Month: June 2017

June 30, 2017

Recovery Testimony: Be Encouraged!

good_newsContinued from here.

I hope that the three recovery testimonies I shared have inspired you and that you are now thinking about your own recovery testimonies. We all have them – nobody is lucky enough to get through life without experiencing some sort of upheaval that rocks your world. And if you truly don’t have one yet, know that one is coming. When it hits, I hope you will remember what you read about my recovery testimonies and believe while in the storm that God will cause the sun to shine again.

Your recovery testimony might not be as dramatic as mine. If that is the case, count your blessings! The three I shared are dramatic, but I had to live through that drama, which wasn’t fun. Only the power of God could turn these tragedies into victories!

I encourage you not to compare your recovery testimony to mine or anyone else’s but, instead, praise God that you have one! Your recovery testimony has the power to inspire other people, so you need to share it. If people believe that you never suffered, then they will assume that’s the real reason for your joy. When you show people your joy and then your scars, they realize that there must be a God to be able to make such sweet lemonade out of life’s lemons.

Think about the type of person that the World would expect me to be. Just the child abuse alone would cause someone to expect me to be a bitter person who is unable to trust (which is exactly who I was for a long time). I could have been a prostitute or drug addict. Heck, I could have committed suicide a long time ago. And yet, here I am, shouting from the rooftops that my God is faithful! He is good! He is bigger! He is in control! It’s one thing to hear those words from someone who has never suffered. It’s a completely different thing to hear those words from someone covered with scars as I am.

I used to be ashamed of my scars, but now I’m proud of them because each one proclaims the glory and power of God. When I show people my scars, as I did in my three recovery testimonies, I am showing evidence that I was wounded as well as proof that God heals. Why would I want to hide them? When people ask how I know there is a God, I need only show them my scars. I have no other explanation for how I became the person I am today.

[Graphic: Cartoon of a newspaper with the headline of “Good News” and a photo of Grace giving a “thumbs up.” Courtesy Bitmoji.]

June 29, 2017

Recovery Testimony: Child Abuse

crazyContinued from here.

God’s faithfulness in bringing me my son grew my faith. I was active in church and Bible study. Then, my life blew up again because it was time for God to heal my pain from the childhood abuse. This testimony is far too complex for a 400-word blog entry, so I’ll just hit the highlights.

When my son was a toddler, I started having flashbacks of the childhood abuse. Up until this point, I had no conscious memory of the child abuse, and yet my life screamed my truths. I found a checklist online listing 37 common symptoms of people who have been severely abused in childhood. Someone with over 25 of those symptoms is likely to have experienced ongoing and severe childhood abuse. I had 34 of them. Reading this checklist was like looking in a mirror. For most of my life, I thought I was “crazy” with multiple unrelated issues. I did not realize that I was actually “normal” – a “normal” child abuse survivor.

The pain was so intense that I wanted to die. I even considered suicide but could not figure out a way to do it that would not traumatize my young son. While I held onto my faith during this season of life, I was mostly along for the ride as wave after wave of past pain pounded me. My eating disorder got worse, and I started self-injuring to help me manage the pain.

A church friend asked our pastor for a therapist recommendation, which is how I found my wonderful therapy, who is both a Christian and a qualified psychologist with experience in working with people who were severely abused in childhood. God used him to guide me along the path to healing.

The person I am today is so different from the person who entered therapy in 2003 that I can barely see a resemblance. I have completely forgiven all of my childhood abusers. The pain is gone and has been replaced by joy. I no longer self-injure or binge eat … or experience flashbacks, nightmares, or suicidal urges. I now love and accept myself exactly as I am. All of the self-loathing is gone. I truly am a new creation in Christ, to the praise and glory of God!

Over the years, I have encouraged countless child abuse survivors along their own path to healing. I wrote a blog (under another pen name) for six years in which I shared that hope and healing are available, no matter how severe your childhood abuse was. Several people have confided in me about having been abused as children – I was the first person they told. God has made much lemonade out of the lemons of my childhood abuse.

Continued here.

[Graphic: Cartoon of Grace looking wild-eyed under the words, “Cray Cray.” Courtesy Bitmoji.]

June 28, 2017

Recovery Testimony: Infertility

sadContinued from here.

Little did I know that life’s next storm was already brewing. I had only returned to God for a few months when I learned that I was infertile. For someone so determined to be in charge of my own life, this news was absolutely devastating. Even the Bible validates the depth of the struggle with infertility:

There are three things that are never satisfied,
four that never say, ‘Enough!’:
the grave, the barren womb,
land, which is never satisfied with water,
and fire, which never says, ‘Enough!’” ~ Prov. 30:15-16

Note that infertility is the only human experience recorded in this passage. If you have never walked the path of infertility or walked alongside someone dealing with it, you might not be able to fully appreciate the devastation, particularly for couples who are “control freaks.”

I had a choice to make – Was I going to walk away from God again? Or would I go through this with Him? I decided that grieving the loss of my father without God had not worked out very well, so I would go through the infertility process with God, even though I didn’t understand why He allowed this in my life.

Interestingly, I never perceived my infertility as being a punishment for walking away from God, just as I never perceived my father’s sudden death as being a punishment for anything. My struggle was about why God allowed these things to happen, but I never blamed Him for causing them.

Fast forward 4.5 years … I was sobbing as I drove to work. After years of infertility treatments and surgeries, we went through the process to adopt a child, and we had been waiting over 1.5 years to be matched with a birthmother. My friends’ children were already in kindergarten, and I felt every day of those 4.5 years as my arms remained empty on Mother’s Day, Christmas, etc. I asked God when would I ever be a mother, and I felt this in my Spirit: “It’s always darkest before the dawn.” And a peace washed over me that I could not explain. For the next week, when my thoughts turned to this area of my life, I would sense that again and be washed over with peace.

One week later, we received the call that a birthmother had chosen us to adopt her son. She selected us on the very day that God gave me that message, but the agency waited a week to tell us to make sure she was certain we were the right family. That baby is now my 16 years old son, and he was worth the wait.

Continued here.

[Graphic: Cartoon of Grace crying one big tear. Courtesy Bitmoji.]

June 27, 2017

Recovery Testimony: Father’s Death

Cartoon of Grace on her knees, punching her fist in the air while yelling, “Noooooo.”Continued from here.

As I shared in my last blog entry, I received Jesus as my Savior and Lord when I was 8 years old. I took my faith seriously. I was mocked for bring my Bible to school to read, and I read the entire Bible cover-to-cover when I was 14-15 years old. I even did a Bible study with my peers in my high school.

Then, halfway through my senior year of high school, my father dropped dead … just like that … and my world rocked. My mother was a stay-at-home mom, so we lost all family income. My mother understandably struggled emotionally with the sudden loss of her husband, so it felt like losing both parents rather than only one. My father’s extended family had a falling out with my mother, so no matter where I looked, I saw friction and discord.

I was angry with no “safe” place to aim my anger, so I aimed it at God. My attitude at the time was that if God was going to treat me this way — one of the few teenagers on the planet who actually took the time to read every word of the Bible — then I wanted nothing to do with Him … and I walked away. I refused to go to church. I stopped praying. I decided I was going to live my life in my own way with my #1 focus on becoming fully independent as quickly as possible. I graduated high school at age 17, college at age 20, and law school at age 23. I was determined to hold the reins of my own life and never have to depend on anyone for anything ever again.

Eleven years later, God wooed me back, and He was sneaky about it. My closest colleague at work became a Christian and had numerous questions. Her church friends didn’t know much about the Bible while I had read the entire book, so I wound up teaching her the basics of her newfound faith, even though I had rejected it myself. God softened my heart through this process.

This colleague then invited me to a new Bible study starting up at work because she didn’t want to go alone. She wound up dropping out after a few weeks for personal reasons, but by then, I wanted to stay … and I returned to God.

Continued here.

[Graphic: Cartoon of Grace on her knees yelling, “Nooooo.” Courtesy Bitmoji.]

June 26, 2017

Recovery Testimonies

helpNext week, I will be starting my coursework toward a master’s degree in Christian Ministry. (Yes, this old dog is going to learn some new tricks.) I am already reading through my textbooks in preparation for my classes, and I learned a new term: recovery testimony.

Of course, I’m familiar with salvation testimonies (stories about how people came to invite Jesus to be their Lord and Savior), and mine is pretty simple. I was 8 years old when my mother started bringing me to a Southern Baptist church. She explained the gospel to me, and I immediately invited Jesus into my heart. I created a bit of a controversy because I was adamant about being baptized right away, and the church didn’t typically baptize children that young. I had to convince the pastor that I fully understood the significance of baptism, which I did (to his amazement). That’s pretty much it.

My recovery testimonies, on the other hand, are powerful, and I have several of them. In a nutshell, a recovery testimony is your story about a time in which something blew up in your life, and God worked it out for good. The concept is encapsulated in this Bible verse, in which Joseph was talking with his brothers selling him into slavery:

You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.” ~ Gen. 50:20

In this series, I’ll be sharing three of my recovery testimonies. As you’ll see, I was faithful to God in some and completely rebellious in others. However, God was always faithful to me, and He worked all of them out for good. That’s one of the coolest things about God – that He can work even our own sin out for good.

Let’s face it – life is hard. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t have any need for perseverance, right? I hope that my recovery testimonies will inspire you as well as reassure you that it’s never too late to return to God. As you’ll see in my next blog entry, I returned to God after 11 years of rebellion. Even after rejecting God for over a decade, He still wanted me, and He pursued me until I came home.

Continued here.

[Graphic: Cartoon of Grace sinking in quicksand under the word, “Help!” Courtesy Bitmoji.]

June 23, 2017

Obedience Problem = Love Problem

I have shared previously that I am working through Experiencing God: Knowing and Doing the Will of God , authored by Henry Blackaby, Richard Blackaby, and Claude King. One concept I am pondering is the repeated assertion that…

If you have an obedience problem, you have a love problem.” ~ Experiencing God

The authors cite multiple Bible verses to support this statement, including the following:

If you love me, keep my commands.” ~ John 14:15

Throughout the Bible, obedience and love for God are intertwined. If you love God, you’ll do what He says to do. If you don’t do what God says to do, that’s evidence of a lack of love for Him. In our humanity, we try to make things more complex, but the Bible says it’s really that simple: If you love God, you’ll do what He says to do. If you don’t love God, you won’t. And that’s why the authors says that if you have a problem with obeying God, then you have an issue with loving God.

Like most people, I struggle with obedience. At the end of the day, I want to do what looks good to me. However, as I have been pondering with my series on the enormity of God, I have a limited perspective, so what I view as “good” or “bad” from my teeny tiny sliver of space and time might be very off-base from the perspective of everywhere and “everywhen.” Note that I have included no mention of love in my explanation for my desire to do things the way that look good to me.

To see the connection between obedience and love, I must believe that God’s Word is true – that my willingness to obey God reflects my love for Him while my refusal to obey Him reveals my lack of love. From my teeny tiny sliver in space and time, I don’t see that connection, but the Bible says it is true. However, I do see that doing what **I** want keeps me focused on myself rather than on God, which does point to a lack of love.

While I might not fully grasp the connection between love and obedience, I have found that it’s easier to obey God out of a motivation of love. For example, when I was in the early stages of forgiving my child abusers, I prayed, “I hate my abusers, but I love you more. Help me forgive them out of love for You.” When I focus on my love for God rather than on myself, I find it much easier to obey Him.

Cover of Experiencing God: Knowing and Doing the Will of God. Courtesy Amazon.

June 22, 2017

God Knows More Than My Name

u_get_meA recurring theme in Contemporary Christian music is that God knows my name. Whenever I hear that lyric, I think, “Thank goodness that’s not all He knows!”

For people who feel disconnected from God, I’m guessing it’s reassuring to hear that God knows your name. However, I think about the many people whose names I know but who I don’t know a thing about other than what the tabloids tell me, much of which is likely untrue. And then the things that really matter about those people aren’t going to make it into the tabloids. Only their closest friends will know the information that really matters, and some of the most important information might not even be shared with them. So, yeah, I know their names, but I don’t know them.

Contrast this with the knowledge that God has of you:

Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten by God. Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.” Luke 12:6-7

Even I don’t know how many hairs I have on my own head, but God does. That’s a level of caring that I don’t even have about myself!

Yes, I love that God knows my name, but I love even more that He understands the way I tick, which is something I don’t fully understand myself. Thanks to the child abuse, my brain developed differently from a “normal” brain, causing me to react differently than other people to particular stimuli. As I have healed from the child abuse, I have grown to understand some of my triggers (thanks to flashbacks), but others continue to perplex me. However, God is not perplexed. He knows exactly why I think and do what I think and do, and He loves me through it all.

I love that I have a God who knows me intimately … who knows where I have been, am now, and where I am going … who knows exactly what I need … who completely understands my peculiarities that I don’t understand about myself … and who loves me completely exactly as I am, even knowing me that intimately. Love like that is transforming and runs far deeper than simply knowing my name.

[Graphic: Cartoon of Grace with her hands on her heart below the words, “U Get Me.” Courtesy Bitmoji.]

June 21, 2017

Servant Evangelism

I recently read the book, Servant Evangelism: Showing and Sharing Good News, and was pleasantly surprised. Let me start by making a confession – the word “evangelism” gives me the heebie jeebies. I envision people standing on street corners waving their Bibles around, asking me if I’m “saved,” and threatening me with the fires of hell if I am not. While I am sure that many of the people who do this mean well, it’s a real turnoff to me. My decision to surrender my life to Christ was a HUGE turning point that wasn’t going to happen because someone “threatened” me while I was walking down the street.

Servant evangelism is a very different form of evangelism. In a nutshell, it combines random acts of kindness with sharing God’s love. As an example, hold a free car wash and refuse to accept donations. When people ask why, say, “God has been so good to me that I want to pay it forward” … or something else that communicates that your love for God is your motivation for the random act of kindness. Another example is giving out free light bulbs with the message, “For more light, visit our church” affixed to the box.

I actually saw this in action when I was visiting the beach. I was walking for exercise past a church during worship service hours, and people were giving away free bottles of water with a verse about Jesus being the living water and the church’s name and address on a label on the bottle. There was no “sell” involved. They didn’t want money for the water bottles, and they did not try to make me feel guilty for exercising instead of being in church. If I had asked about God, I’m sure they would have been happy to share with me, but I simply said thank you and continued pushing my son in his stroller, and they did not attempt to detain me.

The beauty of this form of evangelism is that it meets people where they are. If God has already been softening someone’s heart, this provides a wonderful opportunity for that person to ask questions about your faith. However, if someone’s heart is not in a place to “hear the good news,” it simply plants a seed. Perhaps years later, when God starts drawing the person to Himself, s/he will remember receiving that free bottle of water and visit that church.

I know that the Great Commission applies to me, just as it does to all Christians, but I have always been leery about “Bible thumping” as a means to do it. I love the simplicity of the idea of servant evangelism, which meets people right where they are, shining God’s love into people’s lives without a “hard sell.”

[Graphic: Cover of the book, Servant Evangelism: Showing and Sharing Good News. Courtesy Amazon.]

June 20, 2017

God is “EveryWHEN”

whenI just completed a series on God being everywhere, which got me thinking about how God is also “everyWHEN” – that God is not limited by time. Those of you who were blessed with scientific brains might be thinking, “Duh!,” but I was not blessed with such a brain, so bear with me. I never took a Physics course. My science-challenged brain has a difficult time wrapping around the concept of God existing outside of the confines of time and space.

Rich Mullins wrote the following lyrics in his song, Nothing is Beyond You:

Time cannot contain You. You fill eternity.”

This helps me apply what I have been processing about God being everywhere to His transcendence of time. Just as God is “too big” to be contained by space, He is also “too big” to be contained by time. My linear mind has trouble grasping this concept. I’ll probably have to spend a lot of time meditating on this reality to even begin to get this. Just writing this paragraph is making my non-scientific brain cramp!

If I could truly grasp and believe that God exists outside of time, I would find it so much easier to trust Him with my future because He already sees it and is already there! He’s not just a good guesser or playing the odds that the suffering I am experiencing today is likely to produce a harvest in the future. He KNOWS this because He is already there looking at that harvest. My poor brain cannot process this!

This is one reason why God wants me living in the present. When I envision the future, it’s often without God’s presence, which is not possible because He is already there. I’ll worry that X, Y, or Z might happen and construct contingency plans for how I will deal with those issues if they arise, but my worry excludes the presence of God. I’ll never experience one second of my life without God, which makes worry a complete waste of time.

This is not a topic that I’ve been pondering yet – I’m still working on wrapping my mind around God being everywhere – so I don’t have much to say about it. At this point in my journey, I have more questions than answers, but I can see how I could much more easily rest in God’s provision by resting in the reality that God is “everyWHEN.”

[Graphic: Cartoon of Grace holding a pocket watch under the word, “When?” Courtesy Bitmoji.]

June 19, 2017

A Lesson in Humility

airplane_take_offContinued from here.

I continued my meditation on the enormity of God as I flew to visit a friend out of state. As I looked out the airplane’s window, I considered the reality that God fills all of this space! He fills the plane, the atmosphere as far up as I could see, all the way down to the earth thousands of feet below, and every house peppering the landscape below.

And that was only as far as I could see! In that moment, He was also surrounding the Alps in Switzerland, the tropical fish at the Great Barrier Reef, and the penguins in Antarctica. Our God is truly massive!

Then, I thought about myself in comparison. I was taking up this little sliver is space in the middle seat of one airplane, wedged between my son and a stranger. The God of the Universe is EVERYWHERE, and I’m in this teeny tiny space. So, why do I often act as if the world revolves around me?

When I consider the mammoth size of God (actually, He makes a mammoth look teeny tiny), how distorted is my world view when I behave as if the world is supposed to cater to my desires? How could I possibly have any expectation that the rest of the world should defer to my whims?

And then consider my arrogance in trying to bend God to my will. How dare I tell God that He should do X, Y, and Z when my perspective is so severely limited. He sees EVERYTHING while I cannot even see through the seat of the person sitting in front of me on an airplane. How ludicrous of me to presume to know better than God how my life should go.

In my humanity, my own comfort often fills the frame of my perspective: what I want, need, or desire. So, what I view as “good” or “bad” is based on this teeny tiny sliver of space that I inhabit. Only God sees the whole picture. Only He is in the position to know what is truly “good” or “bad” because He sees the needs of EVERYONE. And He is good, so He cares.

C.S. Lewis said,

True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.”

When I think about the enormity of our God – that He is, quite literally, EVERYWHERE, I am deeply humbled as I take my eyes off myself and place them onto my God, where they belong.

[Graphic: Cartoon of Grace waving through an airplane window above the words, “Ready for take off.” Courtesy Bitmoji.]