Something in me knows You’re the only one who can heal me

I was drawn to spend time with You instead of returning a phone call or spending time just watching tv with the  family. Even though I’d spent most of the Sunday cooking snacks then cleaning up after myself, and felt a little bad for doing so.  But when I got there, I thought I’d be doing one thing but didn’t “feel like it” once I’d gotten there.  I ‘felt like’ just lighting a candle, turning off all the lights and sitting there. My candle illuminated a picture of the ocean with the sun casting golden light on the whole landscape. I was drawn to just look at it, I settled back in my chair and just looked, soaking up the view.  The next thing I know I am crying because this thought just crossed my mind, that "HE looks at me like that", and enjoys looking at me, like I’m enjoying looking at the beautiful scenery.  I just can’t resist it, it erodes instantly any hardness I’ve gotten in the week.

In my mind I begin to try to explain what it is like as if I am explaining the awareness I have just gotten to a group of friends.  I say it is like the song “If Your grace is an ocean we’re all drowning”.  Only for me right now, it is Your love and it’s as if there is an ocean of it yes, but  I’m in only a hot tub - so nothing dangerous even remotely possible, but still this ocean worth of more.  And I sit there imagining, no, remembering, being at the ocean and seeing there is no end to the horizon as far as I can see in front of me and left to right is all ocean. There is only water as to the edge of the world, all the world that is visible to me being ocean.

And this is Your love for me (and not just me,all those that are His, but I am aware of it for me in this moment and it’s a taste of heaven). You remind me how I saw an ocean like that in my younger years - so long ago that it had been forgotten!

Then You expose a need that has been buried, I saw it in the form of a memory.

Something I have been praying for for a very long time; asking You, Could I please stop being so pulled into the upsets of other people?!  I know it is what I do, counseling and caring for friends and family when they are hurting, and I do it because they are deeply important to me.  I only don’t like it when it becomes a problem, like sometimes when their upset drags my focus away from God.  I get utterly caught up in what they are feeling like it was my own feelings.  Picking up someone else’s emotions, believing them as now my reality makes me unable to help them; the truth is blinded to the both of us.  For me, it also temporarily cuts me off from my lifeline, my oxygen tank under water - You.  So, I’ve been working really really hard to conquer this - doing all the right things etc. Standing on the truth, confessing, “I’m doing it again God.”  All ultimately to no avail, it keeps happening, probably why my group/class was my mind in this conversation with You tonight, because it was an intense discussion and I got totally immersed in it and lost sight of You, yet again.  It makes me not want to be around people, ever again. But that is so not me, not You in me either.

This is actually the exact issue I’ve been asking for help with for months now.  I’ve been dropping vows, I made to fix the world or the hurting people in it, but I didn’t see why those were there, not all of it anyway.  Then up came this really old seemingly unrelated memory of my Dad and then poof!  Bitterness pops up, no denying it.  So I admit it to You, through all of this being aware of the sense of Your amazing love for me.

I’ve been saying as a mantra, ”I am not responsible for them, God is The I Am-and I am not.”

To be continued....