Everyone has one, I suspect. Everyone has a magnet hard-wired into them.
They might not have been born with it. But it came - over time and at different ages in different people. Some people had it implanted all at once; in others it was iron filing by iron filing over years and years.
What I'm talking about is that wounded place in each person - the place where there is great hurt, where the spirit has been badly injured. Perhaps it was a violent assault. Perhaps it was systematic abuse. Perhaps it came from years upon years of being criticized, made to feel stupid, or unwanted, or bad.
Once there, this is the problem: the magnet attracts more of the same. The very behavior that resulted in the spirit's being deeply hurt generates a desire in other people to injure that person in that exact same place. It's uncanny. It's spiritual in nature - and I've seen it happen over and over again in myself and in people that I know, people that I love. Even Christian pastors have remarked about this idea when talking about some counseling situations - an overwhelming desire to say something to the person that will injure him or her. The ones who recognize it for what it is, immediately pray for that magnet to lose its power. Of course they don't say those exact words... they might talk about an evil spirit - which is as accurate an explanation as anything else to describe the phenomenon.
When someone smacks me in my own wounded place, my reaction is far more severe than it would be if they hit me in a place that was stronger. And so it is with everyone - some call it a "sensitive area" or a "soft spot". The end result is that people will jump on top of it like a hen on a June bug, like sharks in a feeding frenzy. Sometimes without even being aware of it. It has happened so many times in my life that I have lost count.
My natural reaction to something like that is to avoid situations that will place me in danger of that happening. (Which is why I avoid certain social situations like the plague. But I digress.)
What is harder, but better in the long run, is dealing with the hurt and rendering it powerless.
Like what happens at the store when you're buying some articles of clothing... they have a magnetized strip somewhere in the garment that will activate the security warning in the store if not "demagnetized" by the checkout clerk. But run a demagnetizing device right over that spot, and it changes the properties of the strip so that it doesn't react when the magnetic beam in the automatic doors hits it. If a clerk forgets, it's usually a simple matter to go back and get it done. Usually.
Sometimes, though, one of these strips doesn't get demagnetized at the checkout ... because it's buried so deep and doesn't respond to the demagnetizing device - and then it sets off Every. Single. Alarm.
That happened with a winter coat I had once. It was poly-fiber-filled (the technical term, I believe, is "poofy") and the store at which I bought the coat didn't succeed in demagnetizing the strip; it was buried too deeply. So ... the magnet was still active in it. Every time I walked into a store (any store with a similar security system) wearing that coat, I couldn't get out of the store without setting off the alarm. Try as I might, I couldn't find the strip; it was lost in the poly-fibers. It frustrated not only me, but store security personnel too. They knew me, they knew my situation and that I was not a shoplifter - and they had even tried to demagnetize the coat for me, a couple of times. Nothing worked. Finally ... I stopped wearing the coat!! A couple of years later, when I was taking it out of the closet to make room for something else, I grabbed it in an odd spot - and felt the short, thin strip through the material - it had slipped down into a spot that was unusual. Nobody would have thought to find it there.
The process of demagnetizing those hurt places inside ... takes time. It's not like Someone waves a big demagnetizing wand over the spot and it's all better. Layers upon layers of "poof" builds up over it - in an effort to protect that soft spot - and makes it inaccessible. The key is finding that spot and bringing it into the open. It might take a while. It might even take opening up the facade and ripping out the protective layers.
It does not happen without pain, sometimes a lot of pain. But once a move is made to put God at the helm of the process, it WILL eventually happen as long as He stays at the controls. Healing WILL happen, from the inside out. And the alarms will eventually stop going off. Life will become normal. Happiness will not be so rare anymore.
I know because it's happened in some areas of my life and it continues to happen in others. Like I said, it's a process. And in spite of the sometimes messy beginning, in the vast majority of cases, it is worth the mess, even before the journey is halfway through.
They might not have been born with it. But it came - over time and at different ages in different people. Some people had it implanted all at once; in others it was iron filing by iron filing over years and years.
What I'm talking about is that wounded place in each person - the place where there is great hurt, where the spirit has been badly injured. Perhaps it was a violent assault. Perhaps it was systematic abuse. Perhaps it came from years upon years of being criticized, made to feel stupid, or unwanted, or bad.
Once there, this is the problem: the magnet attracts more of the same. The very behavior that resulted in the spirit's being deeply hurt generates a desire in other people to injure that person in that exact same place. It's uncanny. It's spiritual in nature - and I've seen it happen over and over again in myself and in people that I know, people that I love. Even Christian pastors have remarked about this idea when talking about some counseling situations - an overwhelming desire to say something to the person that will injure him or her. The ones who recognize it for what it is, immediately pray for that magnet to lose its power. Of course they don't say those exact words... they might talk about an evil spirit - which is as accurate an explanation as anything else to describe the phenomenon.
When someone smacks me in my own wounded place, my reaction is far more severe than it would be if they hit me in a place that was stronger. And so it is with everyone - some call it a "sensitive area" or a "soft spot". The end result is that people will jump on top of it like a hen on a June bug, like sharks in a feeding frenzy. Sometimes without even being aware of it. It has happened so many times in my life that I have lost count.
My natural reaction to something like that is to avoid situations that will place me in danger of that happening. (Which is why I avoid certain social situations like the plague. But I digress.)
What is harder, but better in the long run, is dealing with the hurt and rendering it powerless.
 |
| HERE is where I found this photo of acousto-magnetic strips used in many stores' anti-shoplifting systems |
Like what happens at the store when you're buying some articles of clothing... they have a magnetized strip somewhere in the garment that will activate the security warning in the store if not "demagnetized" by the checkout clerk. But run a demagnetizing device right over that spot, and it changes the properties of the strip so that it doesn't react when the magnetic beam in the automatic doors hits it. If a clerk forgets, it's usually a simple matter to go back and get it done. Usually.
Sometimes, though, one of these strips doesn't get demagnetized at the checkout ... because it's buried so deep and doesn't respond to the demagnetizing device - and then it sets off Every. Single. Alarm.
That happened with a winter coat I had once. It was poly-fiber-filled (the technical term, I believe, is "poofy") and the store at which I bought the coat didn't succeed in demagnetizing the strip; it was buried too deeply. So ... the magnet was still active in it. Every time I walked into a store (any store with a similar security system) wearing that coat, I couldn't get out of the store without setting off the alarm. Try as I might, I couldn't find the strip; it was lost in the poly-fibers. It frustrated not only me, but store security personnel too. They knew me, they knew my situation and that I was not a shoplifter - and they had even tried to demagnetize the coat for me, a couple of times. Nothing worked. Finally ... I stopped wearing the coat!! A couple of years later, when I was taking it out of the closet to make room for something else, I grabbed it in an odd spot - and felt the short, thin strip through the material - it had slipped down into a spot that was unusual. Nobody would have thought to find it there.
The process of demagnetizing those hurt places inside ... takes time. It's not like Someone waves a big demagnetizing wand over the spot and it's all better. Layers upon layers of "poof" builds up over it - in an effort to protect that soft spot - and makes it inaccessible. The key is finding that spot and bringing it into the open. It might take a while. It might even take opening up the facade and ripping out the protective layers.
It does not happen without pain, sometimes a lot of pain. But once a move is made to put God at the helm of the process, it WILL eventually happen as long as He stays at the controls. Healing WILL happen, from the inside out. And the alarms will eventually stop going off. Life will become normal. Happiness will not be so rare anymore.
I know because it's happened in some areas of my life and it continues to happen in others. Like I said, it's a process. And in spite of the sometimes messy beginning, in the vast majority of cases, it is worth the mess, even before the journey is halfway through.
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