Day Twenty Six

DAY 26

Growing through Temptation

Until I read this chapter, for the third and forth time, I was having a difficult time finding a place to start. It has taken days to get my thoughts together. My views on temptation and Rick’s views on the subject have been far apart from each other my whole life. Some of it came from my upbringing in the church I grew up in and the way things were explained at an early age and the way my young mind understood things to be. I grew up thinking that if I just thought the wrong things over and over again, that it MUST BE SIN because if that was what was on my mind it must also be what was in my heart. And because of the nature of the things that were on my mind I most definitely wasn’t going to talk about them just to see if I was right or if I was wrong about them. So I suffered with my feelings and my thoughts from a very early age. It just wasn’t about homosexual issues, but much more than just that. Today compared to the seventies, the homosexual issue is a much more talked about, accepted in the public eye as we have celebrities and television shows centered around this subject with every turn of the dial. As a young boy, temptation, a thought, a feeling, a desire, it made no difference to me, in fact I didn’t know the difference between them. to me they were all the same. To me just having an immoral thought race through my head made me feel sick, evil, sinful, shameful, ashamed, like I should have never been born to begin with, and like it would be better if I could just die. This started at the age of eleven and continued throughout most of my life. Trying to find anything to occupy my mind to rid myself of these never ending negative feelings about myself was the hardest and most demanding exercise of determination a boy could endure. How to escape my own mind, my own head, my own way of thinking was a never ending task. The best way I found to escape was as a teenager in church. At the age of fifteen when I began helping out in the children’s department, was the first time in my life I had ever received positive reinforcement for anything I did in my life, both from the kids I worked with, the adults in charge of me and the parents of the kids. To hear them say ‘MIKE, my son or my daughter has said such wonderful things about church and the way you encouraged them to want to return, I just want to thank you for what you have been doing.” Some one thanking me for something good I did, this was exactly the opposite of what I can remember growing up hearing at home my whole life. It was praises like this that helped to keep those evil, sinful etc. thoughts somewhere deep down inside of me. But never GONE, just buried.

As a young adult, after leaving my so called SAFE ZONE, and finally giving into the war within my head, my heart, and my mind, I couldn’t take the pressure anymore. Temptation had risen from a feeling to a curiosity to an exploration than began a quest that seemed to have taken on a life of its own. I had to see how things would play out. What was all this inside me? Where would it lead me? What would I find within its calling? Temptation, a world all unto itself, and in order to grow up, I had to go down as far as it would lead me. Once there at the bottom, the struggle to get back up, through all the hills and valleys that I had been lead down was now the growth process of my life. How do I get back to where God was once the center of my life? How do I get back to Him though all the things that had clouded my mind and changed my ways of thinking? How do I begin to release all the things that had their hooks in me so deep that it would seem like their hold was set in me for a lifetime? Was it even possible to find my way back again after over half my lifetime had been spent giving into all the temptation the world and the enemy had offered me and that I had accepted so freely with no questions asked?

The Word of God said that it was. It didn’t say that it was going to be easy. It didn’t say that it was going to be instant. It just said that it was possible. It was grace and mercy that saw me through those years of temptation, now it would be faith and prayer that would see me through to the other side. With these four elements of God, everything in the world under heaven is possible. There are times when I think that there are parts of me that are never going to be able to be forgiven or removed or changed or taken away, but this is just what the enemy would have me to think just before I am ready to move on to the next phase of my recovery, onto the next step in the process of restoring my mind to the mind God gave me in the first place. Another lie born of satan that tried to steal my joy and my happiness that God gave His son for in my place.

It is one step at a time, one though process at a time, One diversion at a time, One addiction at a time, One habit at a time, One lie at a time, and one thing after another until I start over and do it all over again. Rome wasn’t built in a day, putting down my needle starting six months after I started and took twenty years to finally let go of. Saying good-bye to nicotine was another twenty year habit that was an on again of again I’ll try it again one more time until it finally was gone. Thinking that every Friday night was meant for Speed and Sex that would last until Monday took years to change, even though while I was in the middle of it, I knew it wasn’t what God wanted for me. And that it wasn’t what I was looking for or that I was going to find what I was looking for while I was participating in it. But there I was, believing the lies the enemy had so carefully laid out in front of me. The enemy was good at giving me just enough to entice my mind while leaving me without enough to satisfy it at the same time. Giving me enough to get me high but not enough to make it work or last the way it had in the past. But the promise that it would the next time. And I like a fool, a sucker would believe it every time. How many times does a person get lied to before he stops believing them? I am embarrassed to say. How many years did I spend trusting the enemy to again give me what the temptations promised to do for me? Again, more than half my lifetime. How many mistakes did Thomas Edison make when he invented the light bulb? But then how many things did he know NOT TO DO the next time? Well same here. I know many things not to do, many things that don’t work anymore. MORE THAN MOST and have lived to tell about it, that is the real miracle, Surviving all of it at the Will and Grace of God for His Purpose. God purpose is to bring every man unto Himself. And it is up to God to use us to accomplish that task. If it is His will to use me to do that by seeing me through all my temptations and allow me to get though them just so other men women and children can see the power of God, then that is all by Gods doing, nothing I have ever done has gotten me here to this point except one thing, making a choice to follow Him, surrender to Him, say yes to His will for my life. I have given in to every thing that world had to offer. I have fallen into temptation, given into it, ran with it, and failed at resisting it over and over again. If it were up to me, without God temptation would be a losing battle, but because I Love God, I have made up my mind to decide that I would rather say TODAY I thought about serving God and serving others to keep my mind off the temptation, rather than to sit and dwell on the things of the past, the feelings my flesh would love for me to enjoy, the places my head would love to take me. I have twenty some years of memories, but I also have those same twenty some years of remembering who lied to me, who deceived me, and where all those phony promises got me. If a can throw all that back in the face of the enemy, he shouldn’t stand to much of a chance in the future.