Category Archives: Spiritual

Emotional/Mental, Spiritual

My Guilt and God’s Grace

I was born into a loving family with wonderful parents and four siblings. We lived at an institution where my parents served as staff. Unfortunately, being raised in this atmosphere set me up for emotional difficulties. For many years, guilt was a constant in my life.
GUILT

At school I was taught the same principles and values as my parents taught, but somehow the school’s teaching led me to think of God as someone who was out to punish me. Being a sensitive girl, this led to an unhealthy guilt. Interspersed through all the good times I had as a kid were these nagging feelings in the back of my mind.

Even as I reached adulthood and beyond, I never got over my guilt issues. They haunted me, sometimes worse than others, as when our eldest son was unwell from birth and died a year later. In my mind, I thought perhaps I was being punished for something I had done wrong.

Finally, when our two living sons were seven and five years of age, my life crumbled to the ground. The tipping point to what had now become anxiety and depression was a tragedy that took place in our small town. All the emotions came in full force, and I could not rise above it.

But I realized that I needed to find my way out of this and couldn’t rely on anyone else to fix my problems. I needed to find my own answers, began to look at my symptoms, read and did research on what could be wrong with me, and found that obsessive thinking was actually an imbalance. Along this journey, I received help in the form of medication. As the days went by, we became cautiously optimistic that I was recovering.

GRACE

I came to discover that the right kind of guilt brings about positive change, not rumination over past wrongs. God was not standing over me with a whip, ready to punish me for something. Instead, he was extending me grace and I have not questioned this fact since that time.

When a person thinks obsessively, they try over and over to think their way out of a problem, when, in fact, the opposite actually brings relief and normal thought patterns.

Letting go and letting the medication do its work brought the relief I needed.

 

 

Spiritual

My Prayers

The premise for this blog comes from something that happened in my life many years ago.

I had been on a prayer journey for about four months in regards to the relationship between two members of my family.

One’s actions and rebellion made it difficult for the other to have unconditional love for him.

Then a traumatic event happened in our family. Another member received second and  third degree burns to 23 per cent of his body. Of course, he was hospitalized, and I spent three weeks with him while he was there healing and having skin grafting done. The other two family members remained at home except for visits.

During the time I stayed at the hospital, I knew there was some sort of “light at the end of the tunnel.” I felt strongly that somehow my prayers from the last months were going to be answered even through this tragedy. Of course, I did not know how.

But as the months passed, I became discouraged. My prayers didn’t seem to be answered. I had been so sure God was at work.

Unconditional Love

Then, one day, I had a conversation with the person having trouble to love. He said that during their three weeks together, he realized that even though the other person was not acting the way he wanted him to, he needed to have unconditional love for him. He wanted that person to remain in his life no matter what.

God had taken me out of the picture and given them time with each other. One person made no changes, but the other realized how much he loved him and totally changed the way he related to him. What an amazing answer!

That was the most important time in my life that I had left something in God’s hands that I could not fix myself. That time and many times since God has answered my prayers in ways I could not have imagined. I am no longer surprised but awed.

Does that mean He always chooses to answer? By no means, and that is for another day’s story. But I have seen it often enough to give me the ability to trust the God who sees the big picture when I can’t.