Dwelling on your past is to let it control you
Some know my story, some don’t. basically I grew up in a broken family with broken people. Your typical happy safe family life was a far cry from what my childhood was. My childhood consisted of divorce, rejection, bullying and countless sexual assaults. This all resulted in a very low self esteem and depression.
The constant memories of my broken childhood kept me bound in a dark pit. I lived a life I hated. And eventually started the vicious cycle of daily self harming myself and countless attempts at suicide. I was hospitalized many times, put on an array of psych meds and had been given just about every psych diagnoses there is.
Amongst all this, my relationship with God was up and down. When things were good… me and God were good…. When things were bad, me and God basically didn’t exists. I soon grew to hate God and didn’t understand why all this stuff was happening to me. Why me and not the girl next door? Hadn’t he given me enough to deal with?
I had tried everything and decided rehab was my last chance to turn my life around.
There I learnt to love myself all over again, learnt to cope with the pain that my past had bought me and learnt to love life again. I graduated after 8 months in rehab and was excited about the new life I was about to start. Things can only get better from here.
But boy was I wrong. The honeymoon period was soon over and the reality of life returned and I started to spiral downwards again. I turned back to my old coping skills, daily self harming again and constant thoughts of attempting suicide again. Life just seemed to continue to get worse. I couldn’t handle it anymore and decided this was it.
I headed to the beach with the intent of never returning home, never seeing my loved ones again, to end my life. I walked the beach for hours, thinking, contemplating my decision. But then God turned up in my darkest hour. He did something inside me and I decided to give him one more chance. A few weeks prior to this a friend gave me a ticket to Colour, a woman’s conference. I decided to give God the chance to do something really big in me there, or that was it.
People knew that I had recently been struggling, and I went to colour with such high expectations. Not only the expectations I had placed on it myself, but also from other people.. Having them say we hope you have breakthrough at this, I hope you are blessed. The butterflies followed me there every day. I was so nerves about what God was… or might do.
Its been over a month now since colour and I am still here. I don’t know what God did at colour, I don’t know what he did in me, but he sure as heck did something. Cause I haven’t been the same person since. I've had one bad day, which I was easily able to pull myself out of.
Life really hasn’t been the same. I feel such a strong spirit of freedom within me. It feels like I have gone back to my rehab days. The days when I enjoyed life. The days when I was able to overcome anything the enemy throws my way. The days I smiled and loved myself. And God has renewed my passion of letting others know about this freedom that is there for them.
God did not create us to live in bondage and brokenness. He created us to live life and live it to its fullest. And this is where my passion lies.
Everyone goes through rough times, everyone experiences trails and hurts. But its how we overcome that is the important thing. We can allow our past to control us, or we can allow it to make us stronger and a better person. The latter is ideal.
When we get hurt, either it be from being bullied, having someone close to us pass away, being abused or just life throwing every curve ball possible at us, it is possible to overcome it all and be able to move on in life.
When bad stuff happens to us, the enemy gets excited and takes every chance possible to get his foot in you. Once he has a foothold in yer life, he has got ya good. Ever time you think of the bad, every time you are reminded of your past, the enemy laughs and nudges you to dwell on how bad it all really is. Eventually your life is totally controlled by your past. Everything you believe, everything you think about yourself and your life is going to be negative. The enemy has succeeded!
But now its your time to turn it all around. Now its time to kick the enemy out of your life good.
But where do you start? Right at the root of it. Right at where all your beliefs lie.
As we walk through life, our experiences often determine our beliefs. We lock in these beliefs about who we are, where we came from and where are life is going.
You may believe you are ugly, you have no purpose, you are alone and feel deeply ashamed. But is that the truth?
Gods Word is a book of truth. Within it is the truth about who we are, where we came from and where we are going. And When you can read it, get Gods truth about who you are into your head and your heart you will start to see your life change for the good. And you can just read it once and think that will do. You need to repeat it. You need to read it every day if that’s what its gonna take to change your belief system. For just about every lie… or ungodly belief that you have, there is a promise in the Word that proves you wrong.
I can not enforce how powerful this can be. The truth really does set you free, and God is in the freeing business. Right now he wants to set you free from your past. He wants to remove the shame and guilt that it linked to your broken childhood. He wants you to see who you really are in him, not the mistake that you think you are. He wants you too see the purpose that you have in life.
He wants to set you free…. But will you let him????
Its for freedom that I have been set free.
