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!!

Jul2

God and Me, In Words

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So, I’m doing it. Starting my new blog, that is. Finally! After Google shut down the old one I couldn’t figure out what to do for a long time, and finally I decided I couldn’t just not write, nor could I allow my posts from the Google blog to just disappear. So I determined to copy/paste the posts from that blog onto a Pages document so I’d have a record of everything I said, and then I’d find a place to start another blog. And SOOO, here I am on wordpress.com!

The purpose of this blog is to keep a written record as I recover from my childhood. I come from a background of extreme child abuse. My biological father was an angry, evil, and abusive man who made me the scapegoat of his rage. In addition, my mother was afraid of my father and abusive as well, though not as violently as my father was.

As awful and horrifying as my childhood was I’ve been able to forgive both my parents with God’s help. I couldn’t have done it without His help ~ I couldn’t have survived any of it without His help, but that’s neither here nor there, at least for now.

I’ve often had people tell me that I should write my somewhat remarkable story. Well, maybe this blog is a way of doing that, mostly because I’m not sure I have the emotional wherewithal to go through the process of writing a book and getting it published. Maybe that can come later and I can use these blog posts as fodder for that process, though at age 62 I’m not sure I want to put myself through all that. I’ll have to wait and see…

Well, I believe I’m done with this… It feels done anyway, this first post. Certainly there will be others, lots of them. I don’t know yet how often I’ll post. On the old blog it went in fits and starts, mostly fits. I’d start a post and then let it slide for months unfinished, or I’d post three or four right in a row and then go for six or eight months without a word. I’m hoping I can do better here. I think I’m a better frame of mind now, plus I’m more eager to put my thoughts out there~and maybe even let other people read them this time. No one ever read the old blog. No one, at least not that I was aware of. Well, maybe one person, but she was a Muslim who was out trolling for someone to convert to Islam, so that probably doesn’t count.

I think I was too afraid of people’s criticism and rejection to let anyone read what I was writing, both in terms of the spiritual content and in terms of what I was writing about my emotional life. But I’m more confident of my writing now, plus I’m more confident of what I have to say~in a number of different arenas. Yes, I’m branching out! I’m taking an apologetics course and it’s giving me courage and boldness to speak out about what I believe. In addition, I’m finding as God heals my mind that I’m able to think more logically than I ever thought possible. It’s the strangest feeling sometimes. I’ll be reading something and all of a sudden I’ll realize that it’s something I was never able to understand before and now I’m understanding it perfectly. Then I’ll start to giggle as I’m praising and thanking God for His mercy and grace in healing me.

So, now I really am done. Hehe…

Jun28

My World In a Cat

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I’m sitting here with Lily, my sometimes alter-ego. Lily is my cat. She has been a gift from God from the day I got her onward. I got her in September of 2008 when she was about four months old, according to what my vet thinks, which means she was born in May of 2008.

Lily has always been a joy to have around. She follows me wherever I go in my apartment, and she fetches. I didn’t know cats did that until I got Lily. She’s so funny when she does it. Her currency is wads of paper. Sometimes she uses receipts that I bring home, and sometimes she finds pieces of paper around the house and brings them to me, expecting me to throw them for her. So I throw them, she runs after them and brings them back, then she drops them at my feet. Or sometimes she drops them in my shoe so I don’t find them until later. Only later happens hours afterwards when I’m putting my shoes on to go someplace, and I can’t put my shoe on because there’s a wad of paper stuffed in the toe~at which point I burst out laughing.

Lily does that a lot. Makes me laugh, that is.

She seems to know that making me laugh is a good thing~that my laughter means I’m pleased with her~so she does things on purpose to make me laugh. At least that’s the way it looks to me as I observe her.