Packing for the Journey

Rejoice with those who rejoice, mourn with those who mourn.

We all carry something and what that something is determines who we are and whether we will be joyful or overwhelmed. Carrying the experiences of your life is not the overwhelming part but it's the emotions that are attached to those experiences! Imagine you're loading a back pack for a long trip and you want to bring all the experiences of your life with you so you can share them with people along your journey and also use them to empathize with those people. What would be easier, to write each trial and lesson on a small piece of paper and carry it or to write each one on a brick?  The paper represents your stories and the bricks are the actual emotions attached to those stories. Each brick is an emotion such as anger, bitterness, shame, pride, unbelief, fear, resentment....You would not be able to carry all those bricks in your backpack, you would breakdown at some point, be weak and ineffective, you would feel irritable and soon your health would deteriorate and your soul would suffer. We were not created to carry the past and its pain or the future and it's worries! God created us to lay our burdens on Him and for us to travel our journey with only our stories.

If we carried all the emotions attached to our stories in our backpack we could never be the bearers of good news, taking God's message of freedom to others. Are you carrying a heavy load? Are you bringing all the bad feelings that accompany your life's story with you as you try to show others about God's healing and freedom? He wants you to stop right now and go through your backpack with Him, removing each brick of painful emotions and as you tell Him each story He will record it on a small piece of paper. Each brick will be replaced with that lighter load so you'll be able to carry them. Sure, a backpack full of paper will be cumbersome and annoying at times but that is our cross. Christ carried the heavy cross of our sins at Calvary and His desire for us is not to carry our own burdens, only our stories, about His forgiveness, mercy, grace and love! We are to carry the stories not the burdens of bricks.

After you sit with Jesus and do this with every painful experience of your life, your load will become lighter and your story will be one of deliverance! The Holy Spirit will guide you through this whole process by bringing memories to the front of your mind, revealing them so He can heal them. It's takes time but each step will profoundly change you! Rather than being hunched over with a backpack of bricks, you'll begin to stand up straight and people will begin to see Christ in your life rather than your old complaining character of victim-hood and self-pity! I'm not the same person I used to be and that's because my journey of doing this process with God has finally brought me to a point of epiphany! I can see the power of Jesus in all my circumstances now, and the times I do fall back into self-pity are less and less severe because the time I've spend with Him has made me wiser. God's loving pressure in my life is turning my lumps of coal in to diamonds!

You can't run away from your own shadow in this lifetime and none of us is perfect. We will never be sinless but we will sin less, and our stories can transform us if we will finally hand over the painful emotions and trust them in our Heavenly Father's hands. The events of my life knocked the joy out of my soul for a long time. Everyone saw the vibrant, funny me but inside I was silently screaming from a dark pit of panic. I saw only me but now I see Jesus in it with me! I was talking with my nephew the other day about inner fear and I told him that everyone has it and each person just covers it with something different. Some people use anger to push people away so that they never have to show their vulnerability. Others use quietness, humor, silence, jabbering or they might even isolate themselves from others. All these things are what satan uses to keep us from God's tender love. Whether we are weighted down by our bricks, bound by vines of lies or live a life of freedom in Christ, it's all a result of choices we make moment by moment, day after day. Choose wisely dear ones because there are people out there that need you.

1 Peter 4:8...Love covers a multitude of sins.