearsed in this triangulation. The only word I have during this day is DIE! Absolute and total relational failure, which is why this piece in my life has become my destiny destroyer. Toxic emotions buried or denied have a way of cycling back around until you submit your will to the Lordship of Jesus Christ and allow His will to rule in your life. Meanwhile I hear the heartbeat of the Father, and I know He is close and He is breathing victory over me.
On this day, I thought finally I will see victory. I have been walking this way of peace for sometime. I love when the Lord allows circumstance to try and prove our victories. This day I knew I was being seriously challenged. The difference in this day is I knew the bottom line would be victory even if the seeing of it doesn't come until days that follow. How can I say this? I trust the Lord to make my eyes see and my ears hear the truth. If we are truly trusting God our heart is at peace. Toxic emotions reveal the state of our connection to the Lord, and summons us to a place where restoration happens through forgiveness. I felt like Mac in the Shack, the scene where Jesus told Mac to take the boat out to the middle of the lake while He(Jesus) finishes his work in the shed. Mac rows out to the lake and the memories of his past take over his mind to the point where the water turns black underneath the boat and the boat itself begins to break apart and sink. Jesus walks out on the water to the place where Mac is in the boat, and summons Mac to not look at his past and all the devastation there, but to look to Jesus and then after a very short amount of time, you can see Mac going to peace, and the restoration of his current circumstance. In that moment Mac, yields his will to the will of Jesus, because of his relationship with Jesus. Mac knows the great love Jesus has for him and the plans He has has for Mac's life. Mac's destiny is restored in that instance, and what he lives out after the moment is victory upon victory. The scriptures call it fruit.
Here I was in the place I wanted to be in for sometime, talking to people that had been in my life all my life, but I was frozen in the pain of current and past rejection. I could not engage with them with the motive of love that I desperately wanted to pour out to them. The perceived absolute cruelty of being cast out over and over was in my face, and all I could see in that moment was the systematic preference of self to exhalt self over love. It is right here in the midst of this sentence, that I hear the Father whispering, "you have already died," why are you reliving this pain? My very core values were being violated, and the Lord said so die to those inner demands to have people respect your core values. You are filled with anger because people try to control you by violating your personal freedom. This is the deep imperceptible root of self, with its insidious lie that this is my identity! I had become in my identity the person who was controlled by people or circumstances by either valuing or devaluing my core values! I worked constantly on this self wheel, hiding from those who didn't value my core beliefs with their control and manipulation, or trying to prove that I was one who needed to be valued. All of this striving brought no gain in my relationship with the Lord, it just kept me in depression and anxiety! The release and subsequent death of those rights brought me to the place like Mac peace flooding my soul as I submit my will to the will of the Father and I take my demands and my rights to the cross. As Jesus does and did on this earth, I honor others' core values of personal freedom, and I treat others with equality, but I am not demanding equality from them. I am loyal, but I am not demanding loyalty from them. We all know that pain, and those who inflict it we forgive, but better yet die to the rights to let someone inflict the pain on you! I release my anger and my hurt and I submit my will to the person of Jesus to come in and forgive them through me, but more importantly I die to that inner demand to have my core values honored. I then trust that the work has been done and the test of the fruit is humility in my soul and a grace to honor those who are closest to me, Once again peace wells up in my spirit and abiding with my Beloved is my life!
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