Category Archives: Answered Prayer

Dec26

Resolution? What’s a Resolution?

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I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. I never have. I don’t do it because I know I won’t keep them, and I don’t want the sense of failure that I know I’ll feel once I’ve fallen short of the resolutions I didn’t keep.

What I do instead is commit in my heart to work each and every day to grow in the wisdom, knowledge, and understanding of God. This means I cultivate a discipline of daily reading and study in God’s Word, as well as doing my best to remain in fellowship with Him by praying constantly, which I think of as simply talking to God. I don’t always get the reading done, but it’s constantly on my mind, and I use Scripture all the time in different contexts. So even if I’m not actively reading and studying my daily chapters, I’m still wrestling with interpretation and meaning as I’m talking about it with others, or posting verses on Twitter or Facebook.

Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. ~ 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18, ESV.

And probably more important to me than anything, I pray for God to continue healing me more deeply and fully from my childhood.

I don’t want to sound like I’m holier-than-thou by talking about the way I worship God, because I most assuredly do not see myself in that way. I’m well aware of my sinfulness and need for a savior. But this blog is about my progress as God heals me from my past, and it’s also about my life with God as I learn about Him and grow to know Him more and more deeply. And as such, if I don’t talk about myself and my life, and what I’m doing to grow and heal, then it might be a little weird, seems to me.

I could be wrong about that. I’m wrong about a lot of things, but I don’t think so.

But that’s neither here not there, because, as I’ve stated, I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions. And thus far, I’m doing well. Exceedingly well, in fact. This year I’ve had some pretty significant victories, the most exciting of which is that I’m no longer hitting myself. Yup, the self-abuse has stopped. For good.

You can’t imagine how amazing and marvelous and exciting and wonderful that is to me! I struggled with this problem on a daily basis for about forty-five years, and I had no control over it. The least little frustration or the silliest mistake would cause me to fly off the handle and hit myself or scratch myself badly enough to draw blood. There were times where I gave myself a black eye, and the scratches on my face or arms looked like I’d been attacked by a wild animal.

It was incredibly embarrassing, because it was only infrequently that I didn’t have some kind of injury on my face or body, and they were almost always visible. If I was able to go a whole week with no self-abuse I would begin to hope it had gone away, and I constantly prayed to God to take it from me. I also constantly repented for doing it in the first place. Basically I felt like I was living in Hell all the time, and I couldn’t tell anyone about it, because it was just too humiliating.

Then about six months ago, at the end of June, it stopped. I don’t remember what was going on around that time, and no one prayed for me about the self-abuse, but I had continued to beg God for freedom from it. I was playing my online games, mainly June’s Journey and a couple of others, something I talked about in a previous post (Go To Forgiveness, Go Right To Forgiveness. Don’t Pass Through Guilt, Don’t Go To Condemnation.), and one day I realized that the frustration of making mistakes as I played no longer bothered me. I was able to tell myself that the mistakes didn’t matter, that it was just a game, and so what if I made a mistake.

So what, indeed! I finally realized that, given what happened to me throughout my childhood, anything that occurs now is so insignificant by comparison as to be irrelevant. Seeing my life from that perspective makes it so much easier to understand in terms of the overarching theme of God’s loving involvement and protection, while placing the day-to-day events where they belong ~ in the larger tapestry of my whole life, with no single occurrence assuming greater importance in God’s overall scheme of things.

For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago. ~ Ephesians 2:10, NLT.

I love this verse! The word “masterpiece” in the Greek is ποίημα or poiēma. Most other translations use the word workmanship, while the NIV uses handiwork. We get our English word poetry from it.

So my life is God’s masterpiece, a beautiful tapestry of His design, while individual day-to-day events are threads woven in, but they don’t influence the overall outcome, unless it’s to enhance the beauty even more. And it’s all in God’s hands and according to His design.

So this was my big victory for 2019, and I’m grateful every day for it. To be free of something that had tormented me for about two-thirds of my life is a truly huge weight lifted from my shoulders. It was a bondage that made me feel like Sisyphus forever having to push his boulder to the top of the mountain, only to watch it roll to the bottom, where he’d have to start all over again.

I can’t thank God enough for releasing me from that oppression!

I’m eagerly looking forward to another resolution-less year of knowing God more profoundly, loving His Word more deeply, and receiving more healing at His hands. Plus I’m hoping to lose some weight, because I got this cool machine called a StreetStrider, which is an elliptical that can be used both indoors and outdoors. I’m also considering looking for a job, maybe maybe just maybe, though that’s pretty scary.

Just means more healing is needed…

Ever onward with God!!

Jun19

Working Hard at Doing Absolutely Nothing, or Maybe I’m NOT Such a Lazy Bum.

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I’ve been wanting to write about the fact that I don’t have a job, which makes me feel like a I’m not much more than a big, lazy bum.

I’ve tried a number of times to get a job, to no avail. Everytime I apply for a job some place, something always happens that makes it not work out. Either I’m under-qualified, or I’m over-qualified, or I’m too old (I’m 65), or I’m too highly educated, or I’m too religious (I’m an evangelical Christian), or I’m too opinionated, or I’m not opinionated enough, or…, or…, or ad nauseam, ad infinitum. And the few times I’ve had a job, that didn’t work out either, with one exception: my job working for ADS (Airport Delivery Service). I really like that job, and I was good at it.

My job with ADS was the best job I ever had. It was a job where I returned people’s lost luggage out of John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California, and I got to drive to interesting hotels and ritzy houses all over southern California, plus I got to meet a lot of fascinating people. In addition, I could listen to my favorite stations on the radio, without regard to anyone else’s listening preferences. It felt a little selfish, but I was the only one riding in my car, so it didn’t really make any difference.

But if I were to think about it logically ~ hard to do, but I can manage it ~ as well as listen to what my friends tell me, I would realize that I probably do more than I’m aware of. I have three friends, all of whom depend on me for moral support. Both Karens are taking care of their significant others. Karen C. is the primary caregiver for her mom, who is in end-stage Alzheimer’s Disease, and has been for awhile. Karen G-N. is the primary caregiver for her husband, David, and her newborn baby. David is on dialysis three times a week because he needs a kidney transplant, and Karen has been doing the dialysis at home ~ imagine that ~ kidney dialysis at home; what will they think of next. Pretty soon they’ll be doing heart transplants at home without benefit of doctors or nurses.

So David has been in the hospital for three or four months, and he hasn’t even met his baby son for the first time yet. Jonathan (the baby) has been on this earth since May 21, and David has yet to meet him. That’s just wrong! And Karen has needed friends to transport her and the baby to the hospital so she could visit David. I’ve provided the transportation, and then watched Jonathan out in the waiting room while Karen and David visited, and then drove Karen and Jonathan home again.

And then there’s the other Karen, Karen C. She doesn’t need me to drive her anywhere, but she needs lots of encouragement because she has to take care of her mom all by herself, so she’s always sleep-deprived. She has a professional caregiver (some kind of nurse) come in from the outside for six hours on Thursdays, and someone comes in to give her mom a bed-bath once a week, and someone comes in to clear her catheter and change her bladder bag once a week. So anytime something happens with her mom that worries her, Karen calls me and asks me to pray for her.

Amazingly, God always answers those prayers. I say amazingly because there hasn’t been a prayer that I’ve prayed for Karen’s mom that God hasn’t answered ~ with healing, with wisdom for whatever problem with her mom Karen’s been having that she hasn’t been able to figure out. God has always answered every prayer I’ve prayed for Karen’s mom, usually within the hour. There may have been one time where I prayed that her mom wouldn’t have to go to the ER, and she ended up having to go anyway, but that time they discovered that the problem was much deeper and more complicated than either Karen or I were aware of, so it was actually a good thing she went to the hospital.

And then there’s my friend, Helen, who lives in Australia. She had a stroke on May 29th, and while I can’t do anything to encourage her in person, I can support, inspire, and motivate her via email. Rachel and Kim are certainly doing that, and I can do the same. I can send her scripture verses, and cheerful letters, and prayers as well. It turns out you can do all kinds of things in an email letter! And her son is keeping Rachel, Kim, and me up to date on her condition and progress with daily letters.

So the upshot of all of this is that maybe I’m not quite as lazy as I think I am. Even though I don’t do much more than sit around in my apartment all day, while I’m sitting, I do a lot of encouraging and supporting and motivating of my friends. And when I go out, it’s to do the same thing ~ encourage, inspire, and motivate the friend I’m going to visit.

I guess I shouldn’t be so hard on myself.

Cool.

Jun4

Technical Issues Notwithstanding, Writing About the Cool Stuff Again.

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I hate it when I’m trying to write a blog post, but regardless of what I do, the website won’t save. I’ve prayed ~ bound the devil ~ prayed again ~ repented ~ prayed some more ~ yelled at God ~ repented for yelling at God ~ yelled at the devil ~ repented just in case ~ prayed yet again ~ bound the devil again in case the first time didn’t work ~ and prayed again for the umpteenth time. I’ve been at this for over two days, all to no avail. It’s become an exercise in futility.

This is SOOO FRUSTRATING!!! 

Here’s an update. I finally sent an email complaint to what WordPress.com calls their “Happiness Engineers” (seriously? Happiness Engineers?), and then came back here, at which point I decided to try saving what I’d written thus far. And of course it saved immediately. I hate when that happens. Now, when their lovely Happiness Engineers come and check out my complaint, it’ll look like I was making it up. SOOO frustrating!! It’s the same principle as when your car is making some kind of horrendous noise, so you take it to the mechanic, but once you get there, the noise is gone, and the mechanic looks at you like you’ve lost your mind.

It looks like the problem is solved. I did get a response from the Happiness Engineers, however, and they said that, based on past cases, this usually means there’s a problem with the connection between my browser and the wordpress servers, and I should try clearing my browser’s cache, and I should also unplug my modem/router for a few seconds to flush its DNS cache. The problem seems to have resolved itself without doing those things; however, I’m going to do them anyway.

So now I’m back to blather and whatever, what with the problem that motivated this post getting resolved. Plus, now I can get back to writing about the stuff I REALLY want to write about.

Cool.

A further update, over a year later: it turns out that WordPress has a desktop app, which I downloaded. And if I do my blogging on the desktop app, all the problems I had on the internet version of WordPress with saving, etc., just go away.

What a relief!

Jul13

Passive-Agressive Issues Notwithstanding…

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I realized something the other day, or rather, the Lord showed me something. He showed me that I’ve been passive-agressively not paying Mom’s bills to get back at her for not protecting me from Harry when I was little, and for abusing me herself. It explains a number of things and I’m glad to know it, because now maybe I can do something about it.

I’ve managed to significantly lower, and maybe even ruin Mom’s credit rating because I haven’t paid her bills in a timely fashion. It’s not something I’m proud of, and I hope it’s fixable. It seems like it would be. All I’d have to do would be to consistently pay all her bills on time over a long period of time, and keep on doing it, and keep on doing it, etc., etc.

So anyway, once I realized it, I took it to therapy and asked Jeff to pray about it, and he did. So now I have to start paying the bills! I’ve lost any excuse for not doing it. (In case you can’t tell, I’m not crazy about paying bills, passive-aggressive issues notwithstanding.)

I’ve often pondered the wisdom and plan of God in making me the one who’s in charge of my mother’s affairs once she reached a point in her life where she couldn’t handle them on her own. If my sister had survived her battle with cancer it would have been her, but she didn’t, so it was left to me. I’ve never been any good at managing money matters, though I am pretty good at paying my bills on time. My sister, on the other hand, was always meticulous about those issues, about everything really, to the point of being completely anal about it.

I asked God once why He gave me the responsibility of taking care of Mom instead of my sister, because in many ways I’m no good at it. His answer to me was that while she had the skill, I have the heart, and heart is better. Which makes me wonder, did He remove her from the scene by having her get cancer?

“For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways,” declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts. ~ Isaiah 55:8-9, ESV.

I’m so very grateful for God’s mercy in all of this. In many ways I’ve completely bollixed  everything concerning Mom’s finances, but God is so good, and so kind to me! It’s hard for me to fathom sometimes. Despite my clumsy handling of her affairs, she still seems to be in fairly good shape, thank God.

Thanks be to God for His unspeakable Gifts!!