When wounds surface

    Depending on your childhood, or your early adulthood, you may have many wounds. If you're much like me, these wounds may have hampered your emotional growth via acceleration of what you felt like you must grow into. Often times I forget that I'm only 23, and that I have a lot of time to figure things out and be a young adult. I especially feel the call for maturity because I've felt that very same call since I was young, since I felt the call to protect myself from my siblings or family members. Since I felt the call to provide for myself, and to be thinking about consequences by my actions. It has only been recently that I've been realizing that this call was never one God intended for us, because it created a sick wound where I would try to take the consequences on for the actions of others. I would try to absorb the consequences of my siblings, or of my parents so that they didn't have to fight, or lie. Maybe it was a righteous effort, maybe it was something that was just inside of me, in any case it was born out of woundedness and iniquity. One of the most important things we learn about ourselves and our identities is what makes us us, and what makes them them. Doesn't matter who the "them" is, we all have a "them". Jesus made us to have a community, and if you don't feel like you have a "them" then I would suggest that you find one. My them right now is a community founded on prayer. These are people who have been in the area a long time, who have been spiritual for an even longer time, and who have been doing the work of the Lord for as long as they can remember. I still have much to discover about the depths of this "them" just as I am still discovering the depths of myself. 

    

    Some people believe that they can read other's thoughts or hearts. Other's believe that they have a power or control over other people's thoughts. I think these people are quite the opposite of empathetic, and are believing in lies. I used to be one of these people though, and the more I read, the more I was convinced. There is connection, and pedantically speaking there's a lot more to interpersonal interaction than we can tell or measure at this point in time, but nobody truly has control over the perception of others, nor do we have control over the actions of others, or their desires. I know for me that this caused a lot of grief in my life, and continues to do so, and that is because I was trying to take too much responsibility. The more I realize that I wanted to take all the responsibility for everything because of my desire for control, my need to express control over something in my life, the more I realize that I really had no control, nor will I truly ever have control over the external circumstances in my life. Rather, I will only be able to monitor what goes on internally and ask myself questions. This isn't the same as just accepting our external circumstances and not reacting, or acting out authority and dominion over our time and space, it is realizing the limits of how far your authority and dominion go. In other words, authority and dominion don't often mean control, but influence. YHWH spoke the world into existence, and speaks into it today in such a way that He influences it. Just as He spoke into my life, challenged me to submit EVERYTHING, and lead me, has been an exertion of influence, not of control. So do we have the power to influence the world around us, and it is responsibility to know how to influence and persuade. But we can never control. We can only control HOW we go about influencing and persuading. Some may read that as a permission to manipulate, however that is certainly not what I'm expressing. Respect the "no" and the "yes" of others, learn what makes those decisions, but learn more about how to empower a person to make those decisions for themselves. Rarely are we taught how to say "no" or "yes", and I know for me that this is a big wound, and something I'm learning now. I am reminded of the sovereignty of God, and may spend a blog post or two expressing the sovereignty of the Lord in my life as of late, as it is relevant and awesome what He's been up to.