My Testimony

My life has been an emotional roller coaster for the past couple months. I’m not yet ready, not sure if I will ever be ready, to share all that has been going on, but I do want to talk about all I have learned in the process of all the hurt and pain. I’ve always believed that God loves me and I know He does, but for the first time in my life I have truly been able to see and feel how much.

I talked in a previous post about how lost I was in the years after my ex’s affair. I couldn’t feel God and I thought He had left me. My faith plummeted, I no longer believed God cared about me, and I questioned Him every day as to why He was gone. I honestly believed that God had left me to deal with all my hurt alone. I shut down completely. I no longer wanted to feel anything because that pain was too great to handle. I begged God every night to not make me wake in the morning, and then I cried out to Him angrily every morning because I did. I wrote a goodbye letter to my children because I didn’t know if I was going to make it out of the darkness; I thought they would be better off without me because I didn’t know how to be a mom anymore. When driving, I would think about steering my car into a tree. I threw away every single pill in the house because I was scared I might lose this battle that I thought I was fighting alone. I sat one day in front of the gun safe, holding a gun in my lap wondering if this would make it all go away. I had never felt more alone in my life.

This was months and months of deep depression and a pit I could not climb out of. Outside, I projected that I was strong, but inside I felt dead. It wasn’t until one night when I was standing outside my boys’ rooms watching them sleep that I realized I no longer could feel anything. I had shut down so completely that I couldn’t even feel how much I loved them. I knew in my head that I did, but I couldn’t feel it anymore. I began to sob because I desperately just wanted to feel something again. I wanted to feel the love I had for them, but I also wanted to feel like I was loved.

It was a slow process coming out of this. Turning my emotions back on meant I had to deal with the pain that I had been running from. I spent years in Celebrate Recovery at my church, leading worship and listening to the steps of forgiveness and redemption over and over again. Then I spent a year and a half in a small group study with a brave group of women actually going through the steps, no longer just listening, but learning and actively working to forgive others and myself and accept the love God offers. I feel like this study opened the door that just recently, I finally walked through. I had all the head knowledge and I knew God was there, but it has taken me years to open my eyes and heart to allow God to show me His love and faithfulness.

As I stated earlier, I had lost my faith while in the darkness. I thought that meant God had left me, but all it meant was that I had turned away from God and couldn’t see Him. It turns out, I didn’t need that faith, I just needed to remember God’s promises to me. His promises that are true and faithful, his grace and mercy that are free, and His love that is unconditional. I don’t have to earn any of that, they are gifts from Him. I could never do enough to earn it anyway! The gifts are too great to put a price on them. He loves me even when I turn my back. He gives me grace when I doubt Him and mercy from the consequences of those doubts. He is faithful to me even when I am not faithful to Him. I did nothing to earn any of this, He loves me so much He gave it all to me. While I was running from God, He was finding me. While I was doubting Him, He was holding me. He had never left me, He was always there doing so much more than I even knew.

This realization has been mainly mind over heart until very recently. I tend to be very analytical and sometimes have a hard time relying on my feelings, so I tend to seek knowledge over emotion. The ending of my current relationship and me diving deep into the understanding of myself and why it ended, has culminated into a deeper understanding of the lengths God will go to for us, for me. While I was beating myself up for the mistakes I had made in the relationship, God was using the people around me to remind me of His love and protection. While very painful, the ending of this relationship is what actually showed me God’s love and protection. I had already been through a relationship with a man who wasn’t following what God wanted, and the consequences he caused then almost destroyed me and did break up our family. It was only because of God’s deep love for me that I made it through. This time, though, God protected me before I had to deal with the consequences of stepping outside God’s will. I didn’t realize it at the time, but God was making sure I didn’t have to once again bear the hurt of another’s wrong choices. God loves me so much he protected me from going through that again! I can’t even begin to describe the joy that brings to my heart. Forget the mind knowledge that I know God loves me, for the first time I finally see it and feel it on a much deeper level. I didn’t turn my back this time, I just trusted Him. I trusted His complete control and the knowledge that He knows what He is doing. He has a plan and it is greater and better than anything I could ask for! If He had followed my plan, not only would I not have felt His deep love for me, I would have been incredibly hurt once again.

I am only human, and can never be perfect. There is no amount of knowledge, faith, or understanding that can give me life without sin, pain, sickness, or hurt. It is in these things, that we learn to rely on God, we learn His sovereignty, and we learn to feel His love. If we do not go through the hard times, we don’t grow. We don’t learn who we are and who God wants us to be without that growth. I faced my darkest times, and in the process began to truly understand who God is. Somehow, as He brought me out of that pit and back into His arms, He gave me strength and courage to stay there even when life gets hard. When faced with another relationship ending, God showed me the lengths He will go to protect me, not from all the pain, but from most of it. If I hadn’t felt some of the pain, I never would have felt Him draw me closer and I wouldn’t have learned how much He longs for me to rely on Him and not myself or others. I wouldn’t have seen first hand that He has control of all things. I will continue to make mistakes and wrong decisions, but God already knows this and loves me anyway. He is such a good God.

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
    neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the Lord.
“As the heavens are higher than the earth,
    so are my ways higher than your ways
    and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Isaiah 55:8-9

Trust in the Lord with all your heart
    and lean not on your own understanding;
 in all your ways submit to him,
    and he will make your paths straight. Proverbs 3:5-6