In some of my other blogs I wrote about some lost relationships and challenges with deep depression and anxiety that haunted me for more years than I even realized until I got help. I had a great break through and I wanted to share it with all of you. I think the greatest thing that has worked against me in all of this has been the critical voice I heard constantly in the back of my head my entire life, and its my own.
I can make a lot of things about me, that are not. I can make it my job to fix everything, when its not. In fact... that's my pride. It being all about me. Isn't it? All my time spent on how others perceive me. How beautiful I am, how helpful I am... I... I ... I am the only one involved in all of this.
Learning this has been very difficult. Having children makes you realize how little life was meant to be about us as individuals and so much more about everyone. Loving and giving out. Its really simple but we make it so complicated... or at least I do.
When I was in my deep depression.. you know when I was taking enough sleeping pills to merit putting an elephant to sleep and heavily on anti-depressants, I remember feeling one thing.... SCREAMING FAILURE. "YOU ARE A FAILURE". That is all I heard and I thought I would never get better. I selfishly thought of ending things quite often just to make life stop and I was so empty and alone, or that is how I felt. Why am I telling you this...?
The other day I went back to the room at my parents house where I stayed when I was "sick". Obviously God has healed me. I have claimed that over my life, but I many times that day walked by that room feeling ashamed. I even voiced to my mother in law that was the room I stayed in while I was "crazy". She reminded me I wasn't crazy (although I felt it at the time). Well as I was folding a blanket and putting it on the bed in that same room the other day, the Lord spoke to me clear as day. "I so loved you in this place."
Excuse me Lord? "I so loved you in this place". I continued folding the blanket, but now tears were streaming down my face. How could He love me here? Here, where I hated life, I was the most selfish the most lost... the most confused. He loved this place with me?
After that day I decided it was time to view that room not as the "crazy" room, but as the healing room. Its where God healed me of my need to be perfect. He healed me of trying to fix the world because in that room I couldn't and I can't. The world is what it is, life will always have a challenge and I am not God. In fact, I will likely screw up over and over.. but the fact that He will always love me at my darkest and through that I am healed is so much more powerful than anything I experienced negatively at that time. Its all been so so painful. But, oh so worth hearing and knowing how MUCH I am loved by Jesus, not for what I do, but because of who He is.
