Bottom is when you stop digging

It amazes me sometimes how my natural tendency to want to give advice, fix, or otherwise control someone else's life can hide from me.

I was warned - many years ago - in another context I suppose.  A camp counselor at a Bible camp told me, when I told her of a recent decision to give God "all my life" - said, "That's wonderful!  just remember though - the problem with a 'living sacrifice' is that it's always crawling off the altar!"

Or was it another context...?  I wonder.  

I do know that denial was a way of life for me then, and for most of my life after that.  It's only in early 2009 that God brought me to the place where I was desperate enough to be honest with myself.  

Looking back, I can be thankful that God brought me the route that He did; there was a time when I couldn't see that (all I could see was my own misery.)  What I can understand now is that my self-delusion had to be crushed to the point where I admitted that my life was totally unmanageable. My efforts to construct a perfect world for myself and my loved ones was falling around me like a house of cards and I was in panic mode. I was drowning in my own self-made watery grave. Like a drowning person who stops struggling and can then be rescued - I was ready to accept help.

Admitting that I needed help from someone outside the church was a big deal for me.  I was bound up by spiritual pride, religious traditions that masqueraded as doctrines when in fact, they were personal preferences based on my level of comfort with certain ideas I had been conditioned to believe were wrong.  

I had so many false beliefs about what real life was like.  They all stemmed from messages I received when I was a child about my own worth, and I formed values based on those beliefs.   I carried them with me into my marriage and eventually into my role as a mother.  

The day of discovery came for me one day about 23 months ago.  Through the help of someone God had brought into my path after a desperate heart's-cry for help... I was confronted with these false beliefs and asked to admit that perhaps my life was in a mess because I'd compulsively dug myself into a hole and couldn't stop digging.  Perhaps the things I believed about myself (and therefore others) were ... wrong.  I was gently asked to stop digging and accept the help that was offered to me.

Eventually, through the process of my inner healing and letting go of the tools I'd been using to dig myself into a hole, I finally asked God to reach into my mess and pull me out.

It was not easy; He had to pull me out through some obstacles I had set up - and it's by no means perfect today.  But He has given me the grace and the experience to be able to tell when I am digging again - and enough of a taste of freedom to willingly offer Him the shovel.