There are times that I feel the dreaded possibility that people cannot change. Can they? Do they? And for good? Once and for all? My entire life has been driven by this desire to change, to grow and to exceed where I now live in my mind. Sometimes it is so overwhelming that I can literally feel the weight of my self. It isn’t a good place to be. Like Frodo and the ring, it becomes the focus of all my attention, all my thoughts.
I have found myself struggling again and again with the same issues, the same patterns again when I thought I had made progress, when I thought I had grown. And it has led me to wonder if I can change or if the programming of my early years are permanently ingrained in my being until I cross over. I wonder if they patterns, these ways of thinking and living are in my DNA like the number of hairs on my head. At one time I believed I could change and I experienced that change, but it didn’t last.
For those of you who seem to breeze through life with good, healthy and whole person (few and far between), this might be hard to understand, but for those of us who suffer with depression, anxiety and the myriad of other manifestations of a stunted soul it is real. I have never been able to brush feelings off, to stuff them or to deny them. It somehow feels false and untrue to do so. So this last week has been a tiresome revisit of the same old familiar friend. Although it doesn’t visit as often and I have had longer and longer absences of the depression, when my old, tired visitor comes I am at the beginning again, starting over.
I don’t know that we ever get full release from these things. I don’t know that we ever are finished in this broken and fallen state of life. We can improve and learn new ways of coping and handling and living with these thorns, but our lack of complete freedom and release is a reminder that we do not belong here with our scarred and broken selves, but are made for a greater purpose and for a more brilliant existance in another place. But here, in this life we constantly battle ourselves and our inate will to be destructive, to be in control……..
1 comment:
Oh, how I can, with great distress, relate to your post. ugh….I tell myself over and again that I will not always suffer from my anxiety, but the truth is, I don’t know if that is true. Since I am being honest, I would suspect that I will always struggle with it in varying degrees. I want to strive, always, to not suffer from this dreaded mental torment but I am beginning to see that the reason I keep coming back to the same place is that I want to work out the solution on my own terms.
I read something yesterday that has me thinking differently today:
“You cannot perhaps hinder the suggestions of doubt from coming to you any more than you can hinder someone in the street from swearing as you go by; consequently you are not sinning in the one case any more than in the other. Just as you can refuse to listen to the doubts or join in their oaths, so can you also refuse to listen to the doubts or join in with them. They are not your doubts until you consent to them and adopt them as true. When they come you must at once turn from them.
Give up your liberty to doubt forever. Put your will in the matter over on the Lord’s side and trust him to keep you from falling. Tell him all about your weakness and you long-encouraged habits of doubt and how helpless you are before them. Then commit the whole battle to him. Tell him you will not doubt again, putting forth all your will power on his side and against his enemy and yours. Then “keep you eyes on Jesus” (Hebrews 12:2), looking away from yourself and away from your doubts. holding fast the profession of your faith without wavering, because ‘he who promised is faithful’ (Hebrews 10″23). Rely on his faithfulness, not on your own. You have committed the keeping of your soul to him as the faithful Creator and you must never again admit the possibility of his being unfaithful.
Cultivate a continuous habit of believing, and sooner or later all of your doubts will vanish in the glory of the absolute faithfulness of God.”
I don’t know if this is true, however, I have never practiced it because I have held onto my “libery to doubt” for so many years. I have personally given the battle over to the enemy because I am more afraid to trust my whole existence to Christ than I am afraid of my home-made fears. Wow! That was hard to confess.
Comment by pam k — 3/11/2006 @ 10:25 am
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