Day Ten

DAY 10

The Heart of Worship

Surrendering all of me doesn’t mean I give up, but I give in. It means that I am letting go of everything that I have been holding onto from the past that I thought I couldn’t live without to survive. Things that I have depended on to make it through the day, things that I need to not deal with feelings I don’t understand, problems in my life I don’t want to face. And there have been a lot of them over the years. Thank God He is a patient and gentle God. If He had decided to just rip everything out of my life all at once because He was in a hurry to see His purpose for my life come to completion all at once, and not give me the time to allow me to let go in such a timely manner, I never would have survived and He knew that. But by allowing me the space to make decisions on my own and the free will to decide on my own when to let go and how to do it on my own, but with His help when I needed Him to, that is what has made me strong. I needed to choose what and when to say no to. He could have stopped it all but what good would that have done me? I would have just sought out something else to replace it just has I always did when what I wanted to fix something when what I wanted wasn’t available. I was always able to find something to escape my loneliness and my pain other that Him. Because it was quicker and more physically satisfying at the moment than just sitting there in the pain and waiting for God to make me feel better from the inside out. So I would find a way to self medicate, fornicate, etc. to relieve the feelings that I didn’t want to experience over and over again like I had all my life. As time when on and as the years of my life continued, those solutions I had grown to depend on slowly began to let me down, failed to work as easy, or became less available. Don’t get me wrong, anything I wanted, everything I wanted is still there and will always be there, but am I willing to go to the extremes I once went to for them? In fact, some of them were now being handed to me on a silver platter so to speak and they weren’t even costing me a dime. Like the first drug I did was a little orange pill that cost me only four dollars, and now the last drug I let go of was being supplied by my doctor in the form of 360 little orange pills at a cost to Medicare at almost ten thousand dollars. And I was enjoying every one of those little orange pills every morning and every evening. But at the same time I was trying to enjoy them I was NOT enjoying any other part of my life. Instead of gaining weight which was one of the goals of taking that medication, I was losing weight. Instead of being happy I was sad and depressed. Instead of getting out of bed and taking care of my self I was isolating and hiding from the world and thinking of suicide the last two months before I surrendered them back to the pharmacy and called my doctor and confessed my addiction to her and told her to take them away from me. And then like all of a sudden someone had taken this huge weight off my shoulders everything that I had been feeling for years was instantly removed and taken away from me. I could breathe again. The burden I had been carrying around for 13 years was gone. I stuck my thumb in the middle of the bible, almost exactly, to Psalms 116 and when I got to verse 16 it read ..” I have loosed your bonds” and for the first time in my life I felt what I had just read. I had read verses like that in the past but just sticking my thumb into that chapter in the bible and reading that exact chapter and verse right after that phone call to my doctor was no coincidence, it was all GOD. And nothing has been the same since. That addiction in my life was the last one that I had to conquer to let go and allow God to begin to take full control in my life. It was the last thing in my life that was stopping him from being the Lord in my life and having access to my heart and my mind the two things that allowed Michael to be Michael, and what a person I have met. It’s like I have been keeping the best person in the world away from myself all these years. I used to complain about having no friends, now I have so many new friends I hardly have time to spend with all of them. The isolation in the bed and bedroom is such a distant memory that when I think about it I wonder how could that have ever been me, I am so occupied with things to do every minute of the day there aren’t enough minutes in the day to do everything I wish to do. And other that the morning shower and feeding myself and taking care of my home and pets, everything else I do in my day is for others. Whether it is worship for God, ministry for church, out on the street talking with people, running errands to complete a task to get something done for someone else, it is all for someone, Visiting someone in jail, in the hospital, going to bible study, to church midweek or evening, making phone calls, writing letters or emails to keep in touch. Isolating I am not. Depressed I am not, Suicidal never again. What has changed? Surrender, total surrender. I haven’t given up, I have given in. Let go. Of everything that I held onto. I have said NO to the things that the world said I needed to be happy, and said Yes to what God said is the only thing I needed to live life to be truly happy with, HIM. Sure I went about it backwards and tried everything else first, but that is just so when someone else is standing in front of me and has anything to throw at me or an excuse to say well I just want to try this or that first, I can say to them,” sorry to late, been there tried it already didn’t work won’t work, better let go of it now” because there isn’t anything this world has to offer that I have not tried to replace God with as a means to find happiness. NOTHING. It is all a lie, a false sense of security that will only lead you to one place, the state of despair with the capitol city of hoplessness, down the street of anxiety. Nice place to vacation but not a nice place to live. Believe me the travel agent sucks.