Day Twenty Three

DAY 23

How I Grew, and I am Still Growing

Sure the seed was planted, a long time ago. October 9^th, 1969. My mother told me to WALK, but inside I wanted to RUN down the isle into the waiting arms of Pastor George Peek of North Long Beach Brethren Church. I wanted two things, for God to save me from the things I knew made Him unhappy with me, and for Him to save me from my father. After that day when the days and months and years past, and as I would call out to Him to save me from my father, and it seemed like He was absent or didn’t hear me, I wondered, why He didn’t listen to me. Why wouldn’t God pay attention to a little boys cry for help? I didn’t stop believing that there was a God, I just didn’t understand why everything I heard about Him didn’t seem to come true for me.

Then as I reached puberty, those horrible confusing years that really shut me down and locked me inside myself, God got even more distant. I wouldn’t speak of anything I was feeling or thinking to anyone except God and He didn’t seem to be hearing me because I just wanted all that STUFF to just go away and the more I did, the more it just seemed to get worse. Umm, Nature, no one told me what to expect. But somewhere deep down inside I just felt that what I was feeling wasn’t normal and that something was broken and it was God’s responsibility to FIX IT so I prayed and cried out inside to Him every day to FIX me, to change me, to make me normal (what ever that was or is) but nothing ever happened, the feelings I had just got stronger and stronger, so again the absence of God was there all the time. I heard that if you asked God for His will to be done that He would do it. Well I couldn’t think of anything more in line with His will than to take these abnormal feelings and desires out of me but they never left. I used everything I could to mask or disguise them. I tried removing myself from any temptation that I could think of. Wasn’t that the right thing to do? I became involved with the children’s department at the age of 15 which took up all of my time. I became better friends with them rather than friends my own age just to keep my head away from the temptation that I had at school all day. I loved telling stories that I had grown up with to children. I sometimes felt like even though God didn’t listen to my prayers, the kids still needed to hear about who He was and that they needed to hear about Him so I wanted them to know about Him. I remember the first 4^th grader I led to the Lord on the back stairs of the church one afternoon. He was sad and upset about something and I asked him if he knew that Jesus died to make everything better for him. And with tears in his eyes he prayed and asked Jesus to come into his life. And as the years went by I watched Sterling Zimmer grow and grow into the most amazing spiritual giant I had ever seen. For the next five years he became one of the most smartest, most popular, most well liked young men in the church and at his school. Every week when he arrived at church he would stop by my classroom to say hello, then when he got into Jr. High school he went to the same school I attended and would stop by my home to visit every day. Just to know that I had this kind of an effect on him made me proud to know that I had an influence on a little boy’s life like that. But at some point at the age of twenty one I had had enough of waiting for God to answer all my prayers, ten years I though was enough and I left church and family and my values to try and find out those answers to all those questions I had rolling around in my head for myself.

So what happened to the seed that was planted at this point in my life? Did it just die? No, unless I died it couldn’t die. In a way, God’s voice seemed to get a little clearer. Because I was now hearing things that bothered me, my conscience. I didn’t’ hear this before because I had never acted on my feelings. But now I was taking all those thoughts and curiosities and making them a living thing. Now instead of trying to find something to take the place of temptation, I needed to find something to take the place of God and the guilt I was feeling, not as easy a task. Pleasure was temporary, but it was also the cause of the guilt. So more pleasure seemed to work for a while, which piled on more guilt. But when I found chemicals to go along with the pleasure there went the guilt and there is when I thought I had reached the point of no return. Satan had his hook and found his hold on me, he found what worked to keep God far away and me safely bound and tied. I struggled for years within my addictions to break away and find my way back to a life I once remembered. Every time I thought I had made it safely to a neutral corner, the enemy found a way to drag me back into his web of lies one more time. When would this end I would cry out to God? How much more of this can one man take? It was like Moses and the children of Egypt being taken to the edge of the promised land for a glimpse of it and then lead away just as they were about to take the final last steps every time for the last five or ten years. Something always seemed to stop them at the last and final moment of there redemption.

Well it finally had to come to an end sometime. Everything has a beginning and an end. Even the Bible starts out with the words “In the Beginning” so I knew that what had started in my life must have an end to it someday. My last and final chapter of letting go and letting God ended in February of 2008. For thirteen years I had been on a medication for a medical condition that turned into an addiction that the enemy used to keep me tied up and bound. It was the only thing in my life that I was holding onto that was keeping me from allowing God to have total access to all areas of my life. I couldn’t function with it or without it. I felt I needed it because I had used it for a valid reason at one point in my life, but as time went on I had learned to abuse it for a whole lot of other reasons and learned to use it to satisfy a whole lot of other feelings I didn’t want to face in my life. I knew for a long time that this was what was standing in my way between me and God. For a long time I had so much fear of “What will I do without waking up and not having this to take in the mornings? How will I make it through my days having to deal with the feelings that I know will come crashing in on me? Who is going to be there when I begin to cry all day long?” These were just some of the things I was worried about when I began to think about letting go of the last drug and last addiction in my life. But in reality it was like God pruning off that last of the dead branches that were still attached to me. The biggest and the heaviest ones and YES it was going to HURT, A LOT. But it was those last branches that were sucking up all the life out of me.

So it was time to let go and let GOD. How did I know it was time? For the past few months He had been preparing me for this final act of commitment. He lead me back to a place I said and promised I would never return to. The only promise I think I had ever made to God and kept, ever. He placed a Pastor in my life that was prepared for me. He placed church members in my life that HE prepared for me. He placed me in a Church that was prepared for me, or as I have said before in my past so many times “HE SET ME UP” for this very moment. I knew at this very moment that it was NOW that I had to say NO, this is the END. This will not, this can not go on any longer. I made two phone calls. The first one was to the pharmacy to have the refill I was on my way to pick up put back on the shelf, and the second phone call was to my doctor to tell her that she needed to take this drug away from me and not allow me to have access to it any more because I had been abusing it. It was at that very moment I felt the Lord release all the depression, all the misery I had been feeling for the past few months. He even put my thumb in the middle of the Bible to Psalms 116 and when I got to verse 16 it read “I have Loosed Your Bonds”. No thumb could have just picked out that very verse at random like that at that very moment. But God could! No pill from any doctor could have taken away what I had been feeling for so long just like that, but GOD could! No drug could have made me feel better without the side effects like that, but GOD DID! I didn’t even ask for any of that to happen, I just made a choice to put an end to something that I didn’t want in my life anymore. I made a commitment to myself and a promise to myself and to Him to live without the help of anything other than God in my life any more no matter what the outcome was going to be without the drug. And He met me right where I was instantly. The reasons the drug was prescribed were not working anyway. The reasons why they were being prescribed are being met now that I am not taking them. I did my part, God is doing His. No more life sucking branches attached to me anymore.

Since the pruning has been done so painlessly, real growth has taken place. Feelings have risen, feelings have been put on these pages, but with very few tears. They’re more like memories of life that took place, a story of a man that lived through something that got him to a place that has brought him to the promised land still in one piece, with a sound mind, with a pure heart, with an honest Love for God and a heart for people that I can say to everyone I meet,

Have you fallen in Love with Jesus, I have! Would you like to meet Him. Let me introduce you to Him.