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This is not for everyone . If you choose to read it. Please do so prayerfully. This post is about my experience and perspective and does not reflect on anyone else or any Church. Most important. God Is Good. All these things will turn with great momentum and will be used to go about doing good and setting others free, in Jesus Name. The darkness being expelled from the lives of all The Lord sends.
It seems, for one reason or another , I have been forced to face something from my past that I had thought I had thoroughly dealt with. The darkness keeps creeping up on me and settling upon me. Honestly I would prefer to not visit these memories. I would prefer to count the work I have already done in facing them as complete and move on.
It is no fun to face pain. It is no fun to relive trauma and it is certainly no fun to have that trauma trip you up every time you begin to fully break free from its grip. However that is where I find myself. Once again facing a pain and a struggle I hate with all my being.
I wont lie, this round of battles has been taxing to my faith. If there is a chief of double mindedness and unstable emotional roller coaster riders, I am He. It is as if I am surrounded by a fog, a darkness that seems to have stolen all The Lord built in me over the last 30 years. My spirit, when stirred and in the perfect environment comes alive. However that fog seems to await as soon as I begin to walk out my day.
I guess I could describe the feeling and pressure as a severe, traumatic and devastating sense of loss and failure. Worse yet, I know all the answers, well all the text book "christian-ese" answers. I know the WORD , I know about the power of prayer and confession. Yet here I am again. Facing something that feels like it wants to take everything I love from me, and if it cant, which it cant, it is content in isolating me in a dark fog of looping memories and thoughts. I find myself reaching in the darkness only to find the chains that hooked my soul before I had any choice in the matter. Even more wicked, this evil intruder seared into my soul the belief that it was my choice, it was my fault, and I was deserving of the pain and judgement of the darkness that surrounds me.
I am sharing this as a way to utilize a tool in mental health called Catharsis Therapy. I actually learned about this today as an actual tool to use in the effort to get to the core of these types of emotional traumas and loss. Even as I write this I have a sense of empowerment. I will admit the image search brought me back to the place where the wicked intruder attacked my innocent vulnerable soul.
Why was darkness allowed to steal my innocent baby and toddler years?
I could wax spiritual here, but that isn't the point or purpose of this post. I could post one of the many poems and encouragements I have written over the years. I could show how much I understand about trauma, the body, the soul, the brain and how our spirit can be crippled by those things, but it wouldn't add to or help in this particular share.
There are simply times in life we have to admit we just do not know. There are no easy answers. There are no theological views that bring any type of peace or closure to this for me. Not yet anyway. Why was such a dark spirit allowed to attack and innocent toddler? Why was this dark spirit allowed to return , night after night, from before my brain formed memories until I was somewhere between 6-8?
Where were the angels? Where was God? Why was Satan allowed to so scar my soul that even now at 50 years old, I can still feel the pin pierce the palm of my hand? Even as I sit here typing this, my hand feels a little numb and my stomach feels and "hears" the sounds of terror and judgment and fear.
Why is my other earliest memory of an actual event that would scar me and literally leave a foul taste in mouth until my 30s and 40s. Why allow an innocent child to have 2 traumatic memories as his first memories?
Throughout my childhood I remember having big outburst of anger when I felt left out or abandoned. I was a very angry kid. From kindergarten to when I was expelled , I was always fighting. I had to meet with a councilor in 5th grade for anger at school.
There were other symptoms. I wrote a note to a girl once when I was in 5th grade that was very sexually explicit. Her mom found it and she interrupted me and the girl on the phone and straightened me out. She was very firm but also seemed to know that it wasn't normal for a 5th grader and there must have been a reason for it. Thinking back , I don't even know where those words came from, I mean they were weird.
When I was about 9 or 10 I left much of being a kid behind. Darkness stole me preteen years. I started drinking and smoking pot regularly at 11, straight out partying when I was 12 and on to cocain and LSD when I was 15 or 16.
To add to my issues, there was something in my soul that shut down my system when I would try and have sex as a teen. Not that I didn't want to, but, something in me shut down everything. By the time I was 18 I seriously was deep in depression and hurt. I was acting out in other ways to try and meet the sexual needs I had, but that only brought shame to my heart. I became so addicted to one activity that even after meeting my wife it brought shame to me. I racked up bills on relatives phones and my dads phone bill. Darkness just wouldn't let me live a normal life. As if it was steering me to become a violent, foul, broken man.
I met the girl that would become my wife and things seemed to finally work. We were married less than a year after meeting. It seemed my life was finally going to normalize..........but no.
Then all hell broke loose in me. I had plans to attend college and become a police officer. It fell through, and as I said, it seemed all the darkness that was following me, that attached to me as a baby all came flooding upon me and in me. Not even a year into our marriage, with a new baby boy on the way, I became a man I didn't recognize, I gained over 100 ponds in about a year. I was angry, not working, had my new family on welfare and heading to being a man I did not like. I was emotionally, spiritually and physically at the bottom of a foul pit. I threw up everyday for almost 2 years. I couldn't walk up a set of stairs without feeling sick.
My wife is so precious, she doesn't hold any of those years against me, and really doesn't even feel the need to recall them. So for her benefit, I will not share the level at which I fell into anger. I will just say, it is not the man I was created to be and is not the man I am today. I am thankful those days did not last any longer than they did.
Once again, what I thought was going to be a breakthrough of life. darkness stole it.
Then one night I called my Dad and explained what was happening. He said. Rand you have to go to Church. I did, that is a longer testimony, but in a couple years, God did a miraculous work in me and our life. He saved me from sure early end.
I wish I could say The Lord has given me a great deliverance, and in many ways He has. However suffering and pain seems to have followed me. His grace has always been there, but, there has been so much suffering of the soul. I cant even describe it fully. I spent years suffering with so much stress, anxiety, fear and pain, that I was physically in pain for many years.
I sat in Church for year after year in so much physicals and emotional pain. No help came, no one heard, no one seemed to care, the weight finally crushed me. Some year later, I returned to the house of God after going into deep darkness and sin.
There was a leader prepared by God to be a door for me to a team prepared by God to be a safe place for me. For many years the fires of The Spirit cleansed me, strengthened me, and drew me close to brothers and sisters in The Lord. I was on a great mountain top high with that team for many years. I needed that family. It seemed we were on a track to be a mighty ministry for our local church and a mighty fellowship of covenant saints.
Then it seemed it was all gone. All taken away. All the dreams an visions stolen. The path destroyed, the family broken. This was my perspective. I tried to hold it together the best I could. I tried to grab the spiritual reigns and keep everyone on the same path on the same mission. It was all for nothing, I slowly, began to sink. I teamed up with a friend in the spirit to join spiritual forces to launch his ministry outreach. During a very hard time personally, I asked him to remember me when he needed to add staff. He didn't, he actually acted like I never even said that to him. Again this was my perspective. It crushed my soul. I literally felt like I got punched in the stomach. Another person abandoned me, and I felt guilty for expecting anything, for thinking I deserved to be part of a team like that.
The last several years have been a constant battle. Most explained above. It has brought me to where I sit today as I type this. Naturally I have so much joy concerning my wife, my sons and my grand daughter. However, as I said above, I also have a great sense of loss and failure. As if the darkness has won and disqualified me from the dreams and visions I have in God and His Kingdom.
Always a choice right? Choose laying it down and moving on. Or pressing on and holding on to hope. With a constant feeling, who am I kidding, all is gone, all have abandoned me, and because I lack the skills to build relationships and I don't have the perfect little box life, I really wont ever step into my destiny. So I just wont really choose either, but as you know that doesn't work. Not choosing Gods path always lets the darkness in to influence our path
Enter the darkness and why I feel I am facing this now. Below are picture representations of the horrific nightmare that is my earliest memory. Or my earliest memory that became a reoccurring nightmare. I believe I have fully utilize Catharsis Therapy writing this. They say pictures are a good form to stir the emotions and face them.
Thank you for reading this far.
Even now as an adult , when I feel like the darkness is surrounding me, I feel as if I am bound to make the wrong decision. Now though when I reach, I find nothing but chains waiting to bound me back to the darkness.
BUT GOD!!!!!!!!
“You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9)
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