WHAT DO I NEED TO ABANDON?

I'm writing for Five Minute Friday and this week's prompt word is ABANDON.  

Sometimes the Lord will wake me up with the lines from a song.   Perhaps it’s a song I’m familiar with, perhaps not. 

A while back, I woke up with these lines

What if we rewrite the stars?
Say you were made to be mine
Nothing could keep us apart………….

I heard in my spirit the first line, and then knew enough to remember the next two, but after that I drew a blank.  

It happened more than once, so I decided to find out the context of the song. 

What if we rewrite the stars?
Say you were made to be mine
Nothing could keep us apart
You'd be the one I was meant to find
It's up to you, and it's up to me
No one can say what we get to be
So why don't we rewrite the stars?
Maybe the world could be ours
Tonight

 

I knew it was from The Greatest Showman, but wasn’t sure of its meaning in that context.

I did some research and discovered that the characters were two people in love, who were not supposed to be in love because of cultural restraints.    It talks of fate and destiny and all that secular stuff, and you might wonder why the Lord would use a song like that to speak to me, because He wouldn’t be supportive of something written in the stars. 

We have to remember that He created the stars and He did indeed write His story in the stars, long before people would know how to communicate the gospel message with the written word.   His story in the stars is beyond the limitations of any particular written language, even the ancient ones.  

If that interests you, you can check out God’s Voice in the Stars at this link: 

All that aside, what was the Lord saying to me through these lines and through the story behind the song?

I’ve revisited that lately, and He’s been talking about ‘kingdom’.   

He has shown me more clearly something He first introduced to me as a concept over 20 years ago – kingship.    He is a good king.  Most kings are not.   

My father had a kingdom mentality – based around his own kingdom.    He was more concerned with being our king than he was with being our father.    He was more concerned with being our mother’s king than he was with being her husband.  He was more interested in building a kingdom, and with ownership and control, than connection.    He had kingdom rules and there were penalties for breaking them.  Some of those rules and penalties were spoken out.  Most were just learned by cause and effect. 

My husband was also raised by kingdom rules, and they came from his maternal grandfather, who was a very controlling man, and then those kingdom rules were lived out and enforced by his daughter, my husband’s mother.   

When I got married, I basically transferred from one kingdom with its rules to another kingdom and its rules.   I was conditioned to follow rules to keep the peace, and to earn love and acceptance.    Connection was not as important as compliance.

When we belong to someone’s kingdom, we are really only as valuable as we are useful and compliant.   That lends itself to all sorts of rejection, abuse and neglect, sadly.   

We learn that our value comes from performance and that keeping the rules equals keeping the ‘peace’. 

My father saw me as a pawn in his chess game.   Did he love me?  Sometimes.    Did he use me?   Often, in different ways.  

My husband saw me as part of the package, a way to start building his kingdom.   By his own admission, ours was never a story of being in love, but him finding a wife as part of the plan.   That is easy to see now.   Did he love me?   Sometimes.  Did he love our children?   In his own way, yes.   But he was very much governed by the kingdom rules that he had inherited and rarely questioned.   

His mother saw me as a way of perpetuating the kingdom that her father began.   She honestly believed that was a reasonable thing to pursue, and that’s what love looked like for her.   I watched the Lord break things in her to reach her with His love.   It was a very painful process to watch, but it ended beautifully in her coming to know Him on her death bed.   What a pity it took the breaking to get her to come, but her father’s kingdom principles were so ingrained that she couldn’t see or hear the love story that her heavenly Father had written for her. 

I am now having to unlearn, actually abandon, many of the rules and mindsets that I learnt as a child and as a wife, so that I can be healthy.   I’m slowly working through those mindsets with my Father, and with a Christian life coach.  

Our walk with Him was meant to be, and should be, at the very core of it, a love story, but it’s one that is misunderstood by most in Christendom.   We’re often conditioned and actually taught that it’s a set of rules, dos and don’ts, to appease a powerful and capricious god.  

But His kingdom principles are not about control.   They’re about a love so great, so good, so deep that it displaces every fear.  

That performance-based story is not the story HE wrote about my life. 

Perhaps that’s why He wants to rewrite the stars - the story in my brain - so I can be in a love-based relationship with my heavenly Father, Husband and Friend.   

Perhaps, instead of abandoning myself to build someone else’s kingdom, I need to abandon those lies, mindsets, strongholds, habits and defaults that have kept me from living in HIS.

So the question He has been asking me, and I that have to ask myself, again and again:

What mindsets, treasures, riches, lies and defaults do I need to abandon to truly inherit His kingdom?  

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.   Matt 5:3

For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.    But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.   Matt 6:32,33

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and hid; and for joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.   Matt 13:44

 

 

When I feel like there's so much noise
Livin' rent free in my head
Heaven finds me in a still small voice
And it sounds like grace instead
You remind me who I am
When I look in the mirror and I'm not so sure
Lord, I don't wanna listen to the lies anymore

The truth is I am my Father's child
I make Him proud and I make Him smile
I was made in the image of a perfect King
He looks at me and wouldn't change a thing
The truth is I am truly loved
By a God who's good when I'm not good enough
I don't belong to the lies, I belong to You
And that's the truth