Last night my grandson who lives with us came home from being with his siblings and dad.  He told me his girlfriend and he had broken up.  As he started to talk about it he wept. The circumstances have been hurtful and painful.  In the last three years our grandson has lived over 2 of them with us.  Prior to moving in with us the beginning of his senior year in high school, he had lived with his mom, his dad, and in and out of friends and his aunt’s home over about 16 months.  After his parents split, he couldn’t decide where he should live.  There was much hurt he experienced during that time and he had no place to express it.  It ended being expressed in many unhealthy ways.  Over time, after he moved in, we talked much regarding the lessons he learned during this ragged time.  He even went to a counselor recently who is helping him continue the learning from hurts.

Last night I began to see the character defects he is beginning to develop about himself–the lies that unexpressed hurts cause us to believe about ourselves.  When they go unexpressed/unprocessed, we begin to turn the hurt into beliefs.

I write all of this because I, for the first time, saw how my own character defects were fed and groomed during my own adolescent years.  They continued into my first marriage and by the time my wife left me when I was 29, they had begun to have deep taproots into my belief system of me:  who I am, what I meant to God, and how God couldn’t trust me.  It helps to see this in someone else to better understand how this happened to me.  Satan is so deceptive.  He wants to manipulate life so the beauty in God’s creation is destroyed and then we start losing our trust in God.  All of this helps me better know how to talk with my grandson and others who are being beat up by the life they are living–many times by their own choices, they just don’t see it that way as of yet.

God is so good.  I cannot thank Him enough for the clarity He provides when we stay in communication with Him.  To God be all Glory!