Category Archives: The Cleansing Blood of Christ

Apr10

Through the Eyes of Jesus

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I’ve come to realize that everytime I look in the mirror I have two choices. I could see myself as Harry, the devil, and the world would have me believe that I am, or I could see myself as God sees me. Satan and the world, working through Harry, tried to convince me that I was ugly and worthless. But God thinks I’m beautiful, and He valued me enough that Christ was willing to go to the Cross and die to save me from my sins. And since God is smarter than Satan, and He’s certainly smarter than Harry was, I think I’ll stick with God.

But the LORD said to Samuel, “Don’t judge by his appearance or height, for I have rejected him. The LORD doesn’t see things the way you see them. People judge by outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.” ~ 1 Samuel 16:7, NLT.

It took me many years to be able to come to that conclusion. I had to wade through a whole lot of pain and emotional sludge before I was able to reject what Harry had beat into me every day of my life, and believe what God said about me in Scripture.

There’s a saying that says beauty is only skin deep. Well, I beg to differ, because God, Master of the Universe, Creator of All Things, says otherwise. Whoever said beauty was only skin deep was ignorant. More to the point, they had their eyes focused on the wrong things. Skin-deep beauty is only what you can see on the surface, but there’s so much more underneath that. As 1 Samuel 16:7 says above, God looks at the heart, and I think that’s where the true beauty lies, for it’s out of the abundance of the heart that one speaks.

“A good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth good; and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart brings forth evil. For out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks. ~ Luke 6:45, NKJV.

One can read beautiful poetry or speak deadly curses. The one will create positive feelings, and the other will cause sadness and depression.

“Earth’s crammed with heaven,

And every common bush afire with God;

But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,

The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.”

Those four lines are from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem, Aurora Leigh, and I think they are some of the most beautiful poetry I’ve ever read anywhere. They talk about God’s presence everywhere on earth, whether you see Him or not, and if you choose, you will recognize that He’s there, and everytime I read those lines I think beautiful thoughts, and God shows me new things from His Word.

How cool is that!!

2There the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a blazing fire from the middle of a bush. Moses stared in amazement. Though the bush was engulfed in flames, it didn’t burn up. 3“This is amazing,” Moses said to himself. “Why isn’t that bush burning up? I must go see it.” 4When the LORD saw Moses coming to take a closer look, God called to him from the middle of the bush, “Moses! Moses!” “Here I am!” Moses replied. 5“Do not come any closer,” the LORD warned. “Take off your sandals, for you are standing on holy ground. ~ Exodus 3:2-5, NLT.

As far as the negative is concerned, I’ve heard enough evil, gloomy, bleak, and fearful stuff from Harry and my mother to last me into eternity. All that negative input made me hate myself. It also motivated me to become self-abusive, and it drove me to consider suicide. I tried it nine times, but thankfully I was unsuccessful. At the time I was mad. I thought, “Geez! I can’t even kill myself right!” But now I’m so glad my efforts were ineffective. I’m excited to be alive, and in love with Jesus, my Lord and Savior.

If only everyone could see themselves, as well as other people, the way God sees them! It would make such a difference in people’s lives, and in the way culture is played out. People would be able to see the true beauty in the people around them, as well as themselves, and things like plastic surgery would be much less common, or maybe even not be practiced at all.

So those are just some thoughts I’ve been thinking about, with Resurrection Sunday on my mind (it was yesterday), and being grateful for all that Jesus Christ did for me on the Cross and three days later in His Resurrection, and all that He continues to do for me every day. Any gratitude I express now can’t come close to what I really feel, but I’ll say it anyway, because I can’t keep silent about it.

Yet true godliness with contentment is itself great wealth. ~ 1 Timothy 6:6, NLT.

God has blessed me with such abundance that I can’t even describe it, and I am SOOO GRATEFUL!! God is SOOO GOOD!! Thank You Jesus!!

Aug4

Rats. I Just Gotta Let Myself Feel the Pain, ‘Cuz Wherever I Go There I Am.

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The other evening as I was watching the news, they announced that Olivia de Havilland had died, and then later on they announced that Regis Philbin had died as well. While Olivia de Havilland might not be as familiar to many people nowadays as Regis Philbin was, she was very familiar to people my age and older. She played Melanie Hamilton in Gone With the Wind, one of her best known roles, and one for which she received an Oscar nomination. She was 104 when she died.

My point in mentioning these people’s deaths is that when I heard the news of their passing, it hit me rather hard ~ harder than I would have expected ~ and I’ve reached a point with this blog where my first thought when I’m upset about something is to come here and talk about it with you, my followers.

So here I am…

My immediate reaction when I heard the news of de Havilland’s and Philbin’s deaths was to run away. What ran through my mind was that everything was happening way too fast, and I couldn’t control it. And then I reminded myself that I’m not in control anyway, and running away is useless, because regardless of where I go, I’m still with me. Or, wherever I go, there I am, one of my favorite existential statements.

It’s impossible to escape from myself, and it’s also impossible to escape from God,

I can never escape from Your Spirit! I can never get away from Your Presence! If I go up to heaven, You are there; if I go down to the grave, You are there. If I ride the wings of the morning, if I dwell by the farthest oceans, even there Your Hand will guide me, and Your strength will support me. I could ask the darkness to hide me and the light around me to become night ~ but even in darkness I cannot hide from You. To You the night shines as bright as day. Darkness and light are the same to You. ~ Psalm 139:7-12, NLT.

Though, now that I think of it, while I might want to escape from myself, I don’t want to get away from God, because God is the only One who truly understands me and wants the best for me. And once I realized that I couldn’t run away from the pain of losing familiar parts of my life, and that I couldn’t control how quickly everything was happening, I started to cry, because I realized I had to let myself feel the pain.

And who wants to do that? It’s so very painful afterall, and no one likes to experience pain.

But then I remembered that Jesus allowed Himself to feel pain. He wept when He learned that Lazarus had died, the shortest verse in the Bible,

Jesus wept. John 11:35, NKJV.

And the cross was the ultimate expression of Jesus feeling pain, because on the cross He bore the sin, pain, and sickness of all mankind forever. In fact, that was why He came to earth and assumed human flesh in the first place,

For you know that God paid a ransom to save you from the empty life you inherited from your ancestors. And the ransom He paid was not mere gold or silver. It was the precious blood of Christ, the sinless, spotless Lamb of God. God chose Him as your ransom long before the world began, but He has now revealed Him to you in these last days. ~ 1 Peter 1:18-20, NLT.

I love that. God chose Jesus to be my ransom long before the world began. It just boggles my mind that God would plan that far ahead for my salvation, and I love Him for that. That says to me that He was thinking of me for a very long time before I was ever a thought in my parents’ minds, and not only me, but every single human being who ever existed.

And if Jesus can make that choice, can choose to do the hard stuff, even the hardest stuff of all, and experience the excruciating agony of the cross, and even worse, the abandonment of His Father, so that I ~ we ~ can have relationship with Him, well, then I can make the same choice, and allow myself to feel the comparatively small pains of my life.

I thank You, Jesus, and my Father, and Holy Spirit, for giving me that choice, and for giving me the ability and strength to make it!

WOW!! PRAISE GOD FOREVERMORE!!

Feb12

Those Wretched Intrusions!

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I want to talk about something that every survivor of child abuse, and especially every survivor of childhood sexual abuse struggles with, and that is flashbacks. Anyone who has PTSD wrestles with flashbacks. Soldiers who’ve come back from battle often have PTSD, and one of the symptoms of PTSD is flashbacks.

My dictionary defines a flashback as: a sudden and disturbing vivid memory of an event in the past, typically as the result of psychological trauma. 

I have flashbacks on a daily basis. For me ~ and I think they’re different for each person because each person is a unique individual ~ they are distinctly sexual, and very distressing and disconcerting. Basically they consist of body parts having sex, and everytime they happen I feel like a wave of filth has just washed through my mind. When it happens I feel compelled to shake my head in an effort to jiggle it out of my head to make it go away. Doing that doesn’t work very well, but I can’t just do nothing. I also say to myself, “I cast that thought down in the Name of Jesus,” which I got from a passage in 2 Corinthians,

For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh (for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but mighty before God to the casting down of strongholds); casting down imaginations, and every high thing that is exalted against the knowledge of God, and bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ… 2 Corinthians 10:3-5, ASV (American Standard Version).

Over the years my main way of dealing with them has been to spend time reading my Bible, plus I listen to the Bible on tape while I sleep. I figure exposing myself to God’s Word in every possible way has to help because the Bible talks about the Word having a cleansing affect,

For husbands, this means love your wives, just as Christ loved the church. He gave up his life for her to make her holy and clean, washed by the cleansing of God’s word. ~ Ephesians 5:25-26, NLT. 

The Bible also speaks of being successful if you keep God’s Word before you all the time,

Keep this Book of the Law always on your lips; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it. Then you will be prosperous and successful. ~ Joshua 1:8, NIV.

And aside from all that, I just love God’s Word. It’s been my favorite book in the whole world for many years.

However, I find it painfully interesting that since I started working on this post the flashbacks have gotten worse ~ more vivid, more frequent, and more intrusive ~ than they’ve ever been. It’s almost like the devil knows, or my mind knows, that in bringing the problem out into the open its days are numbered.

I hope that’s true!! I would dearly love to be free of this cursed plague!!

So I submit my mind to God, and to the purifying blood of Christ my Lord in the hope of freedom and eternal life!

Thank You Jesus for Your cleansing blood!! I love You so!!