Okay, let me start with this…I’m a human. God made us to have feelings. They are important, but gee whiz, they can be crazy out of control. When you are going through something devastating, you feel so many different things. Guilt, shame, hurt, betrayal, embarrassment, sadness, doubt….this list could go on AWHILE…If you don’t learn to deal with your feelings, I promise you that they will OVERTAKE YOU and make you do and think CRAZY stuff.
I am a feeler….I feel too much and in the past, my feelings dictated a lot of my actions. I constantly worried about what other people thought of me or my family, or how I measured up at my job. This made me work myself to death, stay late at work, and be somewhat disconnected at home. I would replay my day at work and relive every moment, hoping to get a good feeling about every interaction I had, and if I had a bad interaction, I would work to try fix it: Text or call someone, plan to meet with them later, send an email followup about our conversation. I couldn’t stop…
I wanted to be loved by everyone, all the time, everywhere. I wanted everyone in my family to get along but more than that ( I am embarrassed to admit) I wanted everyone to think my family was getting along. I worked so hard to resolve conflict and if I couldn’t, I covered it up well enough to where no one knew it was there. (Do you even know how exhausting that is?) The funny part was that I worked pretty hard at it and actually, at times, felt like I was succeeding. Ha!
You know why I was doing that, because my identity came from all that. My interactions with others, my performance at work, the good friendships I had, all told me I was “okay” (or a lot of the time “not okay”). It was a rollarcoaster. When I had a bad interaction or failed at something, I had to work to fix it, or I was LOST. I didn’t have value or a solid sense of self. Those things told me I was “good” or “not good.” If I didn’t fix them, I wasn’t good anymore.
My whole view of myself only came from what I got from other people.
Then one day, it ALL fell apart. I lost all of it. My family, my security, my finances, my sanity…but more importantly…my identity. I was paralyzed.
It wasn’t a bump in the road; the road was gone, and I was all alone with no one around….totally lost and BY MYSELF. I had no where to turn. I was sick…terrified…I couldn’t tell anyone I was hurting or devastated. It was too embarrassing. I had to keep doing what I had always done, fake it. No one can know I’m not okay, because I will actually not be okay then. How twisted is that?
I was numb and sick.
I actually stopped eating because I couldn’t and started replaying everything I could have done to fix the complete and utter devastation. I blamed myself. I blamed others. I sought out to find the truth about why it happened. I wanted a reason. Something or someone to blame. I did this for months. Isolated myself and lived trying to find a reason or a solution. I wore myself completely out trying to find the truth or a reason. I was desperately trying to grab something that could help me make sense of the senseless.
It was a complete shattering of my identity. I was gone. I didn’t know who I was anymore. I doubted who I was before. I was scattered into a million tiny pieces and did not know when I could possibly be put back together.
This sounds bad, right? Well, it was, but God met me there…..in the lowest, saddest, darkest place I had ever been. I had tried everything. Nothing was working.
I was at the complete end of myself.
A friend reminded me at this time in my life when I am at my weakest, Christ will be the strongest. I thought to myself…”Well, if Christ is ever going to be strong, that would be now.” God felt far away from me because I had moved far away from him. I was trying to control everything in my life to create a sense of security around me, and it all failed. I didn’t believe God would show up now. I had really blown it, and I felt nothing.
I was lost, having frequent panic attacks, paralyzed in grief, alone, and everything had been striped away.
If Christ was ever going to be big in my life, it was going to be now. I had nothing left. I was done. The amazing truth for me was that God wasn’t.
He was going to take my pile of nothing and rebuild it into something beautiful.
But What's the Truth? 