Hello Again...It Has Been A While

It has been over five years since I walked away from this blog. To be honest, I had forgotten about it. I thought that I had deleted it long ago, but here it is just as I left it all those years ago.

I would like to tell you that the story ended exactly where I left it, with the past erased and all things right with the world, but in truth it took several years of fighting, falling, and getting back up again to finally find myself where I am today.

Even now, I find that there is much work in my life yet to be done. I have a long way to go before I have this thing right, and I'm not sure if even then I'll have it all down the way it ought to be. I guess the greatest hurdle I still have to jump is understanding that there isn't a "way it ought to be," but that it is what it is, and I am to live with that.

I do regret having deleted all the posts that I had saved here. I missed out on an incredible opportunity to look my twenty-four year old self in the face and say, "look at that which God has delivered you from through Christ Jesus."

One of the best things I have learned over the years is that I cannot have what I desired most during the time in my life when I was blogging here, namely, to make peace with my past. I learned that I could not go back in time and make the awful things right. I'll never be able to go back and talk sense into an abusive father and force him to have the relationship he ought to have had with his children. I'll never be able to go back to a religiously and spiritually abusive church and force them to walk in the love and the truth in which they ought to have walked. And I'll never be able to return to my younger self and force him to respond and react as he ought to have responded and reacted.

I have also learned that I am to own only what is mine to own. I cannot force the other players in my life to own up to their faults and confess their transgressions, but I can make such a confession, and somewhere, finally, over these past few years I have done the very thing that I wanted, demanded, and expected of others. This confession, and the ability to live without the need of their approval, has lifted much of the weight I once bore upon my shoulders.

All of these thing that I have learned would not have been possible if not for the work of the Lord Jesus Christ in the heart of a very angry and very immature man-child. Out of selfish ambition and selfish desire I was driven to the Word of the Lord that I might find ways to condemn the wicked of my past. I sought curses and charges against them, and instead I found God. I found Jesus crucified for my sin and transgression, and resurrected for my salvation.

In Christ, the entirety of my life is dealt with. Not only the things that I have done, but also the things done to me have been settled at the cross. I have been reconciled to God, and I am no longer a slave to sin and death, but a slave to Christ.

This is not to say that there are not days that I don't look back with a bit of sadness over all that has transpired; I do. I do miss some of those I have lost, and there are times that I do catch myself thinking "only if." But in comparison to the life I live -Christ in me- I count all that is now gone as garbage. It has no value and no significant pull on my life. It is meaningless, and I have been set free of the chains which once threatened to drown me.

It is my hope for those who struggle as I have struggled, who wrestle over and over with the shadows of demons long gone as even I -from time to time- still do, that you might look to the reality of Hope. That while we have a tendency to blame others for the ill and dis-ease in our lives, we might look at the mess and the hurt we have caused by our own hands. That we may see ourselves for the broken cisterns that we are, and that we might repent of our own sin, and turn to the One, that is, Christ Jesus, who has fulfilled the requirements of our debt and is willing to reconcile all to God who look upon Him and trust in Him.

May you, too, repent and believe in Jesus Christ; His life, death, burial, and resurrection offered up for the salvation and reconciliation of all who believe.