We don’t always understand the confusing parts of our lives. We don’t always address our pain in satisfactory ways. We say cliche’s and positive words pretending that they are true even when our daily experience says it’s otherwise. We know what is true in the ways of truth, but these same truths ring false in our experiences.

PATH TO SPIRITUAL FREEDOM

That is where I was in my personal journey some twelve years ago. I had tried everything I knew to become a strong person of faith.  I was strong, well respected, a woman of spiritual strength with a heart for God. Yet. But the pain and problems had erected a formidable fortress of which I knew not how to trespass. It was a perfect storm. I was forced to give up doing it my way. I have to say, in reality, it was the end of one way of living but the beginning of a new way of living.

“And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight. So that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Jesus Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ—to the glory and praise of God.”   Philippians 1:9-10 (emphasis is mine)
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I had experienced many hurts in my life: loss, rejection, failure, and betrayal. These were complicated by other issues including a lack of belief in my own self-worth. I took the initial step that set me on a new path of spiritual discovery one week after my world was rocked by circumstances beyond my control. I was hurting in a major way. Business as usual was no longer an option. I no longer could maintain and knew I was heading toward a breakdown if something didn’t change. I had to face the truth. Either change or fall apart.  A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.*  I wrote a prayer of commitment that essentially began this amazing process that has changed my spiritual life. To begin with, I bought a standard college issue composition book that I would use to document my journey as I took a decided step onto a side path that would head in a new direction, one with an unclear, undetermined destination. In the doing of this, I was leaving the well-worn spiritual path which had been my conventional spiritual walk since the days of my youth. I was desperate to reinvent my life somehow, someway. My heart was breaking as I wrote on the first page of what would become my Journal #1.

Gracious Father,
Work on my heart and mind. Help me to learn to listen. Help me to push past my fear and to have eyes to see. I want to see Jesus. May my reality adjust and readjust as my vision for you changes. May I see you alone. May the work you are doing in me be used outwardly to minister to others. I seek you and you alone. February 2002

After writing out my prayer and praying it to God, I began moving forward in a search to find the cheese** not knowing where my spiritual wanderings would take me. I started looking outside the spiritual box of known religious conformity and practiced spirituality, the form and conventions of obedient and scripted ways of living the spiritual life. This was not a rejection of what I had known as a Christian. None of those things were bad. Nope. That was not it at all. It was something else. It was this. They had never been enough. Why not? The abundant life had escaped me. What I knew, both intellectually and spiritually, did not address an inner need I had that was stifling my spiritual life, something I truly did not understand at all. Pain and despair dogged my spirit life. My new wish for something more was not a rejection of faith or belief. It was quite the opposite. I wanted more in the spiritual realm. The prior week had contained almost more than I could bear. I was running on empty. What I had tried to fend off for twenty years was now becoming my new reality. I would have to adjust to face it. This was easier said than done. It was too much, too long, and I was too dry in my spirit to continue on as I had been. I felt deadness implode in on me. I knew I could not survive the new set of difficult circumstances in my personal life without God’s intervention and help. I was too wounded, and the pain had been building far too long.

I made a choice that day. An intentional act that has defined my days ever since.  I chose to turn a new direction, to go out on a limb with God, by making a firm commitment to God as I asked for a new identity—if that was what I needed. I was done, unable to continue going through the motions but not really living. I said to God, “You take it. I can’t do this. I don’t want to live like this any more.” It was hard to know just what was wrong with me. The darkness was overwhelming and the emotional pain was always present throughout the course of each day. I knew it wasn’t depression, although some depression was present, it was something else that completely eluded me.

Rejection seemed to be the curse I had received or internalized in the hand I had been dealt in recent years. Enough is enough. It was decision time. I weighed my options. No, I didn’t want to become a bitter person. Yes, I would choose to be better rather than bitter. No, I wouldn’t be angry at God for not answering my prayers. Yes, I would continue trusting him.  I had nothing to lose. The worst had already happened. In my living room on that ugly February day, I decided I would give it my best, the whole nine yards, by giving up and letting God take over. I knew, even in my brokenness, that I would use this for the good, that there was a glimmer of  light in my future. I knew if God could change me and make me different in some way, I would use it for him. I decided to promise myself and promise God that I would make my pain count for something useful for the benefit of others. In addition to the help that I could gain, I vowed to use anything that God would teach me to help the silent suffering within the Christian community of believers. My pain would not be wasted. My prayer was written in response to pain.  I look back on it as one of the most definitive of choices I have ever made. It changed everything because I meant EVERY word of it, and God knew it!

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* Quote by Lao-tzu, 604 -531 BC

**Who Moved My Cheese” by Spencer Johnson