I didn’t post yesterday.  I was feeling rotten with a bad cold coming on.  My quartet is singing twice tomorrow and I could hardly talk let alone sing.  I took off and went to a quick care I’ve gone to a few times in cases like this.  The doc didn’t want to give me anything because I had no fever-just the other symptoms.  He finally gave me the prescription saying he didn’t want me to fill it for at least two weeks.  I was glad he just did it. I did fill it and started it yesterday late morning.  My voice is much better today so hopefully I can at least sing and come home.  The morning event is a funeral for a family I know.  I hate complicating something like that.  I know God is faithful so I’m leaving it there.

The last couple days have been quiet ones.  I told God this morning that I feel He is giving me a break.  I have a bunch of reading to do for the sexual addiction class I’m taking–7 Pillars.  I’ll use the time for this.  It is also pointing out a character defect I’ve had all my life. If I weren’t actively busy then I wasn’t worthwhile, I thought.  My new creation knows that isn’t true but my old thinking has to be replaced at times like these.  God reminds me He is the one determining my worthiness.  He took care of that giving me Jesus Christ to live within me.  It is a nice reminder to live in the new creation and relinquish these old ways of thinking and living.

This entry is late today.  I started the morning at one of the hospitals in Boise to pray with a friend who is having neck/back surgery.  In fact he is in surgery as I write this.  He has come so far in his walk with God.  In fact, I’d love to tell you all the things God has done for him just in the past couple months to make this surgery possible.  It is his story, however,  so I won’t.  I’ll just say that God is so good.  This man will have a testimony to soon share with others.  The great thing is that he is ready now to share it.

Last night’s class–7 Pillars, was excellent.  There is one other in the class who has a story somewhat as my own.  He had a very abusive dad and had a couple different events from gay adults in his growing up years.  He hasn’t had the professional help that I’ve had (but has started it) and he was unable to complete some of the assignments as they were too painful.  I complimented him for even being there last night.  He is only 28 years old and truly wanting to overcome.  How I pray for him as well as those still silently suffering in their guilt and shame.

God is so good and so patient waiting for us to seek Him.  The more I live in my new creation the more I realize the beauty of living today.  Life may not be easy but it is always worthwhile.  There is no hiding, no secrets, no lies–instead there is trust, joy, assurance and so much more.

I thought I was going to skip today’s entry.  As I’d finished my devotions I honestly had nothing to share.  I knew I wanted to complete the homework for tonight’s class for men who struggle with sexual addiction, so I did.  Well, in completing it I was then compelled to complete today’s entry.

Some of the facts that surround sexual addiction are that 81% of men and women who struggle have a history of childhood sexual abuse; 72% have had physical abuse and 97% have had emotional abuse.  This reality is stinging.  The deepest wound of all is the one of shame.  I could have told anyone this, but reading it only puts it all in capital letters with an exclamation mark at the end.  The book says that guilt is the feeling that tells us something is wrong.  Shame is the feeling that says I am wrong.  Shame hits our identity and it becomes who we think we are.  This is nothing but the truth.  It is the first time I’ve read anything that says this truth so blatantly.  I’m so glad to see that this class is addressing it head on.  I’m also grateful to God that I’m not in this class until now.  If I’d had to face this without having had the amount of counseling and therapy I’d be done with it.  I’d also be running as fast as I could to try and hide what I’ve just heard.

This is such a deep-seated issue in our society today.  There is so much controversy about its relevance/impact on people.  How I wish I could get people to take their heads out of the sand and realize how serious this problem is and how we are digging a grave for the generation that follows us.

The pain of reading this today is definitely present for me.  However, today, the greater pain is that of which is left unaddressed–the consequence of our society’s look at pornography and the story that brought each individual to it.  I pray for us to awaken to it’s sinful reality and join forces to call it what it is–sinful and wrong.

My sermon has now ended.  God bless you today.

Today is the first day of Spring!  I don’t have to pretend anymore that it is here.  I do love this time of year.  There is much to do outside and I look forward to all of it.

The journey of today has several tasks to get done.  I say tasks because they are one time things.  I use to fret about these things but in learning to live as a new creation who is not taking control, I am surrendering these old ways to God.  I will do them and use whatever time I have to do the work of the yard.  Some of the tasks are God ones.  They connect to people and my relationship with them.  I never want to diminish their importance and let working in the yard take precedence over them.  I’ve certainly done this in times past.  I want God’s priorities to be mine from this point forward.

I pray for God’s richness today to be yours both in spirit and in truth.  God bless you.

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.