Maybe it's okay that I'm not okay!

 

 I've been trying my hardest to do that which goes against every fiber of my being and experiences in life, which is what every believer is asked to do,

T R U S T G O D

Some of us grew up in homes where trust was a foreign language. Some of us grew up in homes where we held on to the walls of the house with a vice-like grip, because we didn’t know when the next time the bottom was going to fall out. My entire childhood was like that. It seemed each year got worse from six-years-old and up, until I was eighteen and I could get the heck out of there. Recently, I heard a sermon about how a woman gets her sense of being loved by GOD through her father and later her husband. Oh, brother, I can attest that to be the absolute truth.
If her father showered love and confidence in who she was, and her husband did likewise, then she can easily see a loving GOD doing the same thing. Trusting Him would be a piece of cake. If a woman is spoken kind to and affirmed and shown unconditional love by her husband, she is able to be confident in the LORD in almost anything. On the other hand, for a woman who has gripped the walls all her life because the bottom always fell out, and there was no loving fatherly figure in the background, or loving faithful husband present or past accounted for, it is impossible for her to conceive of a loving GOD. Sure, she can believe the words on the pages of the Bible, but believing them and feeling them are sometimes on the opposite spectrum of experiences. Unless you’ve walked through or lived in the fiery furnace of afflictions for decades, you can’t possibly begin to fathom the never ending hurt and fear that takes a hold and control of a person’s psyche.

The stuff started hitting the fan for me when I was only in first grade. My home was far from a loving home. We weren’t a stable family by any stretch of the means. Our mother was a mess, our father was absent, because our mother made sure to keep it that way. We siblings had to learn, survival of the fittest. Those who were the toughest were able to take the pain of it all and stuff it, while the black sheep of the family only made matters worse by expressing it, because stuffing it wasn’t an option. Guess who that was! The trauma finally ended when I went to college, and those were some great years. I had my first love, first experience with someone who actually just loved me just because. Those were wonderful years, and then being the unstable girl I was, I threw that all away. 

 

I don’t have any regrets, because I believe in the Absolute Sovereignty of GOD.  I believe that His hand guides us with every step we take, and HE sets us on the path that He had already ordained for us before the creation of the world.  Although, we weren’t believers when my husband and I got married and first became parents, we became believers soon after that.  It didn’t make the marriage a lot better, but it did make it more tolerable and permanent, or so I thought.  We were getting along like any normal family, struggling, but holding each up as best as we knew how. That was until the bottom of the bottom fell out again in December of 2008.  The problem here was that the bottom never stopped falling out, each year, a different trauma, a more devastating loss, a worse crisis until it consumed our marriage and our marriage succumbed to the cancer in the church called D-I-V-O-R-C-E. 

I have already touched upon this subject several times in my other blog posts, so, I’m not going to beat a dead horse, but what I will say is that no one in the church in a stable marriage is capable of handling, counseling, empathizing, or dealing with this properly, because they haven’t walked that road.  No advice is the best advice. The next time someone happily married tells me that GOD hates divorce, I probably won't be able to control my Italian Yankee firecracker response. While we are in the fire, getting scorched, do not turn up the heat with piety, lest we just may breathe fire out of our nostrils and burn you in the process. We know GOD hates divorce, and to tell you the truth, I did not know just how much until it happened to me. 

I get so angry with  pastors misquoting Job 13:15, saying we should take the same approach.  They skip over the entirety of that verse, as if the second half of the Scripture didn't exist. Read those words,  “Nevertheless, I will defend myself to His face!” (NKJV). Stop listening to your pastors, only, and break open your Bibles yourselves and search. The narrative about Job handling his traumas with near perfection is about as fake news as CNN could possibly report. GOD did eventually call Job on his high and mighty fist shaking, but at the end, and not until after Job spilled all his anguish over his pain and suffering publicly, I might add. Guess who wasn’t mad at Job, GOD was not angry. He was about to hit Job with some serious truth as to Who He was and who Job was in comparison to Him, but he allowed Job to process all that happened to him.

Last night, someone compared Job to me and how Job handled his trauma’s with near perfection. This person claimed to know the Bible cover to cover.  This person absolutely refused to accept the truth, but continued to "rebuke" me for how I was handling my pain.  He went on to rebuked me for my response to his/her rebuking.  Of course, it was an anonymous account, because these people are too shameful to show their faces. He claimed that Job never sinned, that he never questioned GOD's justice, and that he never blamed GOD for his calamity.  I asked him from which Bible did he get that, because the one I’ve been studying for thirty-one years, says quite the opposite.  None of Job’s traumas were because of sin, but they surely did bring out the sinful nature in Job.  If you don’t believe me, do what I did one weekend.  Get a notebook and copy down in that notebook every word Job said, and only his words.  We tend to get lost in the dispassionate reprimands of Job’s attackers, and we focus too much of defending Job from his attackers, rather than really looking at his response.  We  lose sight of what Job really said.  Chapter 2 says, "in all that, Job did not curse GOD."  Sure, that’s right, he didn’t, up until chapter three when the lamenting and cursing the day he was born, began.  Then a whole new Job took over and he shook his fist at GOD for the next 36 chapter

Let me also add, it was GOD who rebuked Job.  No stranger on any social media site has any right to rebuke you. They will throw in some caring and concern and compassion with the Bible verses they weaponize, just so it dresses up their rebuke.  That's like throwing dog poop in a cupcake wrapper with frosting on top of it.   They'll tell you Scripture says they are to correct and rebuke. Do not believe them. Scripture does not give these anonymous church people carte blanche to rebuke every stranger all around the globe. GOD compared Job to Himself.  That doesn’t give ANYONE else the right to do the same to any brother or sister currently suffering as a crispy critter. 

Church people, stop telling bruised reeds how they should survive, heal, behave, think, or feel, because you have no rights to do so, and nine times out of ten your bad advice was unsolicited.  Jesus never beat up on those who were already beating up on themselves, rather he beat up on those who were beating up on the bruised reeds.  Jesus knocked down the standing tall and proud, but lifted the fallen and broken.  My friends, GO and do likewise. 

By claiming to know anything about the suffering saint  is the same thing as Lucifer claiming to be like the Most High, and we all know where that got him.  You don’t know their heart, you don’t know their past, you don’t know their successes, you don’t know there failures. You don’t know their pain, unless you’ve walked in the exact same kind.  I can guarantee you that if someone has walked in the suffering shoes, they surely do not rebuke the current shoe-wearer.  

We want to hear your story of deliverance.  If you want to give them Bible verses, give them one of the 7,474 promises in the Bible, and you can knock Jeremiah 29:11  off the list.  If you are really wise you can also knock Romans 8:28 off the list of potentials. 

If you are the type to have to always go in and “solve” someone’s problem, practice self-control and move on, because you will likely make the pain worse, the self-degradation worse, and the last thing a broken vessel needs is a worthless glue of guilt that will stick more to their cracks, keeping them from becoming whole and one piece, again.  Of the Spiritual Gifts the Holy Spirit gives us, if you don’t have Mercy, then move on.   

To my fellow bruised reeds out there, it's okay that you’re  not okay, and anyone who comes along, especially a church pew warmer with their unsolicited “rebuke/advice,”do your best to just thank them, and move on, don’t even give them the time of day.  GOD knows what's in our hearts, before we even form the words in our brains.   I promise you, there is nothing you can say to GOD that he does not already know if going on in your mind and your heart.  Prayer isn't us informing GOD of our needs and pain, it's GOD helping us discover them, so we can learn from them, deal with them, and grow from them.  We cannot hide things from GOD, but sometimes, He hides the solutions from us, until we are good and ready to hear the answer, see the answer, or even understand the answers. 

 I take longer than most, in fact, most times,  I wonder why GOD would pick someone who is not only not the sharpest knife in the draw, but even as a butter knife, she doesn't get the job done.  You’d think after dozens upon dozens of Twitter fight with modern-day, know-it-all 21^st Century Pharisees, you’d think I would know where this next one will go, ALSO!  

One last thing for today’s Job’s accusers,  even if you think you’re admonishing someone, many times, a bruised reed will complete break with your “admonishment,” because to them, it’s another rebuke of failure coming right at them.  Believe me, they already feel like a total loser, you don’t have to compare them to a superior Bible hero and make them feel ten times worse.