God and writing

So last night I spent some time writing.  God uses my writing to help me process and to hear His voice.

God used it to make me realize that I haven't dealt fully with some aspects of my past.  Things from back in Junior High, like when I was 12.  I thought I had laid a lot of that to rest.  But when Tricia and I were talking last week, we realized we hit on something right before the end of our session.

I had been bullied by a couple of different people in 7th grade.  It wasn't that big of a deal or so I thought.  But as I worked through it as I wrote last night, I realized just how big a deal it was.  I really took what was said and done to me to heart.

Though I am very high on the Empathy/Feeling charts, I find myself shutting down emotionally and unable to re-engage.  I traced it back to some things that happened while in 7th grade where I vowed that I wasn't going to let others see me cry in front of them again.  Unless I was in a "safe place" or with "safe people" I didn't cry.  I also didn't express how I felt to anyone for the most part, even to my mom, when something happened.

I can remember when my first cat died.  It was my senior year of high school.  I'd had her since I was four.  My mom was taking her in the next day to be put down because she was too sick and in pain.  I got home from school the next day, and had a friend with me.  We hung together in my room, ate supper and went back to the school for a late drama rehearsal.  I never said anything to my mom about Willow, for a long time. 

Several months later, I encouraged my family to get two kittens, and they had them for a very long time.  Later I ended up telling my mom that I stayed up several hours with Willow on her last night.  Curled up next to her on the couch, petting the one place that didn't hurt her (the top of her head and ears) and cried.  The reason I had a friend come home with me the next day was cause I needed the distraction.  But it was a long time before I could acknowledge those emotions, define them, and share them with someone.

I am not as bad as that now.  I have healed a lot in the last few years.

However, there are still times when I have trouble expressing my emotions.  Sometimes I don't even know what I am feeling.  Like I said, I shut down.  Because of the bullying things that happened to me, the humiliations, I ended up putting up walls to protect myself.

God has been faithful in helping me pull down those walls.  Many of them are down now, and I have much less of a tendency to hold in emotions than I used to.  It's much less self-destructive.  But there are still walls there. Some of these walls have people's names on them, I have discovered.  It's going to take a lot of hard work to get those walls to come down.

With God's help, I know it will happen.  In His time.

There are other things that are going on at the same time. - again - there is always something, and it seems God is working on me from different fronts, with different things all at once.  Maybe it seems like that because He is trying to help me shore up the weaknesses that He sees in me, so that I can come out the other side more whole, and a better person to better reflect His light.

All in His time.  And - as a reminder to myself - I don't need to know the why's of what's going on or what's happened.

God uses my writing to help me process different things.  Last night He helped me process and identify some things that I need to go over with Tricia.  Other times He just plain outright speaks to my heart, by impressing something on it.  Other times it is through reading His Word as well.

I am just so glad that He still speaks and heals and redeems and restores, today as always.

He's got me covered.
He's got you covered.

Praise God for that!  I am so grateful that He hems us in behind and before and that He lays His hand upon us all!