“The Lord is my Light and my Salvation—whom shall I fear or dread? The Lord is the Refuge and Stronghold of my life—of whom shall I be afraid?”
~~~Psalm 27:1 (AMPC)~~~
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Blessings!
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Jimmy Evans “Listen, when your mind begins to argue with the Word of God, you don’t sit there and argue with the Word of God, you cast down that argument and you accept the Word of God. That’s how you get set free. God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of love and power and a sound mind. So the only way you can deal with fear is to treat it as a separate entity. It’s not your fear. You weren’t born with any fear. You don’t have any fear, you’re fearless. Did you know that? All fear,…God hasn’t given us a spirit of fear. God doesn’t use fear. God didn’t create us with fear. So why am I saying this? Is because the same way you deal with fear is the way you deal with a mental stronghold. It’s not your thought, it’s the devil’s thought. Taking every thought captive. It’s not your friend, it’s not you, it’s the devil…There cannot be rogue thoughts,…you can’t have a rogue thought in your mind, you can’t. It’ll destroy your life. It’ll hold you in bongage”.
“[Inasmuch as we] refute arguments and theories and reasonings and every proud and lofty thing that sets itself up against the [true] knowledge of God; and we lead every thought and purpose away captive into the obedience of Christ (the Messiah, the Anointed One),”
~~~2 Corinthians 10:5 (AMPC)~~~
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Blessings!
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“The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? the Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?”
~~~Psalm 27:1 (KJV)~~~
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Blessings!
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Terri Savelle Foy: “If you want to go beyond where you are today, you have to feed what you want to live and starve what you want to die. Feed what you want to live and starve what you want to die. In other words you gotta feed your FAITH and starve your FEARS. And how do you do that? Well the Bible says that faith comes by hearing, right? So when you’re hearing God’s Word like you are today, and you’re reading books and you’re just filling yourself up with the Word of God, you know what happens? Your faith gets stronger and your fear gets weaker”.
“So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.”
~~~Romans 10:17 (KJV)~~~
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Blessings!
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Maybe this issue of understanding the difference between shame and guilt is a much bigger problem than it was in my upbringing. I must say thank you to my grandparents and especially to my dad & mother for being such good parents. The longer I live life the more I am realizing just how fortunate I am in that I truly did have an emotionally loving and extremely stable upbringing. And I am realizing more and more just how devastating and difficult the struggle can be for others who did not.
Too, I have come to realize those with the deepest wounds are often the best at covering them up and pretending they have it all together, that others have problems and not them. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Truth be told, such individuals are in intense emotional pain and fear there is no hope, but there is, there really, really is. Taken from personal experience “Angry Men and the Women Who Love Them: Breaking the Cycle of Physical and Emotional Abuse” was written by Paul Hegstrom.
Paul Hegstrom states “Shame is a perception that locks me into a belief system that says, ‘I’m bad, I’m wrong, I’m no good.’ It comes out of a tendency toward perfectionism and leads to the expectation of rejection, rigidity, and despair. When I operate from a shame-based worldview, my value is buried under my dysfunctions, fears, anxieties, behaviors, mistakes, imperfections, rejections, feelings, powerlessness and sins. I am satisfied with nothing less than perfection. I live on a performance basis and place unrealistic expectations on my partner and those around me as well as myself. No matter what I do, I feel I’m never good enough. Shame and rage are interactive-where there is rage there is shame. Rage comes from helplessness. It hides shame. Rage keeps a person from being exposed. It is isolating and disconnecting”.
Forgive me for so heavily quoting the author, however I am hoping his words, carrying so much more value than my own, will effect a heart change in others, and if need be, in your heart as well.
I am in total agreement with Paul Hegstrom when he points out how an adult who was shamed as a child”…fears punishment, abandonment, and rejection. He…feels overly responsible for circumstances”. All the more this explains why these adults seem to try so hard, come up short, exhausted and angry so much of the time. And why they want to hope but fear hopelessness, why they live in pain and rage.
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My efforts to work on my ‘fixing’ as Mort Fertel, Marriage Fitness expert, likes to call it, has been rewarding to say the least. There are no shortcuts to a healthy marriage. Those three-easy-steps methods will not do it, certainly not long term anyway. However, it only takes one spouse to make this decision, to stay focused and committed, to believe and dream of the future.
As Mort Fertel has pointed out, it is not a spouse choosing to have an affair that causes marital problems, but it is marital problems which lead a spouse to have an affair. And as Mort also points out, marital problems don’t just all of a sudden happen, but have been brewing for many, many years. Certainly we had the typical relationship issues to figure out as any young couple does. And it is absolutely staggering, all the crazy stuff we have survived during our thirty plus years of marriage. An affair is just one more of those crazy things to work through together.
My initial efforts to work on myself and our marriage led my husband to understandably think I had a selfish plan. Lots of things had been said, misunderstood and repeated. Despite our dysfunctional marriage and family issues, I love my husband and would never leave him. However, all my initial crazymaking attempts to fix our marriage (translation; fix my husband) only led him to fear my rejection.
Despite my husband being the man of my dreams I certainly was not honoring and respecting him as I knew I should. I was no longer the independent college girl who he fell in love with. I wasn’t fun to be with anymore. No, this was not what either of us signed up for when we fell in love and married, dreaming of a life together. And this is exactly why I made the decision to not only work on my “fixing” but to work on healing our marriage.
Why, being so madly in love did we gradually get to where we couldn’t relate, couldn’t really connect anymore? Nothing is right in a person’s world, no matter how much money in the bank, no matter how healthy, no matter how many friends, no matter what, if the most important relationship is not what it should be. Again, I must give Mort credit for this powerfully accurate thought.
So what, an affair is part of our story. Some people go through several affairs before they decide to get off the merry-go-round of rebound relationships and get on home where they know they belong. While I am praying my husband’s affair has ended, I am also preparing for his return. I have no reason to ask details surrounding his time away, only what he feels convicted to share with me. Too many details about his affair will only leave haunting images that serve no productive purpose. Again, thank you, Mort, for teaching us this.
I choose to view my husband’s affair as a major warning sign he was hurting even more than I realized and we were in deeper trouble than what most of those fix-yourself-relationship books could handle (Christian or otherwise). I choose to dig deeper, to work on my own fixing. I choose to forgive and ask forgiveness.
And, I choose to continue to be thankful for my husband who, after all these years, has finally been able to speak out and admit he too is a very emotionally caring person, he too has a very tender heart. What’s not to love about a man such as my husband who is brave enough to admit he is a real man, emotions and all.
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Blessings!
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I was rummaging through old cards and letters I didn’t even realize my parents still had. I came upon a letter I had written to Mother on her birthday. I really don’t remember writing this letter. I do however, remember being single and a college student at the time.
I have read and reread this letter over the last couple days. I’ve shed many tears, tears being released by all the memories which are coming back to me. And I wanted to share what I wrote to her with you. Many of you are blessed to have such a mother. Many of you may not be. Please remember though, we all have the potential to be this type of mother. It may not be to our own children even, but there is someone out there who surely is in need of your mothering, your unconditional love. Enjoy!
Dear Mother, There aren’t enough opportunities to express the thoughts that occur in the passing of my day. But as I struggle to mature into the person whom you, Dad, and God desire me, I find myself ‘impressioning’ a very beautiful person-that person is you. When you were my age, I was only occurring. Being a mother is very special and my ultimate goal is to be a good mother and wife and I know that I will look back at the manner in which you and Dad reared us. For now though, the Lord is leading me elsewhere, I only pray that I am interpreting his will correctly. His will is all I desire. My life is so confusing, I become frightened, and goof thing up. I wonder how and WHY God would use me-or even want to use me!! But I look at Moses, for one and how doubtful he was. God certainly used him. Life is difficult to understand, but having a Christian home and family is something I am thankful for and do find a security in. Never change, just keep getting better! And pray for me. I know you don’t always agree with the ways I do things, but take those things with a grain of salt. Mother, I just want to wish you a very Happy Birthday and thank you for being someone whom I can impression myself after. Love you always.
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“The remarkable thing about God is that when you fear God, you fear nothing else, whereas if you do not fear God, you fear everything else” Oswald Chambers.
“Oh how great is thy goodness, which thou hast laid up for them that fear thee; which thou hast wrought for them that trust in thee before the sons of men!”
~~~Psalm 31:19 (KJV)~~~
There is nothing to fear unless we forget what the Lord has done.
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Blessings!
Straight up, I miss my mommy and am not sure I will ever stop missing her. She passed into glory on the morning of May 25th of this past year. Despite her failing health, she remained her sweet self to the very end. Less than two days before she passed, we talked by phone. Still her sweet and encouraging self, yet she admitted she was tired. She hadn’t said this to me before and I knew it was time.
While she was blessed to pass at home on the farm as she had wanted, just a few weeks prior I had had the opportunity of spending the night with her in her hospital room. It was a very, very special time we shared together. It was as if we had gone back in time and were both young again.
Dad and Mother were twenty and eighteen respectively when they married. By the time Mother was twenty-six, she had four children to nourish with her love. Though I am the second of four children, being the oldest daughter I have come to realize just how fortunate I was to have had her to teach me by her example just how to be a wife and mother, and to care for a home. I have often said Mother would have been an amazing kindergarten teacher, a natural and gifted teacher for sure. I am so grateful to have been her private student.
And so, the night we spent together in her hospital room was a night I am so thankful to have experienced with her. While I was tired and found myself catnapping only to be awakened by her wanting to talk, I enjoyed every minute of our conversations. It was as if she was in her early thirties and I was a young girl. We talked of memories from each of our childhoods. We talked about our each dating and falling in love with our husbands.
It was fun to be able to discuss topics which would never have been possible all those years ago. And, to discuss the past not through my childhood eyes, but through my now adult eyes. And yes, how interesting to be able to see the past in a full circle view, now knowing what I could not have been able to understand as a child.
She seemed open to my asking about a particular fear she dealt with. We children knew of this fear, actually a very common fear many people have, the fear of water. While I knew of an occurrence during her early twenties which would have left anyone traumatized, I discovered during our midnight hour chatting of how her fear of water took hold of her as a small child.
What also came to light was just how much her own mother’s fear caused her fear to develop. Mother nearly drowned as an eight year old little girl. Her mother, my grandmother, helplessly witnessed this incidence. And while my grandmother seemed to worry not just about her own children, but we grandchildren as well, hearing my mother retelling the story, made it clear my grandmother’s fear of losing her baby girl had more of an impact on my mother than that of her own experience, the actual seconds of her own being under water.
While I am not sure whether Mother realized it or not, her retelling of her near drowning incidence was told based on the perspective, the fear, she saw on her own mother’s face that afternoon. I have wondered since, had my grandmother’s facial expression been different, would my mother have developed a fear of water? Being a mother myself, I totally understand my grandmother’s heartfelt emotions as she watched her little girl going under. Any mother who loves her own children certainly understands. This is what a mother is all about. This is what a mother is made of. This is my mother’s love.
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