Where do we start?
Have you ever thought about life as if it were a staircase? Have you asked yourself what’s the next step? Ever wonder how to get there? I have. I’ve had many times in life in which people have told me just do this one thing, just this one thing. I have looked at it like this:
There is a doorway at the top of a ledge but no stairs to get there. Very simply for someone else there is no steep ledge to “this one thing” but I’m at the bottom of a ledge and there are no stairs leading up…How do I go about getting up there? There are no steps, what is the first step? How do I even find out what the first step is?
It’s getting to the point of figuring out what you need? What’s the problem? If we need one thing to get us moving, what is it? I have had to do some real deep thinking and digging to figure out what the source of the problem is. For me it was issues in the past that were unresolved. I had had some conflict that was not dealt with. Things in the past that I had just pushed down, feelings I was not sure how to resolve and had therefore not dealt with.
The First step
Counseling was my first step. I needed help finding out what the problem was, figuring out what it was that was running through my mind the most that I needed to deal with first. So, I figured that out: let me say for instance it was the awful way my marriage ended and how I took on the blame for things that weren’t my fault or even mine to worry about. I deeply grieved for my children that they would grow up without a dad. I cried and beat myself up for failing to provide that. I grieved over missed birthdays and Christmases and all the little growing stages my kids were going through that their dad was missing.
Let me tell you. That was not my burden to bear, not mine to grieve. I was grieving things and being paralyzed physically for emotional pain that wasn’t even mine. I was too stuck in the what if to be in the here and now. I slowly learned to let go, to stop clenching so tightly to things that left no strength to even crawl forward.
Letting go, can do so much.
How did I let it go? I used to ask my counselor that question. How? I want to but how do I actually do it? Someone I know used to tell me that anxiety was like balloons in your head and what you had to do is to swat the balloon away and say to yourself I’m not going to worry about that. My counselor said that it was like being in a pool with a beach ball and trying to keep that beachball pushed under the water and the constant struggle to not let it get out of your hands and go floating around the pool. I had to learn to let the beachball float around the pool with me and not let it take all my energy. How? That was my constant question. I figured it out and that is what I want to talk about today.
Wow….it only took five paragraphs to get to the bottom of that. Here is how I did it. And you can do it too.
The hard part…
Ok here is the hard part. When I first started this journey, I had to stop putting myself down. I allowed myself no negative thoughts about myself. This was only half of the hard part. The second part was to be ok with the first part feeling yucky inside. When I get to this point in processing something that had come up as causing me a roadblock, I HATED IT. I described it to my counselor as my insides feeling like I put a fish into a pillowcase and having all that flailing from the fish inside of me. It feels gross or even wrong. Up to this point we have conditioned ourselves to get a small hit of comfort from beating the crud out of ourselves and saying mean things to us. That feels like the normal conclusion, so not doing that is going to feel so yucky.
Hold on to this thought > It won’t be this way for long, we can do this, we can get past this feeling and the more we let that feeling be and feel that feeling, the less we feel that feeling. Don’t panic if you get a similar yucky feeling. It is hard to do new things, but we can do hard things.
We must be kind to ourselves. Give ourselves some grace. Everyone has those times that they feel less than pleased with how they handled something, but instead of giving ourselves an internal black eye, we should work our way through what we can do better next time. And leave it at that.
Finding resolution
Who besides me hates conflict and avoids it. What I have found is that if I ask someone who I feel I may be at odds with, if I need to apologize for something, then that opens the door for a peaceful conversation about what has been going on. It takes your finger off the switch that blows things up when we approach conflict with our hackles up.
Sometimes the best thing we can do for ourselves is to eat something and take a nap. God told Elijah in 1 Kings 19:4-8, to eat and drink and take a nap. This gives us time to process what we are working on and to give us some time to seek the Lord and find out where and what He would have us do.
Seek and you will find
Seeking the Lord is so very valuable. We all need someone who knows more than we do, to help us make the best decisions on what to do, that which the Lord has for us to do.
A past struggle for me was studying the Bible. My fear was about doing it wrong (see that negative thinking). The easiest way to start is to just start. Pick a book and start on chapter one. Start with a short prayer asking God to give you understanding about what the passage is telling you. Read the passage. Think about what it says. Read the passage in a different translation. Did that give you more clues about what it means? You could look up the passage in a commentary. Just remember, that those commentators are just common taters. They are people like you and me; they may have studied more deeply than you at this point but ultimately God is the one who speaks to our hearts through His word.
Pray -> 1 Thessalonians 5:17 says to “Pray without ceasing”. We can read the bible to find out about God but only through conversation with Him can we know His heart and what He has for us to do.
Very shortly (hopefully in the next couple of days) expect another post. That one on different bible study techniques.
My hope that this reaches you where you are and helps you to take that next step. The healing from many things that once tormented me has been immense. My one prayer and what I keep telling myself is “I won’t go backwards”. We can make progress up to the next step, onto the next journey, we can have ups and downs along the way. How will we know if we are expecting too much of ourselves? By asking ourselves, “will doing this move me backwards”? Life is full of instances where progress is slow or nonexistent. We can rest knowing that slow progress is ok. This gives us time to look back and see where God has brought us.
Make a ta-da list. A list of those things you have accomplished. Celebrate the good things.
That’s it for now. I Pray that you have a blessed Christmas and a happy new year.