Tag Archives: Abuse/Addiction

confessions of a rebellious soul

This is a repost of a previously published blog post. I’ve dusted it off, added and deleted and tweaked, and now I’m reposting. Because I’m still going through this thing, and I needed to feel the weight of that. I also needed to encourage myself with the fact that I’m still in the fight. That I still want, and believe, that I can walk free from bondage. 

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True confession:  I’ve always hated the word ‘obey’. In all of its forms. In any kind of sentence.  Obey seemed oppressive. Controlling. Demeaning. Surely there was a softer way to put it. A gentler call to do what God wanted.

Surely it isn’t rebellion that feeds these thoughts. Surely. 

The change began a few years ago. That’s when I stopped arm wrestling my bondage to food and admitted that it was stronger than me. Much stronger. Overwhelmingly stronger. And I wept and wept because dammit I was tired. Tired of needing to be free of yet another thing and wondering when the last shackle will fall from my soul and thinking this one will be with me to the end.

Then I read  this book. Really, you should read it.

Turns out, it was step one. I had to stop pretending that I didn’t have an idol. Seriously, how can you be this overweight, this miserable, this unhealthy and think idolatry isn’t your deal?  I say you but don’t be offended. We all know I’m pointing at me. I just like saying you more than I like saying I. I think a lot of us are like that. I think it’s a thing we do. But I digress.

Another confession: I have an idol. Actually, my idol has me. Ha Ha. Get it? Yeah, I know, but if I don’t laugh I’m gonna cry and no one wants to see that. Trust me.

I saw the idol. Admitted what it was. Wished I could just wrestle it to the ground and then kill it. But that’s never going to happen. I don’t know about your idol, but I didn’t pick a weak one. No sir. This thing is the Incredible Hulk of idols.

Anyway. Then, I read about Abraham.

{Did you really think I would tell you a story that didn’t include some reference to the Old Testament? You’re new here, I can tell. It’s ok.}

“The Lord said to Abram:  Go out from your land, your relatives, and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.  I will make you into a great nation, I will bless you, I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing.  I will bless those who bless you, I will curse those who treat you with contempt, and all the peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” {Genesis 12:1-3}

Blessing flows through obedience. From one generation to another it flows through people who obey God. 

Next confession:  While I avoided the word obey, I’ve always known that obedience was a good thing. Something a Christian is supposed to do. And I did. I obeyed the easy parts. But if you’ve been following Jesus for more than an hour, you know there are hard things and mostly I just turned my head from those and pretended to be busy doing something else. Can I get a witness? It’s ok. Don’t raise your hand. This is about me and as much as I want company right now, I think you’d just distract me. Sooth something in me that shouldn’t be soothed. Excuse something I can’t keep excusing. But thanks for offering.

We’ll just move on to the next step in a process that has actually been harder than it sounds. And not nearly as glamorous.

“For just as through one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so also through the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.” {Romans 5:19}

Adam so disobeyed and I so disobeyed, but God so loved the world and Jesus so obeyed His Father and now I am saved. Because of obedience that comes from love.

Love and obedience are holding hands and they can’t be separated and salvation flowed through obedience. From a cross made bloody by a Son who loved  and obeyed His Father, it flowed to me.

Confession number (what number are we on?): I’ve had a number of bondages, but none of them were my fault.  That’s not the confession. The confession is that I believed that lie because it was so much easier than the truth.

Every bondage I’ve had came through disobedience. Not through generational blood lines. Not through curses or entrapment or some kind of disorder. I wasn’t born that way. It is true that food addiction, and addiction in general, runs wild and free in my family line, but that fact does not remove my ability to choose differently. I became addicted to things because I didn’t say no to them. I had a stronghold of anger in me because I disobeyed the scriptures on forgiveness and dying to self. I let the sun go down on my anger for years. Seriously. Years. 

I believe it is not generational sins that caused my bondage to food, it is the fact that I have gone to something other than God to find comfort and solace.

Disobedience brings bondage. And the truth will set us free.

“I will always obey Your instruction, forever and ever.   I will walk freely in an open place because I seek Your precepts.” {Psalm 119:44-45}

Freedom flows through obedience and that’s the truth.

And finally, we come to this…

“Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the Devil.” {Matthew 4:1}

You know the story. We all know that Jesus overcame temptation by speaking the word of God to Satan. Except He didn’t.

Let’s be honest. It’s just us here, so why not? It is not a lack of knowledge of the Word of God that keeps us circling the drain of defeat. It’s our lack of actually doing what that Word says. Disobedience, not ignorance, is our issue, wouldn’t you say, just between you and me?

Jesus overcame temptation and defeated Satan not just through speaking the Word of God, but by obeying it. By refusing to make bread when He was –no food for 40 days– hungry.

(I would have made the bread. I would have made bread out of every rock I could find. I would have surrounded myself with rock biscuits.)

Power and victory flow through obedience.

And that’s where He got me. Because apparently, dying from a bondage to food wasn’t enough motivation. But if you tell me that obedience is warfare that will break the back of the enemy, I’m in. Well, I’m interested in being in. I’ve long ago learned that I tend to over commit.

Confession # whatever: Here I go again. Choosing steps of obedience. I will fall and flail about while doing it, because I know me and I know this thing that is gripping me. I will not beat my idol. The only way to be free is to walk away. To obediently walk away from self-soothing and self comfort. From feeding my emotions. From trying to escape by way of the fork in my hand. (I have no idea what I’m even trying to escape, but if you know my story at all, you know that escape was my very first addiction, and that horse is very much still in the race.) I know from experience that it is harder than it sounds on paper. But I also know Jesus, and that alone gives me the advantage.

So if you think of it, pray for me. However God leads you, pray.

broken and whole

She showed me her little clay pot that was a lovely shade of blue. I was surprised at how beautiful it was. Beautiful and cracked. Broken and whole. Jagged lines ran up and down and sideways all over it. It wasn’t hard to figure out what had happened.

blue pot

Because when something has been broken and put back together…it shows. 

It was therapeutic for her. She took the pot and smashed it and it helped something inside of her. And then she found the pieces and glued them back together and that helped too. Sometimes, we need to see something broken and put back together to really believe there is hope, you know? Hope that we can be put back together. Hope that even though our brokenness shows, we are still beautiful.

I saw the clay pot with jagged lines and I thought of my own jagged lines and I know God’s voice and He spoke that day.

 ‘Light shines best through vessels that have been broken.’

Trying to live this life on our own terms doing it our own way living far from God breaks our lives and our hearts and our very souls. And the prayer is that the breaking will lead to broken.

                              Because repentance is brokenness and it turns us from what is breaking us.

Brokenness is clinging to Jesus because we’ve discovered our greatest need is Him. Brokenness praises Him through pain and things we don’t understand because we know that no matter what He is God and He is good. Brokenness raises hands in surrender not fists in defiance and finally drinks in the grace that puts us back together with jagged lines.

And broken vessels are always amazed by the grace that makes them whole.

broken pot

Life can break us hard but grace leaves us sweetly broken and grace makes us whole. I’ve had the breaking and I’ve been broken and I want to see beauty, not shame, in my jagged lines. I want light to dance from these places put back together by grace. Places where the light shines best.

from disgrace into grace

rebuilding-the-wallFive women sitting in a living room, taking turns reading from Nehemiah. We are studying that book because in the rebuilding of a wall God can speak much about rebuilding lives. And in that second chapter, starting right there in that 17th verse, something speaks to me.

‘Then I said to them, “You see the trouble we are in: Jerusalem lies in ruins, and its gates have been burned with fire. Come, let us rebuild the wall of Jerusalem, and we will no longer be in disgrace.”’

Disgrace. (It rhymes with shame.)

Nehemiah saw his broken city with broken walls, and women see their broken lives in much the same way. And in the time it took to inhale that 17th verse something grabbed hold and won’t let go.

The only way out of disgrace is to step into grace.

And I find myself stepping in, in more ways than one. As I sat on that couch in that circle of women, I had no idea that God was searching something out in me. Something that caught my heart by a painful surprise.

Later that night something was said that pulled a trigger and a dam broke open and disgrace spilled out, and I learned that scar tissue won’t hold a wall together because grace is the mortar of God’s rebuilding.

running awayI discovered, as I tried to stop the flow of pain and tears and years of pent-up shame, that the city walls begin to fall into ruin when a little girl is held to a secret as hands go where hands aren’t supposed to go. Shame makes a little girl feel alone and somehow ‘wrong’, and in her attempts to feel ‘right’ again she runs as hard as she can away from her pain, only to discover she has just been running with her pain. Until one day she falls in a heap. Disgraced.

at the cross

But God. He knew where she would fall and He made sure it was at the feet of Grace.

(Because sometimes the only way out of disgrace is to fall into Grace.)

For days now God has been pulling away scar tissue and putting grace in its place. And for once, I understand His timing. Because the women who are studying Nehemiah are the staff at Grace House. And this is where God has me now, about to step into full-time ministry to women with broken walls. To cities in ruin. And I needed to know that God doesn’t rebuild with scar tissue, but with grace.