I've noticed something.....
people say what you think about you bring about.....
I wonder.....
I notice that every time I go out of town, I'm totall relaxed with every man that even looks at me; and particularly if it's someone that I'm attracted to, I have absolutely no problem speaking, and carryin the conversation further. It's very easy for me to be myself and enjoy a compliment from a man who doesn't live where I live....so there's no real chance of it turing into an actual reltionship (or at least the chance is so much slimmer); but when I run into a man in Chicago where I live, who's attracted to me that I'm attracted to....and I notice him noticing me, if you will...I'm extremely suspicious. When does that ever happen to me?
A friend of mine said that it's me, it's the way I think, it's what I expect...I was on vacation when I went to New York so it was easy for me to be myself....but here at home where it actually turn into something I feel a very very strong need to protect myself at all costs, so I think myself ou6t of just being, and my face has a big "get the hell away from me" sign on it.
Maybe she's right.
But truthfully speaking, I can't remember the last time I was attracted to someone from my city, who was attracted to me.......as a mtter of fact I don't tink I ever remember that happening....
well there was the time I lived in Miami....
So maybe she has a point.....
then there's the fact that contrary to popular belief, it actually takes allot for me to like a guy...allot......
I mean it takes a special package for me to even remotely take notice......
it does....
maybe some can say that I'm too caught up in the fairy tale, and I understand that love is a choice and that a man should have some very very important things that exist about his character like loves God,m trustworthiness, responsible, loyal, etc etc; however I don't think that negates the importance of me actually being attracted to the man.
Maybe I'm crazy, but I don't think in terms of boyfriend, I think in term of husband, and if a man is going to be my husband, shouldn't I be attracted to him......?
I mean specifically since sex is a part of marriage......(am I right about that?) Shouldn't I be attracted to this person? Shouldn't my knees get weak when he walks into the room? Shouldn't my heart flutter whenever he looks at me? Shouldn't I not be able to stay angry with him?
Especially if marriage is supposed to be a picture of Christ relationship with the church...I can't resist Christ, why should I be able to resist him (my husband that is)?
Anyways,
the question is such a valid one in my mind that it even had me asking (and still does a little) if I should move...I mean maybe men in Chicago simply don't like women like me........and the ones that do, I don't like them.....
I mean truthfully speaking there is a different culteral beat ina Chicago then in a New York City.....
in any event....
who knows.....
guess I'll find out some time in the future.
Sarah E. Rios
Love Heals All Wounds
Founder and Creator
lovehealsallwounds1@gmail.com
www.myspace.com/lovehealsallwounds1
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Could this be the origin of.........
What happens when someone hates who they are?
What do I mean by that? Well let's explore another question first before we develop that.
Now this may sound crazy, but go with me a little bit on this.....
Imagine that you are overweight. Everyone knows it, you know it, your family knows it, your friends know it, everyone knows it....
Now imagine that your experience with being overweight has gotten you talked about and picked on more times than you can count. Now imagine that you come to the conclusion that the absolute only reason why you're getting as berated as you are is because according to this society, you shouldn't be overweight. I mean let's ignore for a moment the health implications.
As a matter of fact, imagine with me that you are about 5'6 and you weight 135 pounds. Now if you're like me, you automatically think that there's no possible way that any one on the earth could think that you were overweight, I mean you seem about normal, right?
But what if you have anorexia or bulimia or some other disorder that makes your reflection look fat to you, no matter how people would tell you that you were not.
What if because of the perception that you carry about how the world you sees you, you begin to hate your body, hate the way you're shaped, hate the fact that you're overweight (real or perceived) hate society for treating you differently and like you're not worth as much simply because you're not as small as everyone else.
Do you think there's a possibility that you may begin to hate your body so much and maybe even hate the fact that you even have the desire to eat so much that you would rather starve?
You think so? Or maybe you think that's absolutely ridiculous...really? Have you ever met an anorexic or bulimic? Would you tell them that it's ridiculous? Do you think it's possible that they may percieve you to be saying that how they feel is not real and is all in their heads? How do you think they would take that? Do you think it would get them closer to healing or push them farther away?
So the question at the top of this blog was what happens when someone hates who they are... It occurs to me that there are people who hate who they are. They hate everything that makes them them. When you look at this from a carnal perspective it would be very easy to think that they're problem is simply a case of low self esteem. But I wonder if we could go deeper. Imagine a little girl who gets rejected all the time...by peers, by family by friends. Imagine that she has people telling her over and over and over some way or another how no man would ever want her because she's too this or too that. Now imagine that she grows up with a very real fear that love will not be a part of her life....at all. She also grows up with a very jaded and bad opinion about men. She grows up believing what has been taught and is being taught in many homes in the U.S and around the word, and even in churches which is the perception that men are only interested in using women for their own sexual gain, and to further their careers.
The thought patterns are preached and taught and laughed at even from pulpits and they are disguised in cute little saying like "a man is gonna be a man" and "men are dogs" and "men are just tryna get some." Now don't get me wrong, I'm sure that everyone who has said these statements did not mean to suggest that ALL men were that way; nevertheless that is what how it comes across to many of us.
SO anyways, let's get back to that little girl. So imagine that she grows up hearing all of this, and then in her young adult years, people (the same people who told her that men were dogs and they were only interested in getting what they could out of her) begin to tell her that she should be open and OK with the idea of a man chasing her and catching her; the very people that said that men were only interested in using her in the first place.
What if that little girl, as a young woman says to herself that she would rather die than become society's version of acceptable in order to get favor from a man who according to what church people and her mother and aunties say would never have the capacity to appreciate her anyway because they can only apprecite women who look good on their arm as an accessory. Do you think that woman could possibly begin to hate that part of herself that is attracted to anything masculine? Even she knows that it doesn't make any logical sense that every single man could think and feel that way; but what if that seed has been planted so deeply and watered so regularly by people who say things like "a man is not going to want..." or "men like....
or "men are dogs, some are the watch dogs, some are the dogs you pet, some are...." etc etc?
Why is it so far fetched that that woman could get to the point of hating that desire and hating herself for having it, and questioning God's love for her for putting it there? Here's a better question...what happens to that woman?
I wonder......
A few months ago, I was watching a special episode of the show Women Behind Bars and this particular episode was called "Transexual Prison." The entire show was devoted to telling the story of transsexuals (men that dressed as women) who ended up in jail for some reason or another. Now these men were not people who had gone in and actually had surgery, they simply dressed as women. They wore make-up, they sat like women, they talked like women, one could determine that they probably thought that they actually were women.
Now, this is where the blog gets strong so if you have young children or you're sensitive with these matters, I implore you to stop reading now. Accept the fact that I strongly feel that it is important to be real and to talk about these real issues that rear their ugly heads even in our churches; I would not even endeavor to speak about this.
There was one part of the program where the men were free to talk about the fact that either currently (at the time of the taping) or previous to them ending up in prison, they dressed as women. They expressed that they missed the priveledge of being able to dres up in women's clothing, and they also spoke about the stricness of prison and how thier option to have what some call "gender reassignement" surgery had been taken away. They spoke about getting to a point where they had a very real desire to mutilate themselves. In case you're wondering, yes that is exactly what I'm speaking about. They spoke of a desire to remove the part of their body that actually made them men. They spoke of actual attempts of this perpetrated by them on their own bodies. I know what you're thinking (especially if you're a man)...HOW ON EARTH COULD ANY MAN EVEN THINK OF DOING THAT? Just as I was wincing and asking that question, some of the interviewees began to answer it.
"What's the purpose of this on my body?" asked one man, "asking me to keep this is asking me to accept something that I hate." said another. "Asking me to keep this is asking me to accept something I HATE." Interesting. So he's a man, God created him as such, yet he HATES this fact. How heart breaking.
I think it's very easy for us as the church to chock those things up to people who are depraved and even to get in our comfort zone and simply think, well those people are just going to hell because they're an abomination. We quote the scripture all the time that says "You shall not lie with a man as with a woman; it is an abomination." (Leviticus 18:22) We have also quoted scriptures like I Corinthians 6:9,10 that says "Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God."
There are also scripture references in the New Testament that specifically call the act of a woman lying with another woman as unnatural. In Genesis, God clearly says that he created the woman for the man; that she was infact the one who was supposed to be his soul mate, his partner, and the one with which he would share sexual affection.
However, I wonder how many men and women who struggle with this issue do not also struggle with a kind of self hatred. I mean someone who hates that part of themselves, that thing in a woman that causes her heart to beat faster when an attractive man or a man with authority is around her; the part of a man that melts at the softness of a woman's femininity; that part of a woman's heart that fears that her natural God given adaptability and vulnerability make her extremely easy to be hurt and taken advantage of by men (which can entail allot mor than sexual activity; a woman can never ever have sexual relations with a man and still feel very strongly that she is being manipulated and taken advantage of)What about the woman that sees his gift of vulnerabilitty and softness as a curse that seemingly gives him the upper hand?
When that woman comes asking questions about how men think or about a specific situation, what's our response to her? Do we just tell her to "get over it and get on with her life"? In our exhaustion and frustration, do we tell her that the man that she continues to ask about (maybe because she's petrified) couldn't possibly be interested in her on any way shape or form? What's our response to her? What do we say? Do we tell her that she simply doesn't "love herself" and that's why she doesn't understand how a man could love her when in fact she hates men and every bit of her that has any attraction or affection for any of them? How do we respond to her?
Here's another concept to ponder. I wonder how many men and women are struggling with anger toward the opposite sex, and who no one would ever think could be taken into the lie of homosexualitybut are driven there by anger, and feelings of isolation, rejection and fear, not to mention bitterness and disdain...maybe because they feel overly rejected, or used and abused. Maybe because people's perceptions tend to be that "you shouldn't have LET them take advantage of you" (women get this one allot).
I wonder if there's any validity to Satan launching an all out attack on the perfect will and plan of God in the area of male and female relationships and be so determined to pervert sex and pervert and distort marriage that he sows seeds early in a child's life. He sends a molester or a rapist to take advantage of a little girl or little boy; who then grow up either hating themselves or hating the opposite sex because it represents what happened to them(or both). I wonder how many little boys grow up so wounded by witnessing the bad treatment of their mothers by men that they would rather be effeminate than have anything to do with being masculine. After all, why isn't reasonable that ome little boy could say to himself: "if that's what being a man is, then I don't wanna be one." How many of them get so berated by domineering and angry women who order them around and speak of men as if they are unimportant and as if they are animals, who exist only to produce children in women's wombs that they would rather be like the girls and be accepted by them, than risk a women's constant rejection of them.
I wonder how many little girls who aren't necessarily tom boys or who don't act like boys at all witness men mistreat women and use them decide that they would rather die than allow any man in edge wise to treat her like that. I wonder how many of these girls hear boys that they go to school with and to church with brag on how many girls they're "messin with" or sleeping with, and then go home to watch videos where women are portrayed only as fancy trophies for men to collect and have their sexuality completely degraded who grow up thinking that they would rather die than be at the mercy of any man? How many of these same little girls grow up hearing women make excuses for these men in the form of the aforementioned statements like "men are dogs" or "that's the way men are" and in so doing make excuses and leagalizations for why it's acceptable for them as women to specifically go after a man's money or otherwise manipulate him. I wonder how many little girls and young women hear those statements right from the pulpits in our churches as we laugh about it.
I wonder how many young girls and young women in an effort to understand men or to understand what's going on in their lives seek counsel from women only to recieve a barrage of "advice" colored by their own wrong and incorrect perceptions of God's first creation, the man.
I wonder how hopeless these people must feel to have people react to them as if they're crazy for thinking the way they think or feeling the way that they feel. I wonder how many of them get up and leave churches every day, and put guns in their mouths because they can't take the pain any more or put pills in their mouths to try to escape. I wonder how many just flat out disappear and get further entangled and engulfed in a lifestyle that clearly does not and cannot honor God; and I wonder how many of them are then tormented by the devil on a regular basis for walking in the thing that he attempted to mark them for since before they were born.
I wonder how many little children grow up thinking these things because WE TEACH THEM. Some time ago, I had an older woman at my church who I loved so very much and respected tremendously tell me that she told her sons while they were growing up that there are different categories of women: "there are women that you date," she said" women that you sleep with, and women that you marry." How interesting that SHE TAUGHT her boys what people had taught her about men, and that's what they learned, from the WOMAN in their life; that women could be categorized with signs marked "use me only for sex" and "use me only to pass the time" and "finally, I'm the one you marry" and that somehow there was nothing wrong with a man treating women like that. How interesting.....the concept that a daughter of the most high God wouldn't be worth being treated like a daughter of the most high God (wether SHE knew it or not....wrong doesn't become right because the person who's being wronged isn't objecting). One of her sons took this philosphy to heart. She told me in one conversation that one of her sons had several different children with several different women. "I didn't raise my son to be like that" she said. I didn't want to say this in an effort not to hurt her, but all I could think was "yes you did."
So I wonder how many little boys and little girls are being impacted with our broken philosophies about the opposite sex that we spew out in an effort to protect ourselves and protect them. How many kids are picking these things up and becoming the very things that we accuse the opposite sex of being, whether it's the all men are dogs theory that many women (dare I say especially in the black community) seem to have subscribed to, the idea that no man on God's green earth can wait until marriage to have sex, or the idea that all women are gold diggers and if she's nice to a man, she must be trying to get his money.
Ladies, are we poisoning our kids with these devastating and broken philosophies about our brothers? I have to target the ladies, because although I can't say for sure that men don't do that, but I haven't heard many men make such incredible generalizations about women. Can I be honest with you? Although I always thought that the idea that all men are dogs was ridiculous, if for no other reason than there being too many men on earth for that to be entirely true....secretly, deep down; for a very long time...I've carried a fear that says "What if it's true? What if they are all like that?" On top of that, although I never was able to really say "all men are dogs" and mean it.... (not that I never said it) after being told no man would want me for years in subtle ways by family, peers and society, I became very angry with men and I decided that I did believe that they were all extremely shallow, and therefore unable of ever appreciating anyone like me.
That being the case, like the woman in the beginning of the blog, I began to hate that part of myself, the part that flutters when a man takes authority, the part that is so engaged in and at faint heart at the squareness of a man's jaw. I HATED that part of myself and every time I felt anything like that, it caused me a great deal of anxiety.
Truthfully speaking, I can't really say that I'm all the way on the other side, even now, after all this time the idea of actually being vulnerable with a man sometimes causes me a great deal of anxiety....I mean a great deal of anxiety complete with tension and trouble breathing. I believe God for my complete and total restoration, but I realize something. Had I not had a knowledge of the things of God, I could have easily been one of those women who I spoke about earlier. Although it was such a strong spiritual battle that I faced about that part of me, the part that loves men, many people who are people of God could not discern it. It seemed to go over their head.
Praise God for a couple of sisters God gave me that understand and of course for the Holy Hpirit and for His loving kindness of me Even when I was hell bent on destroying myslef because of my anger about this desire, He seeming would never let me. But what about the other women, who don't have that? What about the men who don't know that? The ones who don't know the love of God and don't have an understanding of the things of God in his purpose for men and women; or who have been so hurt and rejected; some in forms of sexual abuse and sexual assault and rape (boys and girls mind you) what about them?
What happens to them when someone simplifies their problem to being resolvable simply by "letting go" of the idea of being with one particular person? As if it's not bound to repeat itself over and over again no matter who the romantic interest is, therby continuing the torment.
What happens to them?
The devil tried hard and continues to try hard with me....I tried to end my life, I tried to walk away from God forever........but He always pulled me back...Thank God, He's good.
But what happens to the ones who don't yet know that level of the love of God?
How many of them leave our churches and become victims and tools in the hands of the enemy?
Do we care?
Do they even matter anymore?
So what does happen when someone hates a part of themselves?
Well, if you hate that you become hungry from time to time (even though food is a necessity, not just a desire) you could try to starve yourself, or you may binge and then punish your body by purging; vomiting all of it...which is bound to make you sick.
If you're a man who hates masculinity and hates the fact that you're a man because you feel it is a picture of hatred, or of hurt and deception (I believe like the men in the documentary I saw) then you could revert to doing anything and everything not to be that, including mutilation yourself....which is bound to kill you at least spiritually, if not medically.
And if you're a woman who feels that your natural femininity is a hindrance to you, something that only gets you taken advantage of and hurt and rejected and made a fool of, you may do everything in your power to REJECT that part of yourself; even if it means ending your own life, or cutting off your hair, dresing like a man, talking like a man, and living as if you were in deed a man...which is bound to torutre you (because you're NOT a man).
Here's the thing though, no matter what you do, you can't get away from you......
So what happens to those who would rather cut a part of themselves a way (whether in the natural or in the spiritual realm) then ever embrace that part of themselves for fear that they will be badly and irreparably hurt?
Some make it to deliverance.
Some don't.
Here's another important question: as the people of God and the body of Christ....
DO THEY MATTER TO US?
Sarah E. Rios
Creator and Founder
http://www.lovehealsallwounds.blogspot.com/
What do I mean by that? Well let's explore another question first before we develop that.
Now this may sound crazy, but go with me a little bit on this.....
Imagine that you are overweight. Everyone knows it, you know it, your family knows it, your friends know it, everyone knows it....
Now imagine that your experience with being overweight has gotten you talked about and picked on more times than you can count. Now imagine that you come to the conclusion that the absolute only reason why you're getting as berated as you are is because according to this society, you shouldn't be overweight. I mean let's ignore for a moment the health implications.
As a matter of fact, imagine with me that you are about 5'6 and you weight 135 pounds. Now if you're like me, you automatically think that there's no possible way that any one on the earth could think that you were overweight, I mean you seem about normal, right?
But what if you have anorexia or bulimia or some other disorder that makes your reflection look fat to you, no matter how people would tell you that you were not.
What if because of the perception that you carry about how the world you sees you, you begin to hate your body, hate the way you're shaped, hate the fact that you're overweight (real or perceived) hate society for treating you differently and like you're not worth as much simply because you're not as small as everyone else.
Do you think there's a possibility that you may begin to hate your body so much and maybe even hate the fact that you even have the desire to eat so much that you would rather starve?
You think so? Or maybe you think that's absolutely ridiculous...really? Have you ever met an anorexic or bulimic? Would you tell them that it's ridiculous? Do you think it's possible that they may percieve you to be saying that how they feel is not real and is all in their heads? How do you think they would take that? Do you think it would get them closer to healing or push them farther away?
So the question at the top of this blog was what happens when someone hates who they are... It occurs to me that there are people who hate who they are. They hate everything that makes them them. When you look at this from a carnal perspective it would be very easy to think that they're problem is simply a case of low self esteem. But I wonder if we could go deeper. Imagine a little girl who gets rejected all the time...by peers, by family by friends. Imagine that she has people telling her over and over and over some way or another how no man would ever want her because she's too this or too that. Now imagine that she grows up with a very real fear that love will not be a part of her life....at all. She also grows up with a very jaded and bad opinion about men. She grows up believing what has been taught and is being taught in many homes in the U.S and around the word, and even in churches which is the perception that men are only interested in using women for their own sexual gain, and to further their careers.
The thought patterns are preached and taught and laughed at even from pulpits and they are disguised in cute little saying like "a man is gonna be a man" and "men are dogs" and "men are just tryna get some." Now don't get me wrong, I'm sure that everyone who has said these statements did not mean to suggest that ALL men were that way; nevertheless that is what how it comes across to many of us.
SO anyways, let's get back to that little girl. So imagine that she grows up hearing all of this, and then in her young adult years, people (the same people who told her that men were dogs and they were only interested in getting what they could out of her) begin to tell her that she should be open and OK with the idea of a man chasing her and catching her; the very people that said that men were only interested in using her in the first place.
What if that little girl, as a young woman says to herself that she would rather die than become society's version of acceptable in order to get favor from a man who according to what church people and her mother and aunties say would never have the capacity to appreciate her anyway because they can only apprecite women who look good on their arm as an accessory. Do you think that woman could possibly begin to hate that part of herself that is attracted to anything masculine? Even she knows that it doesn't make any logical sense that every single man could think and feel that way; but what if that seed has been planted so deeply and watered so regularly by people who say things like "a man is not going to want..." or "men like....
or "men are dogs, some are the watch dogs, some are the dogs you pet, some are...." etc etc?
Why is it so far fetched that that woman could get to the point of hating that desire and hating herself for having it, and questioning God's love for her for putting it there? Here's a better question...what happens to that woman?
I wonder......
A few months ago, I was watching a special episode of the show Women Behind Bars and this particular episode was called "Transexual Prison." The entire show was devoted to telling the story of transsexuals (men that dressed as women) who ended up in jail for some reason or another. Now these men were not people who had gone in and actually had surgery, they simply dressed as women. They wore make-up, they sat like women, they talked like women, one could determine that they probably thought that they actually were women.
Now, this is where the blog gets strong so if you have young children or you're sensitive with these matters, I implore you to stop reading now. Accept the fact that I strongly feel that it is important to be real and to talk about these real issues that rear their ugly heads even in our churches; I would not even endeavor to speak about this.
There was one part of the program where the men were free to talk about the fact that either currently (at the time of the taping) or previous to them ending up in prison, they dressed as women. They expressed that they missed the priveledge of being able to dres up in women's clothing, and they also spoke about the stricness of prison and how thier option to have what some call "gender reassignement" surgery had been taken away. They spoke about getting to a point where they had a very real desire to mutilate themselves. In case you're wondering, yes that is exactly what I'm speaking about. They spoke of a desire to remove the part of their body that actually made them men. They spoke of actual attempts of this perpetrated by them on their own bodies. I know what you're thinking (especially if you're a man)...HOW ON EARTH COULD ANY MAN EVEN THINK OF DOING THAT? Just as I was wincing and asking that question, some of the interviewees began to answer it.
"What's the purpose of this on my body?" asked one man, "asking me to keep this is asking me to accept something that I hate." said another. "Asking me to keep this is asking me to accept something I HATE." Interesting. So he's a man, God created him as such, yet he HATES this fact. How heart breaking.
I think it's very easy for us as the church to chock those things up to people who are depraved and even to get in our comfort zone and simply think, well those people are just going to hell because they're an abomination. We quote the scripture all the time that says "You shall not lie with a man as with a woman; it is an abomination." (Leviticus 18:22) We have also quoted scriptures like I Corinthians 6:9,10 that says "Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God."
There are also scripture references in the New Testament that specifically call the act of a woman lying with another woman as unnatural. In Genesis, God clearly says that he created the woman for the man; that she was infact the one who was supposed to be his soul mate, his partner, and the one with which he would share sexual affection.
However, I wonder how many men and women who struggle with this issue do not also struggle with a kind of self hatred. I mean someone who hates that part of themselves, that thing in a woman that causes her heart to beat faster when an attractive man or a man with authority is around her; the part of a man that melts at the softness of a woman's femininity; that part of a woman's heart that fears that her natural God given adaptability and vulnerability make her extremely easy to be hurt and taken advantage of by men (which can entail allot mor than sexual activity; a woman can never ever have sexual relations with a man and still feel very strongly that she is being manipulated and taken advantage of)What about the woman that sees his gift of vulnerabilitty and softness as a curse that seemingly gives him the upper hand?
When that woman comes asking questions about how men think or about a specific situation, what's our response to her? Do we just tell her to "get over it and get on with her life"? In our exhaustion and frustration, do we tell her that the man that she continues to ask about (maybe because she's petrified) couldn't possibly be interested in her on any way shape or form? What's our response to her? What do we say? Do we tell her that she simply doesn't "love herself" and that's why she doesn't understand how a man could love her when in fact she hates men and every bit of her that has any attraction or affection for any of them? How do we respond to her?
Here's another concept to ponder. I wonder how many men and women are struggling with anger toward the opposite sex, and who no one would ever think could be taken into the lie of homosexualitybut are driven there by anger, and feelings of isolation, rejection and fear, not to mention bitterness and disdain...maybe because they feel overly rejected, or used and abused. Maybe because people's perceptions tend to be that "you shouldn't have LET them take advantage of you" (women get this one allot).
I wonder if there's any validity to Satan launching an all out attack on the perfect will and plan of God in the area of male and female relationships and be so determined to pervert sex and pervert and distort marriage that he sows seeds early in a child's life. He sends a molester or a rapist to take advantage of a little girl or little boy; who then grow up either hating themselves or hating the opposite sex because it represents what happened to them(or both). I wonder how many little boys grow up so wounded by witnessing the bad treatment of their mothers by men that they would rather be effeminate than have anything to do with being masculine. After all, why isn't reasonable that ome little boy could say to himself: "if that's what being a man is, then I don't wanna be one." How many of them get so berated by domineering and angry women who order them around and speak of men as if they are unimportant and as if they are animals, who exist only to produce children in women's wombs that they would rather be like the girls and be accepted by them, than risk a women's constant rejection of them.
I wonder how many little girls who aren't necessarily tom boys or who don't act like boys at all witness men mistreat women and use them decide that they would rather die than allow any man in edge wise to treat her like that. I wonder how many of these girls hear boys that they go to school with and to church with brag on how many girls they're "messin with" or sleeping with, and then go home to watch videos where women are portrayed only as fancy trophies for men to collect and have their sexuality completely degraded who grow up thinking that they would rather die than be at the mercy of any man? How many of these same little girls grow up hearing women make excuses for these men in the form of the aforementioned statements like "men are dogs" or "that's the way men are" and in so doing make excuses and leagalizations for why it's acceptable for them as women to specifically go after a man's money or otherwise manipulate him. I wonder how many little girls and young women hear those statements right from the pulpits in our churches as we laugh about it.
I wonder how many young girls and young women in an effort to understand men or to understand what's going on in their lives seek counsel from women only to recieve a barrage of "advice" colored by their own wrong and incorrect perceptions of God's first creation, the man.
I wonder how hopeless these people must feel to have people react to them as if they're crazy for thinking the way they think or feeling the way that they feel. I wonder how many of them get up and leave churches every day, and put guns in their mouths because they can't take the pain any more or put pills in their mouths to try to escape. I wonder how many just flat out disappear and get further entangled and engulfed in a lifestyle that clearly does not and cannot honor God; and I wonder how many of them are then tormented by the devil on a regular basis for walking in the thing that he attempted to mark them for since before they were born.
I wonder how many little children grow up thinking these things because WE TEACH THEM. Some time ago, I had an older woman at my church who I loved so very much and respected tremendously tell me that she told her sons while they were growing up that there are different categories of women: "there are women that you date," she said" women that you sleep with, and women that you marry." How interesting that SHE TAUGHT her boys what people had taught her about men, and that's what they learned, from the WOMAN in their life; that women could be categorized with signs marked "use me only for sex" and "use me only to pass the time" and "finally, I'm the one you marry" and that somehow there was nothing wrong with a man treating women like that. How interesting.....the concept that a daughter of the most high God wouldn't be worth being treated like a daughter of the most high God (wether SHE knew it or not....wrong doesn't become right because the person who's being wronged isn't objecting). One of her sons took this philosphy to heart. She told me in one conversation that one of her sons had several different children with several different women. "I didn't raise my son to be like that" she said. I didn't want to say this in an effort not to hurt her, but all I could think was "yes you did."
So I wonder how many little boys and little girls are being impacted with our broken philosophies about the opposite sex that we spew out in an effort to protect ourselves and protect them. How many kids are picking these things up and becoming the very things that we accuse the opposite sex of being, whether it's the all men are dogs theory that many women (dare I say especially in the black community) seem to have subscribed to, the idea that no man on God's green earth can wait until marriage to have sex, or the idea that all women are gold diggers and if she's nice to a man, she must be trying to get his money.
Ladies, are we poisoning our kids with these devastating and broken philosophies about our brothers? I have to target the ladies, because although I can't say for sure that men don't do that, but I haven't heard many men make such incredible generalizations about women. Can I be honest with you? Although I always thought that the idea that all men are dogs was ridiculous, if for no other reason than there being too many men on earth for that to be entirely true....secretly, deep down; for a very long time...I've carried a fear that says "What if it's true? What if they are all like that?" On top of that, although I never was able to really say "all men are dogs" and mean it.... (not that I never said it) after being told no man would want me for years in subtle ways by family, peers and society, I became very angry with men and I decided that I did believe that they were all extremely shallow, and therefore unable of ever appreciating anyone like me.
That being the case, like the woman in the beginning of the blog, I began to hate that part of myself, the part that flutters when a man takes authority, the part that is so engaged in and at faint heart at the squareness of a man's jaw. I HATED that part of myself and every time I felt anything like that, it caused me a great deal of anxiety.
Truthfully speaking, I can't really say that I'm all the way on the other side, even now, after all this time the idea of actually being vulnerable with a man sometimes causes me a great deal of anxiety....I mean a great deal of anxiety complete with tension and trouble breathing. I believe God for my complete and total restoration, but I realize something. Had I not had a knowledge of the things of God, I could have easily been one of those women who I spoke about earlier. Although it was such a strong spiritual battle that I faced about that part of me, the part that loves men, many people who are people of God could not discern it. It seemed to go over their head.
Praise God for a couple of sisters God gave me that understand and of course for the Holy Hpirit and for His loving kindness of me Even when I was hell bent on destroying myslef because of my anger about this desire, He seeming would never let me. But what about the other women, who don't have that? What about the men who don't know that? The ones who don't know the love of God and don't have an understanding of the things of God in his purpose for men and women; or who have been so hurt and rejected; some in forms of sexual abuse and sexual assault and rape (boys and girls mind you) what about them?
What happens to them when someone simplifies their problem to being resolvable simply by "letting go" of the idea of being with one particular person? As if it's not bound to repeat itself over and over again no matter who the romantic interest is, therby continuing the torment.
What happens to them?
The devil tried hard and continues to try hard with me....I tried to end my life, I tried to walk away from God forever........but He always pulled me back...Thank God, He's good.
But what happens to the ones who don't yet know that level of the love of God?
How many of them leave our churches and become victims and tools in the hands of the enemy?
Do we care?
Do they even matter anymore?
So what does happen when someone hates a part of themselves?
Well, if you hate that you become hungry from time to time (even though food is a necessity, not just a desire) you could try to starve yourself, or you may binge and then punish your body by purging; vomiting all of it...which is bound to make you sick.
If you're a man who hates masculinity and hates the fact that you're a man because you feel it is a picture of hatred, or of hurt and deception (I believe like the men in the documentary I saw) then you could revert to doing anything and everything not to be that, including mutilation yourself....which is bound to kill you at least spiritually, if not medically.
And if you're a woman who feels that your natural femininity is a hindrance to you, something that only gets you taken advantage of and hurt and rejected and made a fool of, you may do everything in your power to REJECT that part of yourself; even if it means ending your own life, or cutting off your hair, dresing like a man, talking like a man, and living as if you were in deed a man...which is bound to torutre you (because you're NOT a man).
Here's the thing though, no matter what you do, you can't get away from you......
So what happens to those who would rather cut a part of themselves a way (whether in the natural or in the spiritual realm) then ever embrace that part of themselves for fear that they will be badly and irreparably hurt?
Some make it to deliverance.
Some don't.
Here's another important question: as the people of God and the body of Christ....
DO THEY MATTER TO US?
Sarah E. Rios
Creator and Founder
http://www.lovehealsallwounds.blogspot.com/
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Spiritual Pregnancy...........P.....U.....S......H
I'm trying to figure out a way to express this;
I'm pregnant....expecting....with child....
not with a physical child, as wonderful as that could be.....
it's not a natural pregnancy...it's a spiritual pregnancy......
I knew I was pregnant before....or shall we say proverbially "9 months ago"....
if months are ages......
(a thousand years is as a day, a day is as a thousand years).....
I knew it then......
but it seemed so far off......
I mean somehow I knew the baby was there but I wasn't sure it was actually going to live....
I didn't feel it kicking......
then it started kicking me...
that was painful....
gossip and lies were my contractions...
along with painful memories in the night and failures I wish I could take back.....
promises that God made to me were getting lost in the barrage of times of feeling like I had miscarried......
in the times that my mouth exploded the poison that was in my heart.......only to infect someone else and hurt them....badly.....eventhough I didn't mean to....
Someone tried to kill my baby time and time again.......
before I knew I was carrying, the devil tried to kill me....
and then after I knew, he struck again...and again...and again....
He used sexual abuse....and verbal abuse....and low self esteem and low self worth...
and constant rejection, and painful pain...........over and over and over....
as a matter of fact before I was even here, he launched his attack on my parents with physical and emotional abuse....
with demonic attacks like no other......
he had waged an all out war on me....before I was even here.......
He attacked my parents with low self esteem and rage and bitterness from the harshness of life.....
and he started attacking me as a little girl...because he knew what I was carrying....
or maybe he didn't know...that would be to assume that he's all knowing; which he's not....
but since he's spiritual at his nature and deals only in that realm and not in the natural....
maybe he always knew....
and he could always sense it....
so he attacked........
and attacked.....
and attacked....
and attacked....
he tried to talk me into aborting my baby....
over and over and over and over and over and over again.....
But Daddy was always there......
he gave me mothers and fathers in the faith....
sisters and brothers in the faith.......
the ones that I couldn't push away no matter how hard I tried....
and even the ones I did....
the ones who's voices echoed in my ear.....over and over....
who prayed....and prayed and prayed and prayed....
they acted as midwives and they still do...
telling me to eat right......and feast on the word of God....
to drink enough water......the water of the the word of God....
to get some SON light.......that it's good for the baby.........
and I know they're still there now........waiting to tell me to push.....
push.....
push.....
push......
bear down......
it's coming....
bear down....
I can see the head.....
push.........
and I know that my baby is coming..........
she's almost here now............
I can feel her........
and my eyes fill with tears........
tears of joy and expectancy that I'll finally get a look at her.......
I'll know what she looks like.....
what she feels like.......
my DESTINY.........
she's almost here...........
now....
it's time......
to
PUSH.
What are you pregnant with? Let me encourage you....no matter what happens....don't abort....
P.......U........S.........H........
Sarah E. Rios
Love Heals All Wounds
Founder and Creator
http://www.lovehealsallwounds1.blogspot.com/
www.myspace.com./lovehealsallwounds
http://www.lovehealsallwounds.hi5.com/
I'm pregnant....expecting....with child....
not with a physical child, as wonderful as that could be.....
it's not a natural pregnancy...it's a spiritual pregnancy......
I knew I was pregnant before....or shall we say proverbially "9 months ago"....
if months are ages......
(a thousand years is as a day, a day is as a thousand years).....
I knew it then......
but it seemed so far off......
I mean somehow I knew the baby was there but I wasn't sure it was actually going to live....
I didn't feel it kicking......
then it started kicking me...
that was painful....
gossip and lies were my contractions...
along with painful memories in the night and failures I wish I could take back.....
promises that God made to me were getting lost in the barrage of times of feeling like I had miscarried......
in the times that my mouth exploded the poison that was in my heart.......only to infect someone else and hurt them....badly.....eventhough I didn't mean to....
Someone tried to kill my baby time and time again.......
before I knew I was carrying, the devil tried to kill me....
and then after I knew, he struck again...and again...and again....
He used sexual abuse....and verbal abuse....and low self esteem and low self worth...
and constant rejection, and painful pain...........over and over and over....
as a matter of fact before I was even here, he launched his attack on my parents with physical and emotional abuse....
with demonic attacks like no other......
he had waged an all out war on me....before I was even here.......
He attacked my parents with low self esteem and rage and bitterness from the harshness of life.....
and he started attacking me as a little girl...because he knew what I was carrying....
or maybe he didn't know...that would be to assume that he's all knowing; which he's not....
but since he's spiritual at his nature and deals only in that realm and not in the natural....
maybe he always knew....
and he could always sense it....
so he attacked........
and attacked.....
and attacked....
and attacked....
he tried to talk me into aborting my baby....
over and over and over and over and over and over again.....
But Daddy was always there......
he gave me mothers and fathers in the faith....
sisters and brothers in the faith.......
the ones that I couldn't push away no matter how hard I tried....
and even the ones I did....
the ones who's voices echoed in my ear.....over and over....
who prayed....and prayed and prayed and prayed....
they acted as midwives and they still do...
telling me to eat right......and feast on the word of God....
to drink enough water......the water of the the word of God....
to get some SON light.......that it's good for the baby.........
and I know they're still there now........waiting to tell me to push.....
push.....
push.....
push......
bear down......
it's coming....
bear down....
I can see the head.....
push.........
and I know that my baby is coming..........
she's almost here now............
I can feel her........
and my eyes fill with tears........
tears of joy and expectancy that I'll finally get a look at her.......
I'll know what she looks like.....
what she feels like.......
my DESTINY.........
she's almost here...........
now....
it's time......
to
PUSH.
What are you pregnant with? Let me encourage you....no matter what happens....don't abort....
P.......U........S.........H........
Sarah E. Rios
Love Heals All Wounds
Founder and Creator
http://www.lovehealsallwounds1.blogspot.com/
www.myspace.com./lovehealsallwounds
http://www.lovehealsallwounds.hi5.com/
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Being Negative...it's easy
Boy do I know all too well the truth of the above statement. In all, I'm actually a bubbly, goofy, funny, down to earth positive person...accept when it comes to relationships. Every experience I've ever had with a love relationship, or a desired love relationships has left me feeling disappointed, rejected and empty. So of course, me being the analytical and logical person that I am; and wanting to avoid anymore pain in an area that seemed extremely impossible, my solution was to avoid the subject all together. What I mean is avoid the act of being hopeful or positive about that subject; or at least it's occurrence in my life.
If you know me well, or if you've a read a couple of my blogs (and you're an insightful person who can wrap your mind around this concept) I basically gave up on love being a part of my life all together. Every time I would become the least bit expectant or hopeful, I would quickly start to say out of my mouth how love could never and most likely would never be a part of my life. As far as I was concerned; it was an impossibility. Usually when I say that, people become confused.
Some give their opinion about my physical beauty as a reason for their confusion; to which I'm flattered but I understand that beauty is in the eye of the beholder; and it's not that I necessarily feel I need the approval of men; but it occurs to me that men reared in our society find that my kind of beauty is secondary; and if by chance they do feel that it is not, I'm usually not attracted to them. Once in a blue moon, maybe once every 7 light years or so, someone will be attracted to me that I'm attracted too... or at least that's how it seems. Some people compliment me on my intelligence as a reason for their confusion. Interestingly enough, since I am an insightful, analytical, opinionated person, to me that was precisely the reason why men didn't like me. The idea of a man liking me because of those things, I must admit even now still seems kind of unlikely.
So before you stop reading this because of all the "negative" comments I'm making, let's shift gears. I'm sure this may be true for others, but I have definitely wondered why it is so hard for me to believe that anything good can happen to me in this particular area of my life. Have you ever met someone (maybe you) who seemed to be so hopeful and positive about everything else in their life accept one thing; or who even had faith that God would do amazing things in that area in your life or someone else's life but not theirs? As if, somehow God either could not or just flat out would not bless this area of their lives. Does it drive you crazy? Probably, huh?
Have you ever asked them why they feel that way? I've had people ask me why I felt that way; not many but some. At first, it was very difficult to explain and I couldn't put it into words. But then why I was able to put it into words, no one was listening anymore...for whatever reason. It might have had to do with one particular man that I was speaking about that the listener assumed I was chasing (I suppose since I was talking about him so much {by the way, that can be any man that I've ever had feelings for ever, not one in particular, lest I get emails and phone calls})
That happened allot. I would begin to have feelings for a man, it would freak me out, and I would begin my process of analyzing and over analyzing every single solitary aspect of him, his behavior, his behavior toward me, his behavior towards women, what people said about him etc etc. The list goes on. I always had a billion and one questions. I had these questions way before the man even said anything other than hello to me. If I could see something in his body language, or a frequency of him looking at me, or a way that he looked at me that even remotely seemed to suggest in the least or the slightest that he even thought I was attractive and I was attracted to him, I was scared out of my mind and found it extremely necessary to begin trying to figure him out. In the early years, I went about this by trying to get to know him. I would never wait for him to ask me out (partly because I couldn't go out on dates when I was growing up. {That's a hint for parents right there; if your daughter is old enough to drive, and have a job, if she can't ask your permission to go out on a date with someone, something is wrong. One of the set backs of that is that if you never let her date while she's in your house, she'll leave your house with absolutely no clue about how a man is supposed to treat her. She may also have some deep rooted low self esteem that you don't know about because she doesn't feel she can go to you about it. Just some food for thought.} )
In any event, whether I was a teen growing up or a young woman in college, it didn't matter....I was totally freaked out. When I say freaked out, believe me that's exactly what I mean. As I got older, and the chances of me ever having that as part of my life seemed slimmer and slimmer, my anxiety got worse and worse and worse. It went from a simple feeling of discomfort to having a serious amount of tension in my neck, my back, my shoulders accompanied with my heart pounding, my blood racing and an extremely present feeling of wanting to get out of the situations as soon as humanly possible. Psychologists call this the "fight or flight" feeling; referring to the feeling that you either have to fight your way out of a situation or run away as fast as you can(flight). That's how much anxiety was in my brain in just considering the idea.
Whenever a situation would go south, for example if I would find out that they in actuality didn't really like me or that they had chosen to be in a relationship with someone else or I wasn't "their type", what do you think happened? If your guessing major emotional pain, you're right. What I was never able to articulate was that the result was always the same no matter what I did. If I called them incessantly, it ended like that. If I didn't say anything at all, it ended like that. If I was candid and honest about my feelings, it ended like that; if I was secretive and withdrawn and despondent, it ended like that. If I was my usual self it ended like that. It absolutely did not matter how I acted or didn't act, the result was ALWAYS the same.
Now a curious thing can happen when you feel overly rejected for a long period of time. You can definitely feel flawed, unwanted and scared; but another emotion that doesn't show up in everyone but definitely has the potential to.
Anger. Bitterness. Resentment.
I became SO incredibly angry at men. They became a part of the "society" that had always rejected me for simply being myself; and I was very angry at them. My anger was fueled by hearing the typical banter of women who came before me like "all men are dogs" and "a man is gonna be a man" and "men are another species." These little sayings had the tendency to sound like men didn't have any feelings at all, or like the only thing they were concerned about was their own sexual desires and whatever they had to do to get it, be it lie, cheat, steal, or force a woman with rape; they were willing to do to get their "needs" met. Truthfully speaking, I have to say that I still wonder weather or not that's true. So I was angry....very angry....another confession; sometimes I still am.
By the time I was 22, I already had a plethora of negative ideas about men and about love. Even in the events that I did meet great men, honorable men; somehow it still seemed to me that I would never be blessed with having one of them love me with a romantic kind of love and me actually love them back. That just seemed impossible. Sometimes it still does. I mean what were the chances that? I, the girl who got talked about all the time in school, the girl who got picked on a regular basis, and the girl who the boys made fun of and laughed at would EVER be acceptable to people who seemed so extremely driven by acceptance from a society that would never accept me? When was that ever going to happen? On what planet? Are you kidding?Not likely, is what I thought.
The thing about this is that even though there is still a desire there to have the companionship and love of a man that I actually love back, it is still a very hard pill for me to swallow. Since it is so hard to grasp, even now; the very idea or concept just seems so incredibly far fetched to me. Now I have a major dilemma: God has made it clear to me that love and marriage is definitely a part of his plan for my life. As you may have already ascertained, even though God has said this, it still doesn't make sense to me. I mean I know that He has in fact said this by the spirit of God, but in my logical mind, it makes no sense and is incredibly far fetched....which would make all attempts to get to know anyone of the male gender who I'm attracted to or who has expressed (verbally or otherwise) attraction to me a waste of time and energy. It just doesn't seem like there is a point to that.
Even though I STILL can't make sense of it, God continues to echo the same thing. On top of the fact that God is relentless about that, he's also relentless that the man I am to marry will be a phenomenal man of God with a powerful anointing and call on his life. Great God, make it harder why don't you?!! Just how many of those type of men are around that are actually single(and would actually interested in me)? 5? 10? 15? I mean on one hand, I've always felt that there was no point in marriage other than to be married to the man that I was created for so that we can do the work that God created us and brought us together to do. On the other hand, my experience says very clearly that there is no way, no how.
So what do I do?What should we as women do with the promises of God? Especially those of us who have been so assaulted by life, and have dealt with the pain of rejection time and time again? What about those of us who have every logical reason why there is no way that love could ever be a part of our lives either because of the pain we feel from being abused, neglected, or dejected? Should we go with what we feel or what God has said?
The bible says this: "For all the promises of God in him are yea, and in him Amen, unto the glory of God by us." (2 Corinthians 1:20) It also says this about God: "...he is faithful that promised." (Hebrews 10:23) The word of God is filled with instances where God made a promise and delivered on His promise; even when it seemed impossible. God told Abraham that he would be the father of many nations way after he or his wife Sarah were able to bare children. (Genesis) Although Sarah and Abraham wavered in their faith in God and decided to take matters into their own hands, God was still faithful to deliver what he had promised, never mind the fact that it defied logic, reason and biology.
In the same book of the bible, there is the account of Noah. God told Noah that there would be a great rain more than a century before it happened. Although people jeered, and made fun of Noah, what God had told him more than one hundred years before had actually taken place. In the book of Luke, it says "Blessed is she who has believed that what the Lord has said to her will be accomplished!" (1:45)It's important for us that may be discouraged to note that God ALWAYS delivers what he promises. But we are partners with God in that we activate and access his promises through our faith and trusting in him. "without faith it is impossible to please God..." (Hebrews 11:6) God is definitely well able to do anything and everything. (Ephesians 3:20)
What we have to do is to pursue our healing, believe God again and stand in agreement with what HE says, no matter what the circumstances, no matter how it may look or how it may feel. So even though, I'm still a work in progress; and even though there are a number of things that still need to come out of me before I am ready to be any man's wife, and even though truthfully the thought still scares me a little, and even though I still have so many questions; in the end of it all, I have an obligation to myself, my God and my future husband to believe God and trust God. That's definitely a process, and it doesn't happen over night. However, I know that if He says it, then that settles it in the earth.
God has been working on me for quite some time and telling me to stop repeating what I feel and what it looks like and to only repeat what he has said and is saying (either by his RHEMA divine word directly to me or by his written word.) I'll tell you what; it's definitely not easy....and I'm definitely biting my lip allot lately.......but I know that in the end it'll be worth it. Soon, it'll be harder to be negative as it is now to be positive. I hope you make that same decision until we meet again. May God show you again what he said, and may He give you the grace to hold on to it, process it, and believe it...as I am endeavoring to do.
Be blessed.
Sarah E. Rios
Founder and Creator
www.lovehealsallwounds1.blogspot.com
www.myspace.com/lovehealsallwounds1
www.lovehealsallwounds.hi5.com
lovehealsallwounds1@gmail.com
If you know me well, or if you've a read a couple of my blogs (and you're an insightful person who can wrap your mind around this concept) I basically gave up on love being a part of my life all together. Every time I would become the least bit expectant or hopeful, I would quickly start to say out of my mouth how love could never and most likely would never be a part of my life. As far as I was concerned; it was an impossibility. Usually when I say that, people become confused.
Some give their opinion about my physical beauty as a reason for their confusion; to which I'm flattered but I understand that beauty is in the eye of the beholder; and it's not that I necessarily feel I need the approval of men; but it occurs to me that men reared in our society find that my kind of beauty is secondary; and if by chance they do feel that it is not, I'm usually not attracted to them. Once in a blue moon, maybe once every 7 light years or so, someone will be attracted to me that I'm attracted too... or at least that's how it seems. Some people compliment me on my intelligence as a reason for their confusion. Interestingly enough, since I am an insightful, analytical, opinionated person, to me that was precisely the reason why men didn't like me. The idea of a man liking me because of those things, I must admit even now still seems kind of unlikely.
So before you stop reading this because of all the "negative" comments I'm making, let's shift gears. I'm sure this may be true for others, but I have definitely wondered why it is so hard for me to believe that anything good can happen to me in this particular area of my life. Have you ever met someone (maybe you) who seemed to be so hopeful and positive about everything else in their life accept one thing; or who even had faith that God would do amazing things in that area in your life or someone else's life but not theirs? As if, somehow God either could not or just flat out would not bless this area of their lives. Does it drive you crazy? Probably, huh?
Have you ever asked them why they feel that way? I've had people ask me why I felt that way; not many but some. At first, it was very difficult to explain and I couldn't put it into words. But then why I was able to put it into words, no one was listening anymore...for whatever reason. It might have had to do with one particular man that I was speaking about that the listener assumed I was chasing (I suppose since I was talking about him so much {by the way, that can be any man that I've ever had feelings for ever, not one in particular, lest I get emails and phone calls})
That happened allot. I would begin to have feelings for a man, it would freak me out, and I would begin my process of analyzing and over analyzing every single solitary aspect of him, his behavior, his behavior toward me, his behavior towards women, what people said about him etc etc. The list goes on. I always had a billion and one questions. I had these questions way before the man even said anything other than hello to me. If I could see something in his body language, or a frequency of him looking at me, or a way that he looked at me that even remotely seemed to suggest in the least or the slightest that he even thought I was attractive and I was attracted to him, I was scared out of my mind and found it extremely necessary to begin trying to figure him out. In the early years, I went about this by trying to get to know him. I would never wait for him to ask me out (partly because I couldn't go out on dates when I was growing up. {That's a hint for parents right there; if your daughter is old enough to drive, and have a job, if she can't ask your permission to go out on a date with someone, something is wrong. One of the set backs of that is that if you never let her date while she's in your house, she'll leave your house with absolutely no clue about how a man is supposed to treat her. She may also have some deep rooted low self esteem that you don't know about because she doesn't feel she can go to you about it. Just some food for thought.} )
In any event, whether I was a teen growing up or a young woman in college, it didn't matter....I was totally freaked out. When I say freaked out, believe me that's exactly what I mean. As I got older, and the chances of me ever having that as part of my life seemed slimmer and slimmer, my anxiety got worse and worse and worse. It went from a simple feeling of discomfort to having a serious amount of tension in my neck, my back, my shoulders accompanied with my heart pounding, my blood racing and an extremely present feeling of wanting to get out of the situations as soon as humanly possible. Psychologists call this the "fight or flight" feeling; referring to the feeling that you either have to fight your way out of a situation or run away as fast as you can(flight). That's how much anxiety was in my brain in just considering the idea.
Whenever a situation would go south, for example if I would find out that they in actuality didn't really like me or that they had chosen to be in a relationship with someone else or I wasn't "their type", what do you think happened? If your guessing major emotional pain, you're right. What I was never able to articulate was that the result was always the same no matter what I did. If I called them incessantly, it ended like that. If I didn't say anything at all, it ended like that. If I was candid and honest about my feelings, it ended like that; if I was secretive and withdrawn and despondent, it ended like that. If I was my usual self it ended like that. It absolutely did not matter how I acted or didn't act, the result was ALWAYS the same.
Now a curious thing can happen when you feel overly rejected for a long period of time. You can definitely feel flawed, unwanted and scared; but another emotion that doesn't show up in everyone but definitely has the potential to.
Anger. Bitterness. Resentment.
I became SO incredibly angry at men. They became a part of the "society" that had always rejected me for simply being myself; and I was very angry at them. My anger was fueled by hearing the typical banter of women who came before me like "all men are dogs" and "a man is gonna be a man" and "men are another species." These little sayings had the tendency to sound like men didn't have any feelings at all, or like the only thing they were concerned about was their own sexual desires and whatever they had to do to get it, be it lie, cheat, steal, or force a woman with rape; they were willing to do to get their "needs" met. Truthfully speaking, I have to say that I still wonder weather or not that's true. So I was angry....very angry....another confession; sometimes I still am.
By the time I was 22, I already had a plethora of negative ideas about men and about love. Even in the events that I did meet great men, honorable men; somehow it still seemed to me that I would never be blessed with having one of them love me with a romantic kind of love and me actually love them back. That just seemed impossible. Sometimes it still does. I mean what were the chances that? I, the girl who got talked about all the time in school, the girl who got picked on a regular basis, and the girl who the boys made fun of and laughed at would EVER be acceptable to people who seemed so extremely driven by acceptance from a society that would never accept me? When was that ever going to happen? On what planet? Are you kidding?Not likely, is what I thought.
The thing about this is that even though there is still a desire there to have the companionship and love of a man that I actually love back, it is still a very hard pill for me to swallow. Since it is so hard to grasp, even now; the very idea or concept just seems so incredibly far fetched to me. Now I have a major dilemma: God has made it clear to me that love and marriage is definitely a part of his plan for my life. As you may have already ascertained, even though God has said this, it still doesn't make sense to me. I mean I know that He has in fact said this by the spirit of God, but in my logical mind, it makes no sense and is incredibly far fetched....which would make all attempts to get to know anyone of the male gender who I'm attracted to or who has expressed (verbally or otherwise) attraction to me a waste of time and energy. It just doesn't seem like there is a point to that.
Even though I STILL can't make sense of it, God continues to echo the same thing. On top of the fact that God is relentless about that, he's also relentless that the man I am to marry will be a phenomenal man of God with a powerful anointing and call on his life. Great God, make it harder why don't you?!! Just how many of those type of men are around that are actually single(and would actually interested in me)? 5? 10? 15? I mean on one hand, I've always felt that there was no point in marriage other than to be married to the man that I was created for so that we can do the work that God created us and brought us together to do. On the other hand, my experience says very clearly that there is no way, no how.
So what do I do?What should we as women do with the promises of God? Especially those of us who have been so assaulted by life, and have dealt with the pain of rejection time and time again? What about those of us who have every logical reason why there is no way that love could ever be a part of our lives either because of the pain we feel from being abused, neglected, or dejected? Should we go with what we feel or what God has said?
The bible says this: "For all the promises of God in him are yea, and in him Amen, unto the glory of God by us." (2 Corinthians 1:20) It also says this about God: "...he is faithful that promised." (Hebrews 10:23) The word of God is filled with instances where God made a promise and delivered on His promise; even when it seemed impossible. God told Abraham that he would be the father of many nations way after he or his wife Sarah were able to bare children. (Genesis) Although Sarah and Abraham wavered in their faith in God and decided to take matters into their own hands, God was still faithful to deliver what he had promised, never mind the fact that it defied logic, reason and biology.
In the same book of the bible, there is the account of Noah. God told Noah that there would be a great rain more than a century before it happened. Although people jeered, and made fun of Noah, what God had told him more than one hundred years before had actually taken place. In the book of Luke, it says "Blessed is she who has believed that what the Lord has said to her will be accomplished!" (1:45)It's important for us that may be discouraged to note that God ALWAYS delivers what he promises. But we are partners with God in that we activate and access his promises through our faith and trusting in him. "without faith it is impossible to please God..." (Hebrews 11:6) God is definitely well able to do anything and everything. (Ephesians 3:20)
What we have to do is to pursue our healing, believe God again and stand in agreement with what HE says, no matter what the circumstances, no matter how it may look or how it may feel. So even though, I'm still a work in progress; and even though there are a number of things that still need to come out of me before I am ready to be any man's wife, and even though truthfully the thought still scares me a little, and even though I still have so many questions; in the end of it all, I have an obligation to myself, my God and my future husband to believe God and trust God. That's definitely a process, and it doesn't happen over night. However, I know that if He says it, then that settles it in the earth.
God has been working on me for quite some time and telling me to stop repeating what I feel and what it looks like and to only repeat what he has said and is saying (either by his RHEMA divine word directly to me or by his written word.) I'll tell you what; it's definitely not easy....and I'm definitely biting my lip allot lately.......but I know that in the end it'll be worth it. Soon, it'll be harder to be negative as it is now to be positive. I hope you make that same decision until we meet again. May God show you again what he said, and may He give you the grace to hold on to it, process it, and believe it...as I am endeavoring to do.
Be blessed.
Sarah E. Rios
Founder and Creator
www.lovehealsallwounds1.blogspot.com
www.myspace.com/lovehealsallwounds1
www.lovehealsallwounds.hi5.com
lovehealsallwounds1@gmail.com
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Awareness of my mistakes
I thought that if I could just avoid making mistakes......
then maybe......
it occurs to me that mistakes cause pain, and that pain is caused by human mistake;
so if I could just avoid making any mistakes....
then I could avoid ever feeling pain....
or maybe I could at least minimize the pain...
certain pain is inevitable.....
if you go out today driving in your car and you have an accident that isn't your fault, then that pain is inevitable,
if you have someone step on your foot accidentally, that pain is unavoidable,
if you slam your fingers in a car door, that pain may be unavoidable.....
but then there's big pain...caused by BIG mistakes.
like being driven by anger and hurting someone you really care about,
or cheating on the spouse that God created for you or created you for,
or disappointing God,
or disappointing a human being that you love in a big way,
or pushing away those that you love;
or marrying the wrong person,
or being married when you were never supposed to be at all,
or never getting married when you actually are supposed to be,
that pain is allot bigger.
ALLOT BIGGER.
So I thought if I could just avoid making mistakes....
then I could surely avoid pain.
There's only one problem, I can't avoid mistakes.
I can't change the things I said,
I can't change the things they did,
I can't change the reactions they had....
I know I can't change them...
but somehow I figured if I could just somehow avoid these situations,
then maybe I could evade pain....
there's only one glitch in this theory...
humanity is filled with mistake and therefore filled with pain.....
pain and mistake is part of our humanity...
we all make them.....
we all make mistakes....
but somehow when others make mistakes that hurt us.....
sometimes it seems to hurt us more......
it does for me anyways....
maybe it's just that I'm more aware of the pain....
because I'm the one feeling the pain....
maybe it's because I've never really been able to relate well to the experiences of others.....
maybe it's because it never really occurred to me that men were even capable of feeling pain....
(or at least some of them.....)
and since I wanted to avoid pain, I felt like if I avoided them,
if I avoided love all together,
then I would have evaded pain.
Of course there's pain that will happen......
the pain I spoke about before,
the pain of loosing a loved one,
the pain of aging,
or even the pain of the actions of others like your family, your friends and your children,
but somehow none of that pain....
ever seemed to encompass to me
the pain of being betrayed by a man you've been bonded to...
the pain of being cheated on,
the pain of finding out that the man that you respected has fallen....
somehow that's a different type of pain...
I don't know why.....
it's a hurt to your hope, I guess....
like a hurt to your belief....
or at least for me.....
the pain of having your dreams dashed....
dreams of there actually being good men.....
actual Godly men,
men who love God more than they love themselves...
men who love God more than any sensation,
men who so love God that they can't betray him by mistreating his daughters........
somehow faced with their humanity you wanna ask the question "are there really any good men?I mean really do they exist at all?"
I'll admit that I never expected men to cheat...
I knew that some did, but I thought they had to be somehow depraved....
somehow incapable of love...
because what else is the explanation for treating another human being like that?
or so I thought.
or truthfully, say they're not cheating...
but they lie to get what they want....
same question applies.....
can you really love God and be like that?
But
Can you love God and be a drug addict?
Can you love God and hate people?
Can you love God and judge people?
Those are the question that answer the first one...
So looking at my own humanity.....there are many inconsistencies in me.....
but I guess somehow I had given an understanding for them all....
I would cut myself so much slack....
and other people got no slack at all.....and definitely men got no slack at all....
"He's not a human being!" I would respond...
How could he be.....?
"He aint saved, he's faking!" I would respond....
he has to be....
But....
what if he's not?
and what if he's faced with own humanity too?
then what do you do?
I know it's easy to write him off as not worthy of having love or marriage?
But if all sin is weighed the same, is anybody worth love or marriage?
All these questions only God can answer.
So.....
I guess I have to remember that.....
I make mistakes too.
SER
then maybe......
it occurs to me that mistakes cause pain, and that pain is caused by human mistake;
so if I could just avoid making any mistakes....
then I could avoid ever feeling pain....
or maybe I could at least minimize the pain...
certain pain is inevitable.....
if you go out today driving in your car and you have an accident that isn't your fault, then that pain is inevitable,
if you have someone step on your foot accidentally, that pain is unavoidable,
if you slam your fingers in a car door, that pain may be unavoidable.....
but then there's big pain...caused by BIG mistakes.
like being driven by anger and hurting someone you really care about,
or cheating on the spouse that God created for you or created you for,
or disappointing God,
or disappointing a human being that you love in a big way,
or pushing away those that you love;
or marrying the wrong person,
or being married when you were never supposed to be at all,
or never getting married when you actually are supposed to be,
that pain is allot bigger.
ALLOT BIGGER.
So I thought if I could just avoid making mistakes....
then I could surely avoid pain.
There's only one problem, I can't avoid mistakes.
I can't change the things I said,
I can't change the things they did,
I can't change the reactions they had....
I know I can't change them...
but somehow I figured if I could just somehow avoid these situations,
then maybe I could evade pain....
there's only one glitch in this theory...
humanity is filled with mistake and therefore filled with pain.....
pain and mistake is part of our humanity...
we all make them.....
we all make mistakes....
but somehow when others make mistakes that hurt us.....
sometimes it seems to hurt us more......
it does for me anyways....
maybe it's just that I'm more aware of the pain....
because I'm the one feeling the pain....
maybe it's because I've never really been able to relate well to the experiences of others.....
maybe it's because it never really occurred to me that men were even capable of feeling pain....
(or at least some of them.....)
and since I wanted to avoid pain, I felt like if I avoided them,
if I avoided love all together,
then I would have evaded pain.
Of course there's pain that will happen......
the pain I spoke about before,
the pain of loosing a loved one,
the pain of aging,
or even the pain of the actions of others like your family, your friends and your children,
but somehow none of that pain....
ever seemed to encompass to me
the pain of being betrayed by a man you've been bonded to...
the pain of being cheated on,
the pain of finding out that the man that you respected has fallen....
somehow that's a different type of pain...
I don't know why.....
it's a hurt to your hope, I guess....
like a hurt to your belief....
or at least for me.....
the pain of having your dreams dashed....
dreams of there actually being good men.....
actual Godly men,
men who love God more than they love themselves...
men who love God more than any sensation,
men who so love God that they can't betray him by mistreating his daughters........
somehow faced with their humanity you wanna ask the question "are there really any good men?I mean really do they exist at all?"
I'll admit that I never expected men to cheat...
I knew that some did, but I thought they had to be somehow depraved....
somehow incapable of love...
because what else is the explanation for treating another human being like that?
or so I thought.
or truthfully, say they're not cheating...
but they lie to get what they want....
same question applies.....
can you really love God and be like that?
But
Can you love God and be a drug addict?
Can you love God and hate people?
Can you love God and judge people?
Those are the question that answer the first one...
So looking at my own humanity.....there are many inconsistencies in me.....
but I guess somehow I had given an understanding for them all....
I would cut myself so much slack....
and other people got no slack at all.....and definitely men got no slack at all....
"He's not a human being!" I would respond...
How could he be.....?
"He aint saved, he's faking!" I would respond....
he has to be....
But....
what if he's not?
and what if he's faced with own humanity too?
then what do you do?
I know it's easy to write him off as not worthy of having love or marriage?
But if all sin is weighed the same, is anybody worth love or marriage?
All these questions only God can answer.
So.....
I guess I have to remember that.....
I make mistakes too.
SER
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Forgiveness
Forgiveness. The Merriam Webster's online definition of the word forgive is to give up resentment of or claim to requital for. Another definition says: to grant relief from payment of (like a debt) or to cease to feel resentment against an offender. Still another definition states that forgiveness is the process of allowing room for error or weakness.
In this journey of life, there will always be opportunities to be hurt and to have to forgive. Now can I be honest with you? I've had a problem with this concept for a very long time. So you mean to tell me on top of all the pain I've already experienced, that I'm SURE to experience more pain? On top of that, I have to forgive the people who cause that pain? What?
To be honest with you, I really believed with all my heart that the amount of pain that I experienced in my formidable years would somehow exempt me from feeling any more. I know that may sound silly, but then again those of us who have been through ugly things like abuse; verbal, physical, sexual, emotional in our childhood....we understand. We understand what it means to be angry or to be offended at the idea of being hurt.
In that space, it's very easy to doubt God's love for you. I remember having a conversation about love and marriage with someone. I, of course was telling her how I just didn't feel like it was a possibility for me based on what I have experienced, to which she answered firmly "see you don't believe God." The way that she answered denoted that she didn't understand how in the world I couldn't have believed God.....but my silent response to her at the time was "uh no, you mean you do? How could you?" Of course in the Christian circle, none of us can exactly admit that there are times where we may not necessarily believe EVERYTHING that God says...especially if life has disappointed us time and time again. Needless to say she never heard me say those words.
Years later, I can honestly say that I've grown a great deal since then; and God has truly done a work in me. However, there are still times when trusting God is hard. What does that have to do with forgiveness? I'm glad you asked. Actually, that has everything to do with forgiveness. Forgiveness has everything to do with trusting God and trusting God has everything to do with forgiveness. A couple of weeks ago, I saw someone who I hadn't seen in a very long time. This person is someone who I suspect of spreading rumors about me. This is someone who I made the mistake of trusting with sensitive information concerning my personal life. Now I don't have any hard evidence that this person was spewing my inconsistencies everywhere and putting her own little spin on things. But somehow, I just sense it. I know some may think that is terribly paranoid. Regardless of that, I do feel that she did and said exactly what I suspect her of doing and saying.
When I saw her, particularly with the group of people that I saw her with.....let's just say I was not a happy camper. My head started to hurt, my blood pressure went up, my pulse began to race; I became angry about things that had transpired more than a year ago all over again. Here's the clincher; I really and truly thought I was over all the anger and hurt that I originally felt. The fact that I was that upset at just the sight of someone actually frustrated me.
"I thought I was over this," I thought to myself. Some time ago, before this particular incident, when I was talking to God about how betrayed I felt by her and others, God showed me that the root of my unforgiveness towards them and my stubborn unwillingness to release them from the hurt that I experienced was my blatant lack of trust in Him. He would ask me so gently "do you trust me daughter?" I wouldn't answer. "Sarah, do you trust me?" He would ask again, almost with a heartbreaking tone. Finally, knowing that I couldn't pretend with God; I replied "No God, I'm sorry but sometimes, I don't." "Why not?" He asked.
At that point I went about the business of telling God of all these painful things that had happened in my life. I knew that He knew about them, but I almost felt like he wanted me to tell Him about them. So I did. It was painful. I told him again about the childhood sexual and emotional abuse. I retold him about the pain of being rejected over and over again by family and peers. I told him about being lonely as a child. I told him about having handicapped sisters who I couldn't learn from and talk to like other children could learn from their siblings. I told him about this feeling of being an outcast continuing all through elementary and high school. Of course, I told him about the pain of being rejected by men over and over again. I told him about having every single man that I ever cared for in romantic way NEVER feel that way about me. Actual or perceived, my rejection was real and I told Him about it. "How can you love me and allow these things to happen to me God? I just don't understand." That was my response to him.
Through tears I also said "...and on top of it, the one thing that I've asked you for and begged you for which is that you would totally and completely eradicate my desire for male companionship, you will not do. I mean, you are God, you can; and you know that it's the main source of my pain, yet you wont....I just don't understand God."
I said all of this to God. God in His sovereignty, wisdom and faithful care of me simply told me that with every pain, with every rejection, with the sexual and emotional abuse, that He was never in heaven watching lackadaisically while his daughter was being hurt. In fact He said these words: "My heart was breaking." Of course I wanted to know if God's heart was breaking, why didn't he do something to stop it? "I did" He said. "Huh?" I thought. It's a hard concept but, with the existence of free will, God doesn't force humanity to do anything that they don't want to do. We always have a choice, including the people who hurt us, abused us and offended us. However, God will repay, God will restore, God will avenge and God will renew. As a matter of fact, He did and He continues to.
To me, it would be easier if He just would have made someone bite their tongue when they were getting ready to pick on me, or let the man who sexually abused me at my uncle's house that day have a car accident or something on the way there. Since God didn't do that....I did question his love for me, and I didn't trust Him at all. The fact that I was in a place where I felt so strongly and cared so deeply for yet another man after I swore to myself and told God that I would never allow myself to go back there again definitely added to my gross mistrust of God.
Why wouldn't 'he just take it away? Why wouldn't he just let me protect myself? How could God love me? These are all the questions that I asked. The bible says that out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. (Mathew 12:34) Those are the questions that were in my heart. The fact that I had those questions were proof that I did not trust God at all with certain area of my life. I didn't trust him with my desire for male friendship and companionship, and I didn't trust him to avenge me if someone hurt me or did me wrong. So in my eyes, the people who had hurt me, whether they were the kids who picked on me in the past or the people who betrayed my trust in the present were simply getting away with what they did. I was angry about that.
At the same time, I was saddened by that, but I liked the emotion of anger better. I felt less powerless and less like a victim when I went on the offensive. Even recently, I had began my plan of attack in my own head and how I would punish those who hurt me. I would be determined that I wasn't EVER going to let them off the hook...EVER. I didn't even realize how much of my life they were controlling.
Finally, God said to me that He would avenge me, and that He would show me how much He actually loved me since that was a concept that was hard for me to digest. That was about two weeks ago. Knowing what God is about to do with me in ministry,in love and in life, and knowing where He's leading me (which happens to be right back into the company of some of the very people who hurt me), of course I would begin planning my attack. It was a quiet attack I was planning, nevertheless it was an attack. I was thinking of what I would respond if asked certain questions, and how I would mercilessly hurt feelings if certain people said anything to me, particularly about one area in my life.
Guess what, God reminded me....like the great Dad that He is..."Sarah, what are you doing?" "Why are you planning your attack on these people?" To which I would answer, I just know that I have to be prepared to protect myself because I know they're going to have all kinds of opinions. You know what God said? "Who cares about their opinions? It doesn't matter what they think. My opinion of you is the only one that counts." Now if you're familiar with the voice of God, you know that God is just that matter of fact and straightforward, even when holding you in His arms. All I could say at that point was "Lord, I'm so sorry. Please forgive me. Please help me."
Truly forgiving takes faith....and since developing faith in God is a process, forgiveness is also a process. Joyce Meyer has a teaching series called "Do yourself a favor and forgive." What a powerful and true statement. Someone else said that harboring unforgiveness against those who hurt you is like drinking poison and waiting for them to die. Newsflash to all of us: people hurt people. So if you live here, on this earth, you WILL be hurt by people; even by those people that you would never think would hurt you will. Definitely. Believers will hurt you, nonbelievers will hurt you, people you serve in ministry with will hurt you, people you don't serve in ministry with will hurt you, if you're called to be married; your spouse will hurt you, your friends will hurt you, your family will hurt you, people who you think should be further along in their spiritual development will hurt you, if you have children, they will hurt you. Th bottom line is you will be hurt by people.
I used to think that maybe if I just isolated myself and not let anyone in that I wouldn't get hurt. I found that I was incorrect. No matter what, people will hurt you. The challenge to us is to forgive them when they do. Sometimes that's hard, either because we haven't forgiven those people that hurt us before, or we haven't forgiven God for what our finite minds may think was God's attack on our lives, or because the offenses were so severe that they have wrapped their icy fingers around our very soul. Whatever the reason for unforgiveness, we have to abandon it and forgive. It's not really for the sake of others, it's for our sake.
I know it's hard. It's a process that I'm still in the middle of myself. But when I think about all that God has wanted to do in my life that I have been blocking with unforgiveness, and when I think of all that I could have done for God that I was unable to do because of unforgiveness, it occurs to me that my offenders are not worth that type of energy. In actuality, they're not even the real offenders. Your offenders aren't the real culprits either, it's really a cover. The real culprit in all of this: the devil. The bible says this: Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. (I Peter 5:8) His goal is to distract us away from the real enemy which is not in fact other people, but the devil himself.
Once, I heard Bishop Jakes say that the devil will use anything against you, he doesn't care what it is. He will use rejection, abandonment, your first marriage, your first boy/girlfriend, you teacher, your friends, your favorite TV show, etc. Another thing important to note about the devil is that he has no honor. We all have people we don't too much care for, and moreover we have people who we flat out do not like. But even in that, there's a line that we will not cross, no matter how angry we become and no matter what we might say. We have a God given limit. The devil on the other hand, does not. He doesn't have any honor and his goal is to kill. In fact the Bible says the devil comes to kill, to steal and to destroy. (John 10:10)
We can't let whatever hurt or offense that we've experienced, no matter how grievous poison our lives with bitterness, low self esteem, jealousy and resentment. We can't allow unforgiveness to crawl into our hearts and take up enough residency to make us physically sick. Every time I have gotten angry over something from my past, I would get a headache or a chest pain. Just this morning, God said to me "Sarah, do you feel that?", speaking of the pain that I felt in my chest as a result of allowing myself to become angry about the betrayal I felt. He was reminding me of why I have to let it go.
The fact is we do have to let things go, and know that God will avenge us. As a matter of fact God promises that vengeance is his and He WILL repay. (Deuteronomy 32:35) In that same passage He goes on to say: In due time their foot will slip; their day of disaster is near and their doom rushes upon them. He was speaking about our enemies. God wants to avenge us and justify us, and trust and believe that He will. But if we don't forgive those people who hurt us, we never allow God to step in and repay them for what they did or to repay us for our pain because we keep trying to do it ourselves. Forgiveness is a necessity to have the life that Jesus died to give us.
It's important for us to know that forgiveness is a process. We won't always feel like forgiving them. Sometimes we'll think we're over something and then be reminded of it and have to say out loud that we forgive them again and again. But as tedious as it is, we need to be committed to the process in order to apprehend all that God wants for us and in order receive all the blessings He wants to give us. We need to know that God is our strong tower and our defense. (Psalm 61:3, Proverbs 18:10) It is not necessary for us to be defensive. We can trust God to defend us.
All these are concepts that we have to transfer from head knowledge to heart knowledge, me being at the top of the list. It is a process, but it can be done. God can do anything. He's able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think. (Ephesians 3:20) All we have to do is start the process of trusting Him and letting Him heal and prove Himself to us. I pray God would give us the grace to receive His love and to allow Him to heal us by releasing the people who have wronged us.
Sarah E. Rios
Love Heals All Wounds
Founder and Creator
www.lovehealsalwounds.blogspot.com
www.myspace.com/lovehealsallwounds1
www.lovehealsallwounds.hi5.com
lovehealsallwounds1@gmail.com
In this journey of life, there will always be opportunities to be hurt and to have to forgive. Now can I be honest with you? I've had a problem with this concept for a very long time. So you mean to tell me on top of all the pain I've already experienced, that I'm SURE to experience more pain? On top of that, I have to forgive the people who cause that pain? What?
To be honest with you, I really believed with all my heart that the amount of pain that I experienced in my formidable years would somehow exempt me from feeling any more. I know that may sound silly, but then again those of us who have been through ugly things like abuse; verbal, physical, sexual, emotional in our childhood....we understand. We understand what it means to be angry or to be offended at the idea of being hurt.
In that space, it's very easy to doubt God's love for you. I remember having a conversation about love and marriage with someone. I, of course was telling her how I just didn't feel like it was a possibility for me based on what I have experienced, to which she answered firmly "see you don't believe God." The way that she answered denoted that she didn't understand how in the world I couldn't have believed God.....but my silent response to her at the time was "uh no, you mean you do? How could you?" Of course in the Christian circle, none of us can exactly admit that there are times where we may not necessarily believe EVERYTHING that God says...especially if life has disappointed us time and time again. Needless to say she never heard me say those words.
Years later, I can honestly say that I've grown a great deal since then; and God has truly done a work in me. However, there are still times when trusting God is hard. What does that have to do with forgiveness? I'm glad you asked. Actually, that has everything to do with forgiveness. Forgiveness has everything to do with trusting God and trusting God has everything to do with forgiveness. A couple of weeks ago, I saw someone who I hadn't seen in a very long time. This person is someone who I suspect of spreading rumors about me. This is someone who I made the mistake of trusting with sensitive information concerning my personal life. Now I don't have any hard evidence that this person was spewing my inconsistencies everywhere and putting her own little spin on things. But somehow, I just sense it. I know some may think that is terribly paranoid. Regardless of that, I do feel that she did and said exactly what I suspect her of doing and saying.
When I saw her, particularly with the group of people that I saw her with.....let's just say I was not a happy camper. My head started to hurt, my blood pressure went up, my pulse began to race; I became angry about things that had transpired more than a year ago all over again. Here's the clincher; I really and truly thought I was over all the anger and hurt that I originally felt. The fact that I was that upset at just the sight of someone actually frustrated me.
"I thought I was over this," I thought to myself. Some time ago, before this particular incident, when I was talking to God about how betrayed I felt by her and others, God showed me that the root of my unforgiveness towards them and my stubborn unwillingness to release them from the hurt that I experienced was my blatant lack of trust in Him. He would ask me so gently "do you trust me daughter?" I wouldn't answer. "Sarah, do you trust me?" He would ask again, almost with a heartbreaking tone. Finally, knowing that I couldn't pretend with God; I replied "No God, I'm sorry but sometimes, I don't." "Why not?" He asked.
At that point I went about the business of telling God of all these painful things that had happened in my life. I knew that He knew about them, but I almost felt like he wanted me to tell Him about them. So I did. It was painful. I told him again about the childhood sexual and emotional abuse. I retold him about the pain of being rejected over and over again by family and peers. I told him about being lonely as a child. I told him about having handicapped sisters who I couldn't learn from and talk to like other children could learn from their siblings. I told him about this feeling of being an outcast continuing all through elementary and high school. Of course, I told him about the pain of being rejected by men over and over again. I told him about having every single man that I ever cared for in romantic way NEVER feel that way about me. Actual or perceived, my rejection was real and I told Him about it. "How can you love me and allow these things to happen to me God? I just don't understand." That was my response to him.
Through tears I also said "...and on top of it, the one thing that I've asked you for and begged you for which is that you would totally and completely eradicate my desire for male companionship, you will not do. I mean, you are God, you can; and you know that it's the main source of my pain, yet you wont....I just don't understand God."
I said all of this to God. God in His sovereignty, wisdom and faithful care of me simply told me that with every pain, with every rejection, with the sexual and emotional abuse, that He was never in heaven watching lackadaisically while his daughter was being hurt. In fact He said these words: "My heart was breaking." Of course I wanted to know if God's heart was breaking, why didn't he do something to stop it? "I did" He said. "Huh?" I thought. It's a hard concept but, with the existence of free will, God doesn't force humanity to do anything that they don't want to do. We always have a choice, including the people who hurt us, abused us and offended us. However, God will repay, God will restore, God will avenge and God will renew. As a matter of fact, He did and He continues to.
To me, it would be easier if He just would have made someone bite their tongue when they were getting ready to pick on me, or let the man who sexually abused me at my uncle's house that day have a car accident or something on the way there. Since God didn't do that....I did question his love for me, and I didn't trust Him at all. The fact that I was in a place where I felt so strongly and cared so deeply for yet another man after I swore to myself and told God that I would never allow myself to go back there again definitely added to my gross mistrust of God.
Why wouldn't 'he just take it away? Why wouldn't he just let me protect myself? How could God love me? These are all the questions that I asked. The bible says that out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. (Mathew 12:34) Those are the questions that were in my heart. The fact that I had those questions were proof that I did not trust God at all with certain area of my life. I didn't trust him with my desire for male friendship and companionship, and I didn't trust him to avenge me if someone hurt me or did me wrong. So in my eyes, the people who had hurt me, whether they were the kids who picked on me in the past or the people who betrayed my trust in the present were simply getting away with what they did. I was angry about that.
At the same time, I was saddened by that, but I liked the emotion of anger better. I felt less powerless and less like a victim when I went on the offensive. Even recently, I had began my plan of attack in my own head and how I would punish those who hurt me. I would be determined that I wasn't EVER going to let them off the hook...EVER. I didn't even realize how much of my life they were controlling.
Finally, God said to me that He would avenge me, and that He would show me how much He actually loved me since that was a concept that was hard for me to digest. That was about two weeks ago. Knowing what God is about to do with me in ministry,in love and in life, and knowing where He's leading me (which happens to be right back into the company of some of the very people who hurt me), of course I would begin planning my attack. It was a quiet attack I was planning, nevertheless it was an attack. I was thinking of what I would respond if asked certain questions, and how I would mercilessly hurt feelings if certain people said anything to me, particularly about one area in my life.
Guess what, God reminded me....like the great Dad that He is..."Sarah, what are you doing?" "Why are you planning your attack on these people?" To which I would answer, I just know that I have to be prepared to protect myself because I know they're going to have all kinds of opinions. You know what God said? "Who cares about their opinions? It doesn't matter what they think. My opinion of you is the only one that counts." Now if you're familiar with the voice of God, you know that God is just that matter of fact and straightforward, even when holding you in His arms. All I could say at that point was "Lord, I'm so sorry. Please forgive me. Please help me."
Truly forgiving takes faith....and since developing faith in God is a process, forgiveness is also a process. Joyce Meyer has a teaching series called "Do yourself a favor and forgive." What a powerful and true statement. Someone else said that harboring unforgiveness against those who hurt you is like drinking poison and waiting for them to die. Newsflash to all of us: people hurt people. So if you live here, on this earth, you WILL be hurt by people; even by those people that you would never think would hurt you will. Definitely. Believers will hurt you, nonbelievers will hurt you, people you serve in ministry with will hurt you, people you don't serve in ministry with will hurt you, if you're called to be married; your spouse will hurt you, your friends will hurt you, your family will hurt you, people who you think should be further along in their spiritual development will hurt you, if you have children, they will hurt you. Th bottom line is you will be hurt by people.
I used to think that maybe if I just isolated myself and not let anyone in that I wouldn't get hurt. I found that I was incorrect. No matter what, people will hurt you. The challenge to us is to forgive them when they do. Sometimes that's hard, either because we haven't forgiven those people that hurt us before, or we haven't forgiven God for what our finite minds may think was God's attack on our lives, or because the offenses were so severe that they have wrapped their icy fingers around our very soul. Whatever the reason for unforgiveness, we have to abandon it and forgive. It's not really for the sake of others, it's for our sake.
I know it's hard. It's a process that I'm still in the middle of myself. But when I think about all that God has wanted to do in my life that I have been blocking with unforgiveness, and when I think of all that I could have done for God that I was unable to do because of unforgiveness, it occurs to me that my offenders are not worth that type of energy. In actuality, they're not even the real offenders. Your offenders aren't the real culprits either, it's really a cover. The real culprit in all of this: the devil. The bible says this: Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. (I Peter 5:8) His goal is to distract us away from the real enemy which is not in fact other people, but the devil himself.
Once, I heard Bishop Jakes say that the devil will use anything against you, he doesn't care what it is. He will use rejection, abandonment, your first marriage, your first boy/girlfriend, you teacher, your friends, your favorite TV show, etc. Another thing important to note about the devil is that he has no honor. We all have people we don't too much care for, and moreover we have people who we flat out do not like. But even in that, there's a line that we will not cross, no matter how angry we become and no matter what we might say. We have a God given limit. The devil on the other hand, does not. He doesn't have any honor and his goal is to kill. In fact the Bible says the devil comes to kill, to steal and to destroy. (John 10:10)
We can't let whatever hurt or offense that we've experienced, no matter how grievous poison our lives with bitterness, low self esteem, jealousy and resentment. We can't allow unforgiveness to crawl into our hearts and take up enough residency to make us physically sick. Every time I have gotten angry over something from my past, I would get a headache or a chest pain. Just this morning, God said to me "Sarah, do you feel that?", speaking of the pain that I felt in my chest as a result of allowing myself to become angry about the betrayal I felt. He was reminding me of why I have to let it go.
The fact is we do have to let things go, and know that God will avenge us. As a matter of fact God promises that vengeance is his and He WILL repay. (Deuteronomy 32:35) In that same passage He goes on to say: In due time their foot will slip; their day of disaster is near and their doom rushes upon them. He was speaking about our enemies. God wants to avenge us and justify us, and trust and believe that He will. But if we don't forgive those people who hurt us, we never allow God to step in and repay them for what they did or to repay us for our pain because we keep trying to do it ourselves. Forgiveness is a necessity to have the life that Jesus died to give us.
It's important for us to know that forgiveness is a process. We won't always feel like forgiving them. Sometimes we'll think we're over something and then be reminded of it and have to say out loud that we forgive them again and again. But as tedious as it is, we need to be committed to the process in order to apprehend all that God wants for us and in order receive all the blessings He wants to give us. We need to know that God is our strong tower and our defense. (Psalm 61:3, Proverbs 18:10) It is not necessary for us to be defensive. We can trust God to defend us.
All these are concepts that we have to transfer from head knowledge to heart knowledge, me being at the top of the list. It is a process, but it can be done. God can do anything. He's able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think. (Ephesians 3:20) All we have to do is start the process of trusting Him and letting Him heal and prove Himself to us. I pray God would give us the grace to receive His love and to allow Him to heal us by releasing the people who have wronged us.
Sarah E. Rios
Love Heals All Wounds
Founder and Creator
www.lovehealsalwounds.blogspot.com
www.myspace.com/lovehealsallwounds1
www.lovehealsallwounds.hi5.com
lovehealsallwounds1@gmail.com
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Be Careful....don't go backwards, it's easier than you think
Something happened on Sunday. During worship service,I found myself completely overcome with hurt over something that happened years ago. I really THOUGHT I had forgiven all the people involved. Funny thing about hurt; sometimes you think you're healed and then you realize that there's still some more healing that needs to take place. I sat there, thinking. God has made it clear to me that he has every intention of restoring me to my rightful place in ministry, but guess what? As I sat there thinking about the prospect of ministering to people and with people who hugged me with knives in their hands (so to speak), I just became so very angry at them.
I know that this is the year of divine multiplication and I'm a Christian and we're not supposed to speak negatively, but I feel sometimes it's extremely necessary to just be real. I think that may be the component that's missing from allot of ministry today, the realness. No one can relate to you if you're not real about your struggles and your issues. You just look like some super human who never has any problems or never struggles with anything, a goal that no human being can even hope to ever attain. In that space, (at least from my perspective) you actually end up condemning people without meaning to because they figure that being a Christian must mean they have to have it all together and since nobody does, people either walk away from God altogether, or they conclude that this must be the extent of their existence. It never occurs to them that God can use them right in their imperfection, because they see a perfect image (or what they think is a perfect image) before them that they know they can never measure up to.
Anyways, so I sat there in worship service, thinking and mulling over stuff. To be honest with you, I started off being kind of annoyed that I had to sit in the overflow at my church. The best way to explain that: worship service just isn't the same in the overflow. There's just something about being in the main sanctuary (at least at my church) that once you experience it, you never want to worship in the overflow again; it just feels far away somehow. So I was kind of annoyed about that, but what could I do, I was running late and the other people got there early, so I had to deal with it.
But then, as I was sitting there, just the prospect of serving in ministry with the very people that hurt me (some of them I don't really know for sure all the details of how I just have a sense of it), something about serving in ministry with and ministering to the very people who gossiped about me, who lied to me and about me, who made me out to be someone who I am not while acting like they were my friends and they genuinely cared about me just made me so angry; but it wasn't an aggressive anger. It was an anger that was mixed with allot of sadness and disappointment.
Of course I heard the Lord say to me right then "you have to forgive them," and "what they think doesn't really matter." But all I could respond is "I'm SO angry at them." I mean here I was trusting people, the people of God no less with not just information, but with an extremely difficult struggle that I've had since I was a child; and here they were, again the people of God not only not understanding, not caring to understand, and beyond that; using that very struggle against me; for many of them simply for their own selfish gain. I didn't even want to be nice to them. I felt like I did towards the end of high school and most of college like my smile and me being myself was on reserve and definitely did not get rationed out to anyone who I didn't trust, at all. Meanwhile, here's God telling me to trust him, forgive them and not be afraid to be myself. Be myself...with them? Smile at them? This may not make sense to you, but for me, when I get in that space, smiling simply feels like I'm letting people into my world; even if it's just a little bit. So I became very afraid that if I would "go back to normal" with them and proceed to "be myself" that somehow that would be like saying that what they did was OK, or like inviting them to disappoint me and hurt me all over AGAIN.
The anger continued in spurts; even last night. I found myself thinking about everything that had transpired over the years, and I just got mad and hurt all over again, and again and again. All I could do was think about how even though I struggled to FINALLY let them in a little bit and at the very least be cordial sometimes, how that turned into me being branded as someone who I'm not because that's how they painted me.
There's a possibility that maybe the reason why it has a tendency to create that much anger is because I know of the countless women who may not be able to articulate their pain, or who may manifest their fear of love differently then I did who may go home and put guns in their mouths or blades to their wrist since no one is even trying to understand where they're coming from and every time someone tells her "stop chasing him"or something like that, it's like cutting her with a knife. Maybe that's why I get so angry. Or it maybe that it's just my flesh that feels rejected again by people after I swore to myself that no one would EVER get another chance to reject me.
It could be the sheer frustration of having that fear steal me from myself in the sense that as long as I wasn't in that environment, I was bubbly, I was goofy, I told jokes, I was totally and naturally myself; but then when I was in that environment, I was on reserve. I never laughed, I never smiled, I was afraid to; afraid of getting hurt...not just by a man, but by people in general( which ended up coming true.)
I think it's probably all of those things wrapped into one. Here's what I learned last night. After several hours of not even being able to fall asleep, I was able to articulate to God that I felt like they got away with it; like they get to paint me as this crazy girl while they plot and gossip and spread traffic and rumors and they get off Scot free, while I suffer for it. I thought to myself "where is the justice in that?"
Then this morning, God said to me that He is sovereign, and that He is just and that it's really not up to me to exact revenge on anyone. He further went on to tell me that this was just another way the devil was trying to get me to forfeit on my destiny, my purpose and my ministry. He repeated to me that I have to forgive them. You know what's annoying, I thought I did. I really did. I guess I forgave them as long as I didn't ever have to share space with them...which isn't really true forgiveness.
I learned a valuable lesson. The devil is RELENTLESS in his pursuit to destroy us. He'll use anything against you. He can't make you do anything so what he does is attacks your mind and your emotions. Because of that, falling back into something that God has delivered you out of can be allot easier than we think. I revisited another lesson that God taught me some time ago, forgiveness is a process. Just because you say you forgive someone one time, doesn't mean that you actually have. You can't wait to feel like forgiving them. You have to forgive them as soon as possible. You may even have to say it over and over again until it's true. I'm still in that process. Sometimes it hurts to say the words "I forgive them" when I think of how they hurt me. But I know that I have to say it.
As you're reading this, you may struggle with forgiveness. Or maybe you have a different struggle. I don't know which category you fall into. I have some advice to all of us: it's important to relentlessly seek after God and relentlessly seek after healing and peace. We do have an adversary who roams around like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. (I Peter 5:8) The other thing that's important for us to remember: our battle is not against flesh and blood. People are not the enemy. That's a hard pill to swallow especially when you consider things, but it's true. The Bible says this: "For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places." (Ephesians 6:12) In that same letter, Paul goes on to say that we should take up the whole armour of God. We need Godly armour in order to defend ourselves against the negative thought planted by the enemy. I pray that as God continues to work on me, and teach me how to truly forgive and let go, that he would also give you the grace to do the same and to know that you can overcome whatever challenge you're currently facing.
Be blessed.
Sarah E. Rios
Founder and Creator
lovehealsallwounds1@gmail.com
www.lovehealsallwounds.blogspot.com
www.myspace.com/lovehealsallwounds1
www.lovehealsallwounds.hi5.com
I know that this is the year of divine multiplication and I'm a Christian and we're not supposed to speak negatively, but I feel sometimes it's extremely necessary to just be real. I think that may be the component that's missing from allot of ministry today, the realness. No one can relate to you if you're not real about your struggles and your issues. You just look like some super human who never has any problems or never struggles with anything, a goal that no human being can even hope to ever attain. In that space, (at least from my perspective) you actually end up condemning people without meaning to because they figure that being a Christian must mean they have to have it all together and since nobody does, people either walk away from God altogether, or they conclude that this must be the extent of their existence. It never occurs to them that God can use them right in their imperfection, because they see a perfect image (or what they think is a perfect image) before them that they know they can never measure up to.
Anyways, so I sat there in worship service, thinking and mulling over stuff. To be honest with you, I started off being kind of annoyed that I had to sit in the overflow at my church. The best way to explain that: worship service just isn't the same in the overflow. There's just something about being in the main sanctuary (at least at my church) that once you experience it, you never want to worship in the overflow again; it just feels far away somehow. So I was kind of annoyed about that, but what could I do, I was running late and the other people got there early, so I had to deal with it.
But then, as I was sitting there, just the prospect of serving in ministry with the very people that hurt me (some of them I don't really know for sure all the details of how I just have a sense of it), something about serving in ministry with and ministering to the very people who gossiped about me, who lied to me and about me, who made me out to be someone who I am not while acting like they were my friends and they genuinely cared about me just made me so angry; but it wasn't an aggressive anger. It was an anger that was mixed with allot of sadness and disappointment.
Of course I heard the Lord say to me right then "you have to forgive them," and "what they think doesn't really matter." But all I could respond is "I'm SO angry at them." I mean here I was trusting people, the people of God no less with not just information, but with an extremely difficult struggle that I've had since I was a child; and here they were, again the people of God not only not understanding, not caring to understand, and beyond that; using that very struggle against me; for many of them simply for their own selfish gain. I didn't even want to be nice to them. I felt like I did towards the end of high school and most of college like my smile and me being myself was on reserve and definitely did not get rationed out to anyone who I didn't trust, at all. Meanwhile, here's God telling me to trust him, forgive them and not be afraid to be myself. Be myself...with them? Smile at them? This may not make sense to you, but for me, when I get in that space, smiling simply feels like I'm letting people into my world; even if it's just a little bit. So I became very afraid that if I would "go back to normal" with them and proceed to "be myself" that somehow that would be like saying that what they did was OK, or like inviting them to disappoint me and hurt me all over AGAIN.
The anger continued in spurts; even last night. I found myself thinking about everything that had transpired over the years, and I just got mad and hurt all over again, and again and again. All I could do was think about how even though I struggled to FINALLY let them in a little bit and at the very least be cordial sometimes, how that turned into me being branded as someone who I'm not because that's how they painted me.
There's a possibility that maybe the reason why it has a tendency to create that much anger is because I know of the countless women who may not be able to articulate their pain, or who may manifest their fear of love differently then I did who may go home and put guns in their mouths or blades to their wrist since no one is even trying to understand where they're coming from and every time someone tells her "stop chasing him"or something like that, it's like cutting her with a knife. Maybe that's why I get so angry. Or it maybe that it's just my flesh that feels rejected again by people after I swore to myself that no one would EVER get another chance to reject me.
It could be the sheer frustration of having that fear steal me from myself in the sense that as long as I wasn't in that environment, I was bubbly, I was goofy, I told jokes, I was totally and naturally myself; but then when I was in that environment, I was on reserve. I never laughed, I never smiled, I was afraid to; afraid of getting hurt...not just by a man, but by people in general( which ended up coming true.)
I think it's probably all of those things wrapped into one. Here's what I learned last night. After several hours of not even being able to fall asleep, I was able to articulate to God that I felt like they got away with it; like they get to paint me as this crazy girl while they plot and gossip and spread traffic and rumors and they get off Scot free, while I suffer for it. I thought to myself "where is the justice in that?"
Then this morning, God said to me that He is sovereign, and that He is just and that it's really not up to me to exact revenge on anyone. He further went on to tell me that this was just another way the devil was trying to get me to forfeit on my destiny, my purpose and my ministry. He repeated to me that I have to forgive them. You know what's annoying, I thought I did. I really did. I guess I forgave them as long as I didn't ever have to share space with them...which isn't really true forgiveness.
I learned a valuable lesson. The devil is RELENTLESS in his pursuit to destroy us. He'll use anything against you. He can't make you do anything so what he does is attacks your mind and your emotions. Because of that, falling back into something that God has delivered you out of can be allot easier than we think. I revisited another lesson that God taught me some time ago, forgiveness is a process. Just because you say you forgive someone one time, doesn't mean that you actually have. You can't wait to feel like forgiving them. You have to forgive them as soon as possible. You may even have to say it over and over again until it's true. I'm still in that process. Sometimes it hurts to say the words "I forgive them" when I think of how they hurt me. But I know that I have to say it.
As you're reading this, you may struggle with forgiveness. Or maybe you have a different struggle. I don't know which category you fall into. I have some advice to all of us: it's important to relentlessly seek after God and relentlessly seek after healing and peace. We do have an adversary who roams around like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. (I Peter 5:8) The other thing that's important for us to remember: our battle is not against flesh and blood. People are not the enemy. That's a hard pill to swallow especially when you consider things, but it's true. The Bible says this: "For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places." (Ephesians 6:12) In that same letter, Paul goes on to say that we should take up the whole armour of God. We need Godly armour in order to defend ourselves against the negative thought planted by the enemy. I pray that as God continues to work on me, and teach me how to truly forgive and let go, that he would also give you the grace to do the same and to know that you can overcome whatever challenge you're currently facing.
Be blessed.
Sarah E. Rios
Founder and Creator
lovehealsallwounds1@gmail.com
www.lovehealsallwounds.blogspot.com
www.myspace.com/lovehealsallwounds1
www.lovehealsallwounds.hi5.com
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