Phewwww

What a day, what a week. This has been proabably the most spirituallly exhausting and growth filled week since I don't know when. It hasn't been growing like cleaning up my act or finally having 8 hour quiet times (or even daily...) but it's been that kind of growth where Jesus is like morphing your insides to the point where you have Jesus stretch marks. It's kind of painful & exhausting but comforting and exciting all the same.
Lesson #1: When God wants me to know something, I must be a stinking horrible listener because He has to keep telling me in loud bullhorn like ways.
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So I'm at Wednesday night worship and I'm having that like natural lip-quiver where you know the spirit is moving and you're just not sure what direction He's going in. I know I'm brokedown about something but not sure what so I begin to do what I do best which is analyze my day & current life situation and begin to beat up on myself for all the dumb things I've done and said and then when I'm mostly done with that I move on to analyzing what's been said to me and the thousand little words of discouragment I've heard when all of a sudden - it dawns on me how incredibly exhausting it is to do this over and over again. And I do it CONSTANTLY.
When something is a big part of your life and it changes and you forget that's weird. If tomorow I woke up and remember around 10 am that I was married, that would freak me out but that's EXACTLY what I've done with my heart. My biggest struggle was always always always performance anxiety and being way too much of a people pleaser and then I met a sista who pin-pointed it and beat it out of me. One of the best, Laura Troutman - rolled up into my life in an awesome way - that shook me and changed me forever. When we first met, she well... hated me. (The way christians hate... not like wanted to kill me). We were christian enemies - but in my traditional fashion, I couldn't have people not like me so I set my sights on winning her over and she wasn't having it. Finally God brought us together and through some crazy life events, God helped me see that it's okay for people not to be pleased with you, it's okay to let people down, and life is not about making everyone else happy.
The problem is - somehow when I moved to Charlotte and started trying to make a new life, It's like I woke up and forgot I was married to this deep seated issue of performance. I just totally forgot and so instead of forgetting it and conquering it by default - I just let it run rampant and absolutely rule my thoughts. My job is performance driven, my church work became performance driven, my marriage, and especially the friends I made or did not make became centered around whether or not I had lived or acted worthy enough. The worst part is, not only did I not notice these unhealthy thoughts - I did nothing to let stop them from having complete control.
So thankfully, Laura gave me a visit on Saturday. Through her, God showed me that (aside from work sometimes) I'm not in a situation where I'm surrounded by people who let Satan lie to me through them. My husband doesn't call me ugly, my friends don't call me stupid, people don't say to my face that I'm a worthless fake of a person. But because I can be neurotic and OCD, I hear my someone say "What are you doing tonight?" and for the next four hours I'm pretty sure they were trying to tell me that I'm selfish and need to help out more and not relax on my night off. I mean, I really let my mind go to that place. I'm been asking Satan to come in and twist my thoughts - he doesn't even have to convince them to say hurtful things - I've been telling them myself.

So all that said - I'm trying to be done with that. I'm going to try and let God fix it once and for all before Laura moves to Slovakia in May cause I'm not trying to mess with that stuff anymore. Plus - I'd hate for her to have to make a trip home to intervene. It's definitely something to pray about.

Here's a quote to leave you on:
"The Reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellarful of fifteen hundred-year old, two hundred proof grace - of bottle after bottle of pure distillate of Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly. The word of the Gospel - after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about the perfection of your bootstraps - suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home before they started... Grace has to be drunk straight: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale; neither goodness, nor badness, nor the flowers that bloom in the spring of super spirituality could be allowed to enter into the case". Robert Capon

Let's get crunk family -
Jess