I'VE REALISED THAT STRONG IS OKAY

This is a blog post I started to write yesterday, hoping it would fit with this week's Five Minute Friday prompt (REALISE).  It kinda does.   It's not a five minute job, more like fifteen, but it needed to be written in response to many of you reaching out (mostly through the Facebook page) to pray for and encourage me after last week's post.   

This has been my birthday week.    That is significant timing.   I'll explain more later.   

I've felt this stirring in my spirit for weeks.  It's been a huge heaviness, a crushing weight, and it's been hard to concentrate on other things.     I hinted at it last week.   I needed to 'face it, feel it, forgive it and move forward'.   It was soooooo hard.   I had analysed it - well I had analysed the bit I could see, as I do so well.  

Trouble is, I really couldn't see it clearly because it was so deeply buried.  I knew it was painful, or it would be once it really rose to the surface.  But I was keeping busy, making sure I was not alone or quiet too long to think or feel.   I had decided I was going to shelve it for a bit longer, but the darn thing kept flying off the shelf.  

The pressure of that thing was like the pressure of a major boil that needs lancing.  It was constant, sometimes a dull ache, more painful when something 'bumped' into it.   It was also similar to the physical pressure many of us have felt when we're 39 weeks' pregnant and just desperate to have that baby out.   Either way, whether it's a huge wound or a baby that needs birthing, we know we're heading for pain, but we don't really know what's going to happen, though we may have experienced it before.  Often, fear kicks in and we work against ourselves to prevent it.  We want to be free of that pressure, but the fear of the process makes us resistant.   

Well, I've been there, done that, a few times (birthing babies), but a few too many times in the process of healing sore toes, cellulitis wounds and getting emotional healing.  

Despite all my resistance, God won the day!!   He has a way of organising our lives so He can do the surgery that He knows is so necessary.     Firstly, He organised for me to have time alone in my house - that rarely happens.    At the same time, He called His 'nurses' in to pray, fast, encourage and be available.   I didn't see any of it coming this week in particular.  I was happy to put it off.    He organised lots of unconnected people stepping in and stepping up - praying, fasting, speaking up, carrying the load, putting themselves out to be available in different ways.  Not conferring with each other but just responding to a Father, the Surgeon, who was preparing the way, and getting His tools ready for the job.   

So, what was the wound?   One that was much deeper than I imagined, but so toxic and painful that it has affected every relationship I've had with all sorts of people - big relationships and not so big, but still significant.    It also affected my relationship with myself and has led to so much self-sabotage.  

I really thought I'd sorted this one, but it seems I had analysed it, studied it, 'understood' it but not felt it, not really.    I started to face it about eighteen months ago, though that was mostly about the need to forgive, but this was a deeper layer, much deeper.   

So many psychologists and counsellors and authors talk about the 'mother wound'.   I've shied away from it so many times, too many times.   It's just been too hard to contemplate.   Apparently it's normal to dismiss it because mothers are amazing, right?    They're soft and sweet and lovely and motherly.  To contemplate anything different is so counterintuitive and terrifying.    It seems so very wrong to have a problem with your mother, for her sake, but also for yours.   

I mean, if your mother has rejected you, then what are you?   Worthless?  Rubbish?   Broken beyond help?    But the Lord has an answer for even that.   

So many, many times He has brought me back to Psalm 27, all of it, but this week, this verse was confirmed, again.  

Do not leave me nor forsake me,

O God of my salvation.

When my father and my mother forsake me,

Then the Lord will take care of me.   Ps 27:10

Though my mother never left, nor my father, I've come to realise they both abandoned me and rejected me in profound ways and God has been healing that.   But this week, it was about the lies that I have believed since I was a little girl, but particularly since I was 12, when something snapped in me.  

The anger and hatred that my mother sometimes expressed to me and about me was toxic and soul destroying.    It wasn't consistent, nothing ever was with Mum.   But it was there and it was real, it was often violent, and it was toxic.   The Lord has brought me back many times lately to the effect of destructive words in my life.   This verse has been one of them.   

Your tongue devises destruction, like a sharp razor, working deceitfully.

You love evil more than good, lying rather than speaking righteousness. Selah   Ps 52:2,3  

Like a normal child, I assumed Mum was right, that her words were true, because we're designed to believe our parents.  I realise now that so much of what Mum said was lies, based on her own pain and bitterness and her own skewed perspectives.    But  I internalised those lies and they became foundational for me.     And I've poured copious Bible truths on top of those lies, but it didn't shift my core beliefs, though it gave me hope for more, like trying to throw a ship's rope at a dock that you can't quite reach, but one day you might, if you keep trying.   

What emerged this week, while I was talking and praying through all of this with my mentor, was that Mum saw me as a threat, right from the beginning, because I was female.    She had always lived in her 'perfect' sister's shadow and with her mother's open rejection.  And she married a man for whom she was never good enough, who openly flirted with anything in a skirt, who constantly put her down for everything she did and didn't do.     As I grew, Dad was affectionate and affirming with me, his only daughter, (until I was 15) and he constantly and openly compared me to her, and she came up second best.    It was a recipe for disaster - her own wounds combined with my Dad's constant belittling.   

I didn't realise until just this week how much venom was in Mum's words when she was hurt and angry and trying to regain control of her life and emotions.   I don't know what abuse Mum suffered as a child and young person - she hasn't wanted to say too much.   Her relationship with her own mother was very painful.    I'm sure she was acting out of her own pain.   And she was in a very hurtful relationship with my father who was very open about his disdain for her, especially behind closed doors.   

Because she wasn't someone I could go to for comfort, I internalised it.   So, with all of that, what developed for me and in me, because of her outbursts, was a self-hatred for being female, and a sense of guilt for Dad's affection, and for generally being too much - too loud, too pretty, too smart, too strong, too gifted, too useful, too female, too much like my father, too much like his mother, too Australian (Mum is English).   If only I had been a boy, would she have loved me better?    I got a genuine sense of gender dysphoria this last few weeks or so.    

So many memories came flooding back.   The refusal to let me wear pretty things, to buy me a dress, to let me shave my legs, or try make up, or wash my hair to go out, or have clean clothes to wear to school,  or succeed in music, refusal to help me with my constant skin problems, refusal to let me learn to cook because Dad preferred my cooking, the constant public putdowns, the violent rages whenever I was home alone with her.    And the words - I can't remember exact words, but I felt the venom and rejection of those words in my spirit, and it weighed heavy.     

And somehow I managed to stuff it all down for years and particularly the last few weeks, but it all came pouring out on the one day that I was in the house alone.   A friend, who had held me and prayed for me the day before, sent me this song, and it somehow broke through my brain's very sensible resistance and my analysis of the whole thing.   

Jesus moved in on me and I was undone.   The picture was of Jesus coming across the waves and it was powerful, to call me out of somewhere I've been stuck for a very long time, but all while I was fearing that I might drown in the pain that was emerging from the depths.  

I guess the mother wound is pretty deep, just as deep as a father wound.   I'm past trying to figure it out.  I just know Jesus came walking across those waves this week, and met me in that space, with the help of my regular mentor/friend/pastor who just dropped everything and came to be His conduit at that time.    I simply rang for a phone prayer and she was there within the hour (we live out of town).   

Why this week?   His timing.  He knew I would be alone in my house this week, with my girls elsewhere without me organising that.  He also knew that my birthday week would be a good week to make a clean start at being me, and being set free to be me, whoever that is.   I'm still not sure.    But I am discovering a lot of hidden dreams and desires and giftings that He is awakening in me, that He put there in the first place.  That's both exciting and terrifying, because I've tried and failed at them many times, been sabotaged and sabotaged myself.     But, I've realised anew that this life is about pleasing Him, and offering those things back to Him as worship, regardless of what significant others think or want.   And it's about Him being pleased with me, and He is, and that's mind blowing.    That fear of rejection and the guilt for just being myself, for enjoying my life, is gone.   Hallelujah!!   

The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.  John 10:10

What I've come to realise in all that has been exposed and healed this week is this:   I can be strong in who I am in Him, for Him, because of Him, and back to Him, without being concerned about how broken people might hate me and resent me for it.   I've come to realise that they're not secure enough to let me be who I am and that's okay.   That is for them to figure out.  I will live my life for Him, to Him, from Him and in Him from here on and I plan to enjoy doing that.  

For of Him and through Him and to Him are all things, to whom be glory forever. Amen.  Rom 11:36

So it's good boundaries and sometimes goodbyes.    Can't wait to get stuck into reading that book that I bought myself as a birthday present this week.   

On top of that, I got to spend my birthday with my church family, who I've come to realise love me, as is, where is - enough to correct me yes, but also enough to send birthday greetings, to share breakfast and dinner with me, to hold me while they pray, to cry with me, to drop everything and come, to speak God's truth into my life, and call me higher into what they already see and know.    

There's lots more I can say about it, all analytical of course, and it helps me to understand it, but that's for another day.     These verses and truths have spoken loud this week.   

Shake yourself from the dust, arise;

Sit down, O Jerusalem!

Loose yourself from the bonds of your neck,

O captive daughter of Zion!  Isa 52:2

Break forth into joy, sing together,

You waste places of Jerusalem!

For the Lord has comforted His people,

He has redeemed Jerusalem.  Isa 52:9

But now, thus says the Lord, who created you, O Jacob,

And He who formed you, O Israel:

“Fear not, for I have redeemed you;

I have called you by your name;

You are Mine.    Isa 43:1

In that day it shall be said to Jerusalem:

“Do not fear; Zion, let not your hands be weak.

The Lord your God in your midst,

The Mighty One, will save;

He will rejoice over you with gladness,

He will quiet you with His love,

He will rejoice over you with singing.”  Zeph 3:16,17 

Who says

I'm with you there in the dark

It won't always be this hard

I'm holding your broken heart

And who says

I'm not scared of your fears

All your doubts, bring 'em here

I'm wiping all of your tears

He does, He does

It's just like Jesus

To give me strength when I need it

Hope when I cannot see it

When I'm falling to pieces

It's just like Jesus

To put me back on my feet when

I was out past the deep end

You wanted me when nobody wanted me

Now I just wanna be

Just like Jesus

Just like Jesus