Why I Created This Blog

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Helping others find hope & freedom is a longing in my heart because I’ve known the pain of darkness, and my heart goes out to those who have known it, too.  It saddens me to think of people suffering so.  It’s not only terrible to feel hopeless, it’s even worse to feel hopeless and alone in your secret, inner struggles.  I know this because those secret, inner struggles began in my life at the small age of 4.  The many emotional, psychological, physical, and even spiritual consequences of being violated as a child resulted in me going in and out of varied degrees of depression, anxiety, and anger throughout most of my life.

As a small child, I knew something was wrong although I didn’t yet have the mental and emotional capacity to understand or process it.  During my early life, I experienced sexual violations and both observed and endured verbal, mental, and emotional abuses.  I also experienced great loss when my parents divorced at age 14. 

These resulted in insecurities, shame, fears, recurring thoughts, suicidal wishes, and a generally negative mindset that sucked the innocence and joy out of childhood—and thus out of my adult life, too. 

As an adult, when I began to process more deeply all the trauma that I had experienced in my upbringing, I entered a long period of clinical depression in my early 30s.  I didn’t think I would ever break free from a constant sense of oppressive doom.  I truly felt like a wretch, trapped in the depths of depression.  At one point, the lie that played in my head constantly was “My life is a nightmare.” I believed that I would never break free; it was a most horrific experience.

I’m thankful to be able to say that that was years ago, and I have long been free from those lies, but for a prolonged season, the illusion that life was devoid of joy and that I was going to be forever trapped in a pit of suffering was my perceived reality.  I also worried, believed that life was hopeless, and I just didn’t have the motivation and emotional wherewithal to get past it.  I lived with a constant sense of anxiety and irritability; anxiety attacks became common for me. 

Although I was too small to know how to seek deeper healing as a child, I knew I needed an outlet, so I kept diaries; I needed a safe place to “cathart”—to write out all my feelings of sadness, anger, and confusion—to confide the ravages in my soul to someplace, to get the pain out of my system.

These diaries transformed over time.  At first, they were an outlet where I wrote about my daily experiences to no one in particular and just vented my destructive feelings and thoughts to an empty void.  Aaaah, the content of those diaries!  A child who hasn’t been shown how to healthily express pain and hurt feelings—yet who has been exposed to bad words—will write diary entries that can melt innocent eyes!

At fourteen, when I met God, my diary entries became letters to Him—referring to God as “Him” reluctantly because most of those who had violated me had been hims.  I was comforted later to find that God is not just a he.  We humans–both men and women—are crafted after God’s image; that means God’s image includes both male and female traits.  He created both women and men, and He designed us to be like Him, so the feminine traits we have are God as well.  God is not just a man; He’s not just a woman either; He’s not a human at all.  God is much, much more than that.  Humans just refer to God as “Him” to make it easier to refer to God without using the same word over and over again. 

But I digress!

As my relationship with God grew, journaling became less of a one-way monologue where I spilled my guts out to a silent God.  My entries became more of a meaningful conversation with Him.  Through messages and words from the Bible and conversations with people who really knew God’s heart, I began to learn to recognize His voice and discovered that He had things to say to me as well; God is responsive, kind, loving, comforting, and compassionate.  He understood what I was going through; He empathized; He cared.  God spoke life over my hurts and shared my pain. 

My view of God as a cold, distant, angry, condemning authority figure who watched me suffer from afar was gradually replaced by the truth—that He is personal, merciful, loving, and kind, deeply caring and involved in the details of our lives.  God even desires to know and reach the depths of our hearts.

These conversations with God were led by my growing knowledge of God’s heart, His Spirit, and the Bible—which presents wisdom and experience from His mind.  Over many years, I became more familiar with God’s heart as I wrestled with the demons that continued trying to keep me down.  I had the help of the Bible, messages, worship, and others who had real relationships with God.  Counselors who have active, personal relationships with the Lord are key to my freedom; they come in the form of various people such as trained professionals and my husband who are grounded in their bonds with the Lord and led by the Holy Spirit.  God has used many sources to bring healing, including medication for a season.

Through this journey, I have learned much and found great hope, healing, and freedom.  I am certainly not completely free of struggles and won’t be until He calls me away from this broken world and physical body, but I want to share here what I’ve received from the ultimate Healer in hopes of helping others find comfort and hope as well.  God wants us to know we’re not alone and that freedom is attainable!  

In sharing these reflections, my desire is to alleviate that feeling of utter loneliness and to spark a hope in the Lord—a light that will break through the darkness and give us a refreshing breath of His freedom and life! 

If you’ve ever felt the pain of rejection, neglect, abuse, anxiety, fear, loss, or abandonment; if you’ve ever felt yourself drowning in the chaos, suffocating in sadness; if you’ve doubted yourself or experienced inferiority and depression for the myriad of reasons that the world provides in abundance, there is hope. 

There is hope for a joy that cannot be stolen, hope for a light in the tunnel, hope for calm in the calamity, hope for peace amidst the pressure.  Join me in this quest for hope from the ultimate source: our sweet and loving God. Together, we can seek and find the Lord, experience His healing love, and step into the fulfilling lives that He always meant for us to have.