This is probably going to sound odd and maybe weird but stay with me.  Yesterday morning when I journaled I asked the same question I always do, “What do you want me to know from You for today?”  God seemed to be telling me to pay attention to the day for there would be some significant things happen that I needed to keep close to my heart and not respond or react to until I heard from Him.

I spent much of the day cleaning up my yard where I had been replacing the railroad ties with landscaping blocks.  The blocks are done so I was hauling the rotted ties to the dump.  Later in the afternoon Kathy and I went to see the movie, The Shack.  I don’t know how many of you have seen it or read the book but it had a huge impact on me.  I’ve heard the author of The Shack speak and tell his story.  He too had a very abusive dad and the book is an allegory of the childhood boy portrayed as his daughter in the book and movie and how God was with him when he didn’t know.

The movie is very well done.  It gave me some new insights I needed to process.  Even though I’ve forgiven my dad and heard his voice tell me he was sorry, this took place in the nursing home where he was bed fast.  I appreciated it and processed it from that point.  In the movie there is a scene where the author and his father meet and embrace.  His dad tells him how sorry he is and how he appreciates him being a dad like he wanted to be but couldn’t.  Getting to see this on screen was rich in experience for me.  It allowed me to envision my own dad and me doing the same with dad having a healthy body.  Even though I couldn’t see my brother Rich, I could easily transfer our forgiveness more completely.

What touched me too was the beauty of his daughter’s life following its burial.  The tears he had shed brought forth a glorious garden of flowers and colors.  God had turned the ugliness of her tragedy into a glorious  beauty which will be forever appreciated. I would love that my tears have produced beauty as such.

There is so much more I could add to this but now I understand why God told me to pay attention to yesterday and keep what I experience close to my heart.  That is exactly what I am doing.  I just know presently that it had a tremendous healing in it.

Yesterday I went to visit the pastor friends I mentioned.  When we set this up we were to go to McDonalds (his favorite place due to its coffee and constant visitors).  However, when I got to their home he had just returned from a luncheon a friend had taken him to.  They had forgotten our lunch date but still knew I was coming.  I hadn’t eaten either breakfast or lunch so I was hungry!  Funny how things come up like this.  I was there a couple hours, drank a couple cups of coffee, ate a couple cookies and never thought about food.  I told him no less than 10 times where I live, how many miles from his house to mine, who my kids are, what I do for a living and so much more.  In between I told a couple jokes which he caught immediately and then forgot.  He knows me but doesn’t know much about me except we love each other.  That is one memory that goes deeply into our soul and the deteriorating, earthly body hasn’t destroyed.

I’m reading Revelation now in the Bible.  This morning it said that Christ was like a lion and a lamb: Rev. 5:5&6.  It was so good for me to read this and ponder it.  I have been awakening so much of late to the lion of my own dad, I hadn’t recognized how his lion nature influenced the lion reference for God/Jesus.  The ugliness of strength that is used to hurt and destroy instead of protect and love.  Also, the lamb it references I had only seen as fragile and weak instead of seeing it as trusting, intimate and loving.  I could see this so much more clearly today.

God needs us to be strong and intimately loving like the lion and the lamb.  I can be this too without guilt when I do it as a new creation.  These are good lessons to learn and I’m so grateful God is a good, patient teacher as well as everything else He is.

Have you ever called God, Dad?  Probably 25 or more years ago I recall an assistant pastor at our church who would reference God as Dad rather often.  I had always wondered where that came from?  The name Dad just didn’t have any Strength and Honor to it like the Powerful word–God.  In the past few days–following the torment of last week, while I am journaling, I’ve been led to call Father God, Dad.  When I’ve obeyed and done it I have this joyous contentment within.  This morning I’ve realized that this is intimacy with God.  I always called my earthly father, dad.  I’m sure the importance of the term was deeply influenced by this.  God is letting me find intimacy with Him.  I’m so enjoying the richness of this too.  Dad, referencing to God Himself, has Strength and Honor to it, but it also has something I’ve not known until now–Intimacy.  It is so nice!

This afternoon I’m spending a couple hours with my dear pastor friend.  He and his wife came Wednesday night to hear my Celebrate Recovery testimony.  He is 89 and she just turned 86.  I know he won’t even remember they had come, but I will forever remember.  I have so many tender, loving memories of his importance to me in my young adult years.  We will talk about many things and I will repeat my responses several times as though they are the first time.  But, while I do it, I will do so with love and honor for a man who has lived proclaiming God to the lost and lonely.  His wife is a prayer warrior for me.  I love her equally.  I know intimacy with them.  I thank God for that.

It is the morning after.  It is the morning after I gave my testimony to our Celebrate Recovery group.  I just finished my devotions and journaling with God.  I feel so humble and grateful for all that God has done for me.  When I first gave my testimony 8-9 years ago, I was so anxious I can only remember starting it and meeting with the small group of men following it.  I can’t recall actually giving it.  It took days to get my emotions stabilized following this.  This morning it is so different.  Instead of trying to second guess the listeners and trying to determine who I offended, I thank God for the intimate love He has given me working through all the torment of the past.  There was one young man in the crowd last night who is also in my small group.  He is a senior in high school.  He spoke about how Satan torments him making him feel meaningless and helpless.  But, he was really encouraged listening to my story.  He wants to be able to help others like I am today.  I was so touched by this tenderness.  How I’ve longed to do something meaningful for God–to be meaningful to Him.  Here He takes what I thought I had to hide from Him (as though that were possible) and uses it to glorify Himself.  This is Amazing Grace.

The men in our small group opened up last night with details of their individual story that had been unsaid to this point.  They said my bravery to share prompted them to do the same.  This is something I marvel with.  These details are ones I anguish over because they are the details I always knew would keep any friend away and keep a community from wanting me as their children’s principal. Yet, these are the details, now that they are spoken, that God is using to open others locked in their own bondage.  God is amazing and I want to serve Him better and more openly as life moves on.

I would hope that anyone reading this would agree with me that God is a Magnificent God.  If you struggle with this belief, I’d say that if you’ll stick with Him, He will bring you to this truth one day at a time.  Let me tell you why I say this.  Throughout my journey I’ve lived through a childhood of sexual abuse that lasted 12.5 years.  I lived through physical and emotional abuse which lasted 21 years.  By the time I graduated from college I had so many character defects and I was in such denial I thought that living the full life was all about keeping everything from my past hidden.  Now, today, my life is fully turned around.  Instead of keeping my life a secret, God is encouraging me to make my life known.  In doing so I have found there to be no judgment, only encouragement.  I have also found no one distancing themselves from me, instead, I’ve found people want to be closer and to know more.  These things and more are the reason I say God is Magnificent.

The Bible is full of promises God makes.  I really became aware of these when I began working with Celebrate Recovery.  James 5:16 says if we confess our sins one to another we will be healed–now that’s a huge promise.  I’ve longed for healing from the mental torment of my abuse.  Now, the torment is gone and it is replaced with a longing to help others struggling with the torment.  God gave man free choice when we were created so long ago.  However, He also gave us a promise that if we accept His Son Jesus into our hearts, we would be saved–John 3:16.  I have learned that what we are saved from is far more than the eventual hell vs heaven.  I’ve learned that I have been saved from the earthly hell I lived in for so long.  The torment I had was nothing but hell.

Freedom, and living in it, is a gift with responsibility.  We know this as a country.  I now know it from a spiritual point.  It seems tough when God tells us to tell what is tormenting us.  We conjure up all kinds of reasons we shouldn’t tell from man’s point of view.  However, God promises in verses like Isaiah 1:16-18 that we will be white as snow by following God’s lead in confessing.

Tonight I give my testimony to our group.  I will be doing this with more freedom that I ever have had in the past.  I am actually looking forward to it!  God has replaced my fears with a yearning to share His promises of healing and His truths.  Reach out to Him.  He is a kind and loving Father.

Whenever I give my testimony I struggle to tell anyone I’m doing so for fear they might come.  I still struggle with this but yesterday in getting it revised I was nudged to call a couple people I felt God wanted me to invite.  I did that and they are both coming.  It is always humbling and rewarding to find that obedience to a nudge completes exactly what God wants done.

In living through the days of this past week I’ve learned something I didn’t think I would ever be able to face.  I’m going to address it tonight with the 7-Pillars group of men.  It ties in with the story behind my own addictive pattern of behavior.  God was showing me this morning that He wants me to talk it through with the men in our group tonight.  I know it is the right thing to do so I will step into it knowing it is “the truth that sets us free”.

This journey of “living one day at a time, one moment at a time, accepting hardship as a pathway to peace” is grueling at times.  Accepting the hardships as pathways to peace is the tough one for today.  I am stepping out in faith that James 5:16 is true that when we confess to one another we are healed.  God has provided so much healing for me I don’t know why each step of the journey has to be filled with so much anxiety–I think I’m human.  I love the fact that God is our loving Father and is faithful, ever faithful.

Typing the date: March 13, makes me smile.  25+ years ago I was writing my staff newsletter about 6:00 am as I’d arrived at school.  I’d typed the date at the top and realized the date was an important one.  It hit me it was St. Patrick’s Day.  Ha!  I frantically looked around to see a green M&M on a shelf in my office so with two-sided tape I put it on my sports coat lapel.  Later in the morning I was having a very serious talk with a teacher who had been struggling all year.  They couldn’t keep their eyes off the green M&M and it finally hit me why.  Now, I was the embarrassed one.  Anyway, all these years later I remember this as I see March 13.

In two days I am giving my testimony to our Celebrate Recovery group.  This puts me in a tail spin each time I do.  This morning I awoke with anxiety throughout.  As I put it before God He reminded me that I am fertile ground.  He is planting seeds with our story.  The anxiety I feel is from the attacks of the evil spirits wanting to retake this fertile ground and turn it back into a desert where no one comes and I don’t go either.  God uses what was ugly and makes it beautiful through His Redeeming Grace.  I was needing to hear this and be reminded of it so I could revise my story with all that God has done in the past year+ since giving it to our group.

God is an amazing God.  I want no other god before me.  Praise the Lord.

Yesterday I wrote about conviction vs condemnation.  The new creation does get tempted and sometimes steps into it.  This leads to conviction and the need to repent.  We then move on.  The old man would step into condemnation listening to the voices of the old life.  As I was driving home yesterday I was listening to a set of CD’s on the topic:  Battlefield of the Mind by Joyce Meyer.  One is told to state out loud the promises of God by Joyce to combat these old condemning voices.  She says she would do this throughout the day when she was first working on restructuring her belief system.  I have needed to do this too.

This morning I tried this.  I found I can hardly say some of the promising scriptures loudly.  The one in Psalm 139:14 says:  “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”  I just whisper it.  I say it with hope instead of assurance.  This morning’s scripture reading was I John 4.  In the 17th verse it says, “…we may have confidence for the day of judgment because as He is, so are we in this world.”

My biggest battle right now is believing 24/7 that I’m a new creation.  My mind has so many defeating voices at times.  I’m going to start confronting these voices with God’s truth.  Even if I have to do so with whispers, I’m going to do it.  I know that my confidence is shallow at best right now, but I want to be fertile ground for God’s Kingdom work.  So, I am going to strengthen my belief with God’s promises to me.  Join me if you need this too.  There is strength in numbers particularly if God is at the head.

I wasn’t going to blog this morning until I got back to the room from loading the car and the nudge just wouldn’t stop, so here it is.  This morning’s devotion was filled with the topic of conviction vs condemnation.  I’m going to be giving my testimony to our Celebrate Recovery group this coming Wednesday.  Thus, I’ve been working on its revision to include all of the “new creation” things God has been awakening me to in the past few months.  The last couple days have been filled with condemnation because I’m still just the old man I use to be–my mind tells me.  Particularly in the evenings when I am tired, this hits and I stew and struggle to believe otherwise.  This morning’s scripture reading in I John 3 talks a great deal about these two and how the new creation is convicted because he still gets tempted and he has the access to the Almighty Team:  God, Jesus and The Holy Spirit.  The old man knows he has them but he doesn’t believe they’ll do the same for him as they will for others–he’s just not worth it.

Part of what God is showing me is that I’m learning to walk in the new creation.  Learning to walk, as we know it from being with young children, has many falls.  A little child just smiles and gets back up.  I, on the other hand, stew and condemn knowing I’m just not “new enough”.  So, God is reminding me to be patient with myself.  Write this testimony and let others know what the real battle is like in being a new creation is.  This I will do as I get back home today.  Thanks for letting me share this with you.

I’m in central Idaho attempting to write this blog on my laptop.  It is so sensitive that if I keep my finger on a key too long it wipes out the screen and reverts to the home website.  This is my third attempt.  I’ll keep my fingers above the keys!

The topic that has been hitting me of late is pride.  I ate dinner last night with friends who have a son in the same town where I’m working.  He is at a residential treatment center for drug rehabilitation.  They are here for 2.5 days of parent classes.  As we talked we found that pride kept coming up as a major inhibitor for everyone caught with this problem.  I found myself reflecting on how much this topic has kept me in bondage for much too long.

I use to think pride was what my dad had and I was not going to be caught with this same problem.  What I didn’t know was that pride in my dad looked like dad, pride in Earnie looked like Earnie.  For dad it raged and abused, for me it pulled away and kept very quiet.  When one lets pride interfere with making progress in their spiritual walk, it is a sin.

This morning I read the first chapter of I John.  It says in I John 1:9 that we can confess our sins and He is faithful to forgive all our unrighteousness.  I’ve know this verse for many years but today I confessed the pride that causes me to stumble and asked for God’s light to shine into this area of me.  In fact, I felt God telling me to step into His Light when I feel tempted.  It is always right there waiting for me to recognize it.  I’m sure that is what a believer does.  A beggar pulls away and pouts that he just can’t change.  I’ve been there most of my life.  I want to be a believer from this point onward.  God is so Good and always waiting for us to seek Him.