His Goodness Makes Me Enough

What area of my life do I struggle with believing I'm good enough?

Tough question!  There are several, but my role as a mother is probably the greatest of all.

Sometimes I fear that I have no idea what I'm doing as a mother.  My beautiful son has autism and at times it can be very hard to determine what's best for him.  I am currently homeschooling him after having experienced an extremely unpleasant kindergarten year and watching him struggle as well.  The very first week of school he came home with a knot the size of a baseball on his head because he was banging his head in the floor in frustration and no one stopped him.  It happened on carpet and he had the carpet burns to prove it.  That passed, but we just never could get his environment right for him, though we tried.  Oh, how we tried!  Still, there are always the questions that can haunt me a little too often.  How much therapy is enough?  How much is too much?  Should I try school again?  Am I isolating him too much here, even though he is learning so much more?  He is six and he still needs me to stay with him until he falls asleep.  Is that my fault?  The list goes on and on and ON!  It's never ending.  The pressure can feel extreme at times.  The thought of being in charge of my precious boy's future possibilities is terrifying.  No matter how many books I read, parenting classes I attend, or how many options I check  into, I can never really know what's right.  Honestly, I don't think anyone knows, professionals included.  No one can seem to agree on anything, from diets to therapies to causes.  No one can know for sure and yet lots of people have strong opinions that they will gladly beat you with.  It's just hard.  However, I don't doubt that God gave my Thomas to me for a reason.  I love him with all I am.  My patience threshold has become so high that it practically touches the clouds.  Although, I do occasionally have my moments of breaking down.  No matter what comes our way, I will never ever give up on my baby boy.  I only hope that's enough in the end, even if I never feel like it is.

I take comfort in God's promise that through him I am enough.  I take comfort in the knowledge that he is watching over us day and night.  In fact, God used my son to bring me back to him.  I'd forgotten who I was.  Thomas reminded me through a "Veggie Tales" show on his ipad.  He found it on his own and he would walk around the house singing, "God is the biggest!"  It took me a while to figure out where he learned it, but when I did I was reminded that I don't have to do this alone.  In much the same way that I discovered God mostly on my own as a child, my son did the same.  I found him in a book, my son found him on an ipad.  I had let life get so busy that I forgot who to call on.  My son was having such a hard time learning how to speak or to even understand other's speech that I could not even fathom trying to teach him about God.  May that never happen again.  Ever since I've turned back to God, I've had more hope.  Instead of staying awake at night trying to find the answers, I hand it to God for the night.  I sleep and pick up my part the next morning.  I am loosing nothing in the deal but I am gaining so much.  Rest, assurance, love, and support.  When I say, I can't do this, he whispers... "Oh, yes you can.  Don't you know who you are?  You belong to me and through me ALL things are possible."  Nothing in this world has the same effect on my heart as that simple truth does.  He's got me covered, but he also has Thomas covered.  I can relax a little knowing that's true. 

Changing My Perspective

"Has the pain of your past ever made it hard for you to believe God's promises and plans for your future?  What do you sense he wants to change in your perspective?"

I found this topic to be the most challenging for me.  That's why I'm choosing to tackle it.  I'm tired of avoiding the things that are uncomfortable to me.  I would like to try to face them head on.  So here goes....(gulp)

The pain of my past has absolutely made it hard for me to believe God's promises.  Most of my life has been lived in captivity to my past.  Even when I'm ignoring my past, my decisions and reactions in life tend to get directed by the very past that I'm trying to ignore.

Like many of you, I come from a broken home.  More accurately, it was never whole to begin with.  I was raised by my maternal grandmother.  I called her Mama because in my heart she was.  In my early years I loved her with a fearless abandon.  She was my entire world.  My mother left me with my "Mama" when I was six months old.  My father denied me altogether.  I wasn't a new life to be celebrated, rather I was the product of an affair.  My mother was married to another man and my father was engaged to another woman.  Based on all the whispers, I grew up believing that I was something to be ashamed of.  I didn't even know what my father looked like.  I felt unwanted and unloved by the people that mattered most.  My feelings of worthlessness would later be reinforced by my grandmother's struggle with alcoholism.  So began the pattern of me trying to be "good enough" to keep her sober.  It was painful to watch her repeatedly hospitalized because of her disease.  I was always afraid that she was going to die and leave me like everyone else had.  Besides that, my grandmother was not a happy drinker.  The man she lived with was also an alcoholic, but he was my protector.  I called him granddaddy and he always protected me from the worst of my grandmother's drunken rages.  We spent countless hours sitting in his old Ford truck listening to 8 tracks and hiding out.  He never said very much.  We just stayed there until the storm blew over.  Unfortunately, my sole protector passed away when I was nine.  I always believed alcohol would take my grandmother from me, but it was my granddaddy that was snatched away by his addiction much too soon. I never knew what I had in him until years after he was gone.  Without his protection my life became much more difficult.  It would get even worse before it got better.

I was sexually abused by my aunt's husband when I was twelve years old.  He was the best dad I never had until his betrayal.  My love and trust for him made the betrayal all the more painful.  Rather than receiving the support I needed from my family, I received the blame instead.  Even my grandmother joined the mob, which was excruciatingly painful for me.  Many hurtful things were said and nothing was done to help me.  In my pain I even went so far as to cut my arm from top to bottom with a razor blade.  I went to my grandmother to show her what I'd done and to tell her that I needed help.  That was my outward cry.  She said she'd get me some.  She never did and it was never mentioned again.  These memories are just the highlights of what it was like growing up in my family.  There were lots of other things that caused my heart to ache besides.  Sadly, I wasn't the only girl in my family to suffer from sexual abuse.  It felt like my family was a magnet for this sort of thing.  Yet no one was ever held responsible.

All of these happenings certainly caused me to doubt God's promises.  Even now I carry around a ton of baggage.  I know that Jesus was with me through it all.  I even knew that then.  I know how great he is.  It's myself that I have trouble believing in.  I wish I could honestly say that I have overcome all of it and am completely ready to embrace God's plan for my life, but I can't make that claim quite yet.  I'm still working through it.  I'm still trying to figure out why I do the things I do and feel the way I feel.  On the outside my life looks normal.  I'm usually able to convince others that it is, unless they try to get too close to me.  I'm very guarded and I work very hard to keep people from getting too close.  I can only handle surface level relationships.  Though I am the decision maker for my own course in life, I haven't really chosen it.  My fears have kept me from believing that I even have a choice.  My insecurities have led to poor decisions, many regrets, and even more shame.  If I were to be completely honest, which I rarely am regarding my real emotions, my life can feel extremely lonely and empty at times.  I am truly blessed to have a husband and son but I know they are not all I need.  The good news is that I can feel Jesus urging me forward to a better way of living.  At my own pace he is providing me with the courage to face my past so that I might begin to live my purposed life.  He has shown me things about my past that are helping me heal.  For example, I now understand that the thoughts and attitudes of my family were muddled by substance abuse and alcoholism.  Their words weren't reliable or grounded in truth of any kind.  Their words were not a reflection of Jesus' love for me or of my worth.  God did not allow those terrible things to happen, but he did hold me close through my darkest nights.  Every night I'd imagine him there in my room, holding me tightly, as I drifted off to sleep on a tear soaked pillow.  I'm an old pro at asking him to help me through in a general sense, but I've never trusted him enough to ask for his help when it comes to leading a full life with purpose.  Tonight I can't help wondering why this has been the case for so long.  Perhaps I think he's done enough just by getting me through.  If I ask for anything more, will he get tired of me too?  In answer to this doubt I sense him telling me that he didn't carry me through all of the storms so that I might simply survive.  I hear his call towards a higher purpose and I feel like Gideon did when the Lord called on him.  I am terrified, but I am also hopeful.  I now recognize the voice that tells me I'm not worth anything as the voice of the enemy.  The most important thing that God is revealing to me is that I need to keep myself surrounded by his love and his words.  I need every tool I can carry to fight that misleading voice whenever and wherever it arises.  I pray that Jesus will continue to reveal his truths to me and that he'll continue to uncover the lies that I have believed for too long. 

A Heart Surrendered to Christ

I find the idea of sharing when I first surrendered my heart to Christ to be an intriguing concept.  The reason for this is that when I look back on my life, I can not really remember a time that I did not cry out to God for my comfort.  Perhaps I didn't always understand Jesus as my savior, but I certainly understood that he was my Lord for as long as I can remember.  The interesting thing about this is that I did not grow up in a Christian home, we did not attend church ever, and other than a simple child's prayer that my grandmother once taught me, we didn't pray together either.  However, I can remember that simple little prayer to this day, even if my grandmother, who raised me, wasn't consistent with keeping it up.  I've just always known that there was something bigger than me out there and I've always known that we call that something God.  A little later I would happen upon a children's book about Jesus.  I have no idea where it came from, but it was in my possession for some reason.  Perhaps it was given to me.  I just can't remember.  Anyway, in this book the author was trying to explain how Satan comes in many disguises, how he can even come disguised as an angel!  Now, I'm not knocking the author, as I'm certain his or her heart was in the right place, but can you just imagine a young girl's literal imagination running away with that concept?  The devil disguised as an angel!  How on earth was I supposed to tell the difference?  What if an angel appeared in my room?  How would I know if he or she was the real deal?  If anything has ever been the cause of a little girl embracing an active prayer life, that book CAUSED it!!  I prayed every night to God for God not to allow the DEVIL to come into my room disguised as an angel because it was just too frightening to fathom.  I later understood the deeper meaning, but you get the picture.  So to pinpoint the exact moment that I gave my heart over to God is difficult for me.  Although it would be years later before I would officially make a verbal request for the Lord to enter my heart, the truth is, he always had my heart.  I grew up in less than ideal circumstances, as I'm sure many of you have as well, and during my darkest hours in my younger years it was always "my" God that I cried out to, that I thanked, that I praised, that I FEARED!  I do mean feared in the literal sense.  Since I didn't go to church and didn't share my life with other followers, I had no basis for really understanding God's true heart.  So there was a period during which I fervently believed that one wrong move could and WOULD get me struck down by lightning!  I had quite an active imagination.  Of course time passes as it will and little girl hearts are forced to grow up and during my growing up I pulled away from God, ran away at times even, but I always found my way back.  Actually, that's not quite true.  He always finds a way to pull me back to him, sometimes against my own will.  I am so thankful that's the case and that his love is that strong for me.  He brought me through my childhood and he continues to bring me through today.  I can remember that I was probably somewhere between the age of 10 and 12 when I was first baptized, but I only understood it as a ritual.  I understood I was supposed to follow God and his ways, but I didn't quite understand his endless love for me.  It wasn't until later, when thinking back on it, that I realized I have always had a very personal relationship with God.  Despite my fear of divine lightning strikes, I would get angry with God and we'd hash it out, then later I'd apologize, disbelieving my own bravado towards one so great.  Today I know that our relationship was truly a relationship between a father and his daughter.  He WAS the father I so desperately needed and did not have in the flesh.  I now know that he was not angry with me even when I was angry with him.  I now know that he was hurting for me and with me through my deepest hurts.  I would later get baptized again in my early twenties.  I think I believed that I needed to rewash my sins because I'd fallen so far away from God.  I didn't understand that we can never fall too far away.  That's a huge relief considering I would have had to go through the cleansing process enough to drown a person by now!  So though there were specific times that I went through the rituals and even times when the rituals and "religion" of God caused me to miss the heart of God, there has never been a moment that I haven't felt his presence watching over my life.  Ironically, even when I have tried to deny God, there has been a fear that he's mad at me for my denial.  How does that work?  I'm denying your existence, but please don't strike me down for my denial.  If that isn't belief in it's purest form, I don't know what is.  :)  I understand God's perfect love and I understand the idea of salvation.  However, I'd like to get to know my Savior even more personally and I'd like to believe that I am truly worthy of his love for me so that I might live out my life in the confidence that only Christ can provide.