Trust in God

The more I seek to find God- that goodness that he created in all people, places and things and love with perfect love, fear will no longer be an issue and I will trust.

via Trust in God.

I love this post at http://closetotheheart.me/

Who will love me?

I used to assess my worth on the basis of how loved I had been by the people in my life. Sadly, that was often not very much. I felt unloved by most of the people in my life – I felt that they often just weren’t very interested in me. Later I learned that often I kept people at a distance – and I also often tried to get love from people who were incapable of giving it. But that understanding came a lot later, after I had found the Love I’d been looking for all my life.

What transformed me in recovery was accepting that God loved me. This is a love that I can choose to accept or not. But it’s different from the love that human beings can bring. It’s not because of what I can do, or the good things I have done. It’s just love. And the flip side of that is more amazing – even though I’ve done bad things in my life, and even though often my motives are bad and I get things wrong, God loves me. He even took the consequences of my bad actions onto himself, in the person of Jesus. Jesus loves me, and will love me.

I love this song from JJ Heller…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG7SPCVkKyY

Accepting the love of God

When I really, really, think about God’s love for me… what he has done for me, the healing I have received, the blessings I have, the church I go to, his strength during the tough times… and the atonement, I feel great and wonderful joy. It’s joy that wants to leap in the air, sing at the top of my voice, hug strangers and just praise God with everything I’ve got. It’s a wonderful feeling.

I don’t know why then, that I don’t think about it more often. I can feel the barriers go up sometimes, almost like a physical feeling, which shuts off the love of God. It’s the worst thing I can do. When I started out in recovery those barriers were there most of the time, and now therey’re not there as often. The barriers are also lighter and easier to move. But they still come.

All I need to do is invite God once again, into my heart, and clear out any bad stuff in there. He can move the barrier if I let him. I look forward to the day when the barriers never come down, and I am always aware of the love He has for me, and for the world.

When giving advice isn’t good

Following on from yesterday’s post about wisdom and advice, I thought I’d write about the darker side of giving ‘advice’.

I do wonder whether giving advice ever really helps, unless we’ve already signed up to doing what is advised before we hear it. Sometimes when I’ve given advice and the person has acted on it, if it doesn’t go how they want, they resent me for it. I often give advice to people and then realise I should be taking that advice myself. And sometimes I give advice out of pride or the need to control, rather than love, which isn’t usually a good thing, I’d say. In telling someone what to do, there’s a whole lot of superiority wrapped up inside it.

I read in a book once, the saying ‘help is the sunny side of control’ and I know I can fall into that trap . I can want to help for my own purposes, rather than out of love for the other. Sometimes when I give advice, I’m also adding a heavy dollop of judgement of the other.

Sometimes I give advice for the right reasons, and sometimes the wrong ones. I’d say the further I’ve gone in recovery, the more surrendered to God and the healthier my actions, the less advice I give… and when I do give it it’s from a healthier place and more loving. But I’ve still got to keep account on this one.

Wisdom of the old

I totally rejected the wisdom of the older generation when I was young. I was rebellious, and angry with my parents. I can’t quite remember where I picked it up, but there was lots of good advice going around. ‘If you sleep with him on the first date, he won’t respect you’. ‘If he wants to have sex too early, he’s only interested in one thing’. ‘Don’t do drugs’. They’re just a few of the suggestions that I totally ignored in my early life.

I didn’t listen to the wisdom because I was trying to escape myself. I was trying to find love. I hadn’t been told that only God can provide the love I need. If I had, would I have listened? Maybe not at that point – I don’t know. Perhaps we need humility before we can listen to others or listen to God.

At church they were discussing the wisdom of Solomon in the books of Proverbs. Chapter 16 verse 20 says, ‘Those who listen to instruction will prosper; those who trust the LORD will be joyful.’

What advice have you heard, and did you follow it?

Addiction: the ‘God shaped hole’

Talking about the ‘God shaped hole’ isn’t new in the rooms. I think that I used to try to fill my ‘God shaped hole’ with all manner of things, from alcohol and drugs to TV, from sleeping around and romantic fantasy to work. The trouble was, they didn’t satisfy, so I used them more. And most of them ended in tears, harming me or other people – usually both.

What my ‘hole’ needed was unconditional love. The only place I have ever found that was from God – human beings just can’t love unconditionally. When I allow God to love me I feel complete and satisfied. Sometimes the hole gets blocked with my own faults and failures. I believe Jesus took all the consequences of those failures onto himself, meaning I get totally free when I’m sorry and turn to Him. There’s no greater feeling than that freedom and that love. Then, the desire to use other stuff goes away, one day at a time.

Struggling to believe in God?

I used to really struggle with doubt. When I started thinking seriously about spiritual things, I found it really hard to believe that there was more than just the material world, the atoms, organisms, planets and galaxies that are visible to the eye. That’s how we’re usually brought up in the West, to just believe in what we can see.

I believe there is a much more important dimension of experience though – the heart. Some people would call it the soul, or the instinct, the psyche, or even just the emotions. It’s our experience and our being – much more than what words are travelling around in our minds and what we see and touch. It’s our heart that knows truth when we find it, and our heart that also hides the truth, when we don’t want to accept it.

If you’re struggling with doubt about God or a Higher Power, I thought I’d share some things that helped me. The first is the testimony of near death experiences. Howard Storm’s was the most powerful in his book, ‘My descent into death; and the message of love that brought me back’. His website is at www.howardstorm.com.

I also read the Bible a lot, particularly the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John (you can get them online at http://www.biblegateway.com). A book by Brian McLaren helped me to understand something of God’s intentions for the earth, called the Secret Message of Jesus. CS Lewis’s Mere Christianity is pretty good.

When I was going through a lot of pain, reading stories of people who had walked a painful path was really helpful. Corrie Ten Boom’s story of surviving a concentration camp was massively inspiring, ‘The Hiding Place’. Other inspiring stories included those of Nicky Cruz and Jackie Pullinger.

I also found listening to Christian music really helpful, including Iona’s ‘Journey into the Morn’, a generic album of praise and worship songs, Jennifer Knapp, and other God-focused music.

At the start, I did read lots of books about other faiths too, but Christianity felt and fitted the best, I just found Jesus so compelling and healing.

There’s a good book which is more recent called ‘The Reason for God’ by Timothy Keller, which I’d highly recommend.

Most of all, what I found to be true, was ‘seek, and ye shall find’.

Using people for our own purposes

I did not used to see the problem with my sex and love behaviour. I knew that the problems were a result of previous traumas but soldiered on in old behaviours until they brought me to my knees. It took a while and a good step 4 to get me to a place where I could take responsibility for my past and consider what was wrong.

Slowly I began to realise that my previous interactions with people were all about me and my needs. I would think in my head that I just wanted to love someone – but really I wanted to love someone so that they would be there and they would love me back. I would need someone so badly that I was incapable of considering their needs. And when they inevitably would not be able to meet my needs in the way I wanted them to, I would get very angry and upset. I would say this was their fault, but ultimately it was very selfish – they weren’t doing what I wanted them to do.

It is very similar to what is wrong with sexual addiction and pornography. In all sex and love addiction, we are using someone else for our own ends, whether it is meeting emotional needs or sexual ones. One term for it is objectifying. It is easy to see this when we think of what has attracted us to someone. If it is about their looks, or their wealth, or their social status etc, then it is not really about them. It is looking to them to meet our own need and using them for this purpose – it is objectifying them, as if an object.

But you might say, what about our needs? Surely we have legitimate needs, whether sexual or emotional, and there’s nothing wrong with meeting them? In our culture this is increasingly seen as the norm. But think about it. Could we ever be satisfied or secure in such a relationship, where we are being used for a purpose? Can it ever be genuinely loving to treat someone like this? How would we feel if we were being used for something more obvious, such as our ability to clean a kitchen or buy someone expensive gifts? When we drill down into such behaviour, we can see that it is spiritually very dry indeed.

However sex and love behaviour can be highly addictive. And it’s hard to work out what is real love and what is using people.

Now the main thing I want in a partner is to journey on in spiritual growth. I want to be with someone who loves God as much as I do and with whom we can grow emotionally and spiritually and discover more about ourselves and grow in love for God, ourselves and other people. But it will take a long time to distinguish what is healthy and genuinely loving and what is not. But God will guide me, I’m sure of it.

A Step 3 meditation

I found this really helpful in Step 3 of the twelve steps. For me, this step was a lot about trust. Could I trust God? Could I let go of control? During meditation, I’d imagine the scenes from the gospels – such as in Matthew 14, Mark 6 and John 6 – and imagine that I was in the scene. Then I’d imagine myself as if I was about to walk on water – particularly from Matthew 14 – and going to walk towards Jesus. Sometimes it was easier to imagine this if it was a swimming pool that I was walking on. I imagined that I stepped out and walked on the water – developing the faith and trust in Jesus that I’d be able to do this.

Handing over the will requires a lot of trust, I think. I used to find it very difficult to trust anyone, whether people or God. Now I feel trust and faith in God, and my trust in others is increasing. I guess that’s been due to practice, and willingness, as well as getting to know God better. The more I know of God, the more I learn how trustworthy He is.

Joy

Today, I am feeling real joy. It is sunny and I have had a nice morning playing tennis. I have some interesting work to do in the afternoon. All these things are true, but what is really bringing me joy is God. He loves me, and there is nothing better than knowing this truth. I hope you’re feeling joy too – but if you’re not, I haven’t always felt this way either. But I believe everyone can find real joy, though sometimes it can be a rocky road to get there.  

I went onto http://www.Biblegateway.com for a different post, and their verse for the day was this:

“You’re all I want in heaven! You’re all I want on earth! When my skin sags and my bones get brittle, God is rock-firm and faithful. Look! Those who left you are falling apart! Deserters, they’ll never be heard from again. But I’m in the very presence of God— oh, how refreshing it is! I’ve made Lord God my home. God, I’m telling the world what you do!” Psalm 73:25-26 MSG

I love the passion of this verse and the translation, and it really resonated with my feeling of joy today. God is all I want, all I need, and all that satisfies me. The presence of God is wonderful, refreshing – like living water. I’m grateful, and I feel sad for those who don’t want God, because He truly is the best thing in life, the best everything.

I have travelled through some really dark paths in my life, and felt a great deal of pain. But now, I feel great joy.