Being used by people, guilt...and the spirit of pride

I swear I have some of the most interesting talks with my girlfriends -- sometimes late at night.

Tonight was no exception, as topics like guilt and pride and being used and rejection float around in my head.

Guess I should be sleeping and dreaming and looking forward to God talking to me through my "visions on my bed" right now -- but I want to write out what I'm feeling. Send this angst into cyberspace and hope it lands on fertile ground.

How I wish I could write the things I really want to write. Seriously, I can, I'm just in that mode of being careful and cautious once again -- wielding this writing gift like the powerful weapon that it is...

Late night writers make for late night readers...

Anyway, I think I should add love and heartbreak and recovery and a plethora of other things to that title above.

Okay, here goes.

On being used...

Yes, I've had people use me for their own benefit, their own pleasure.

There was the silhouette of the boyfriend in my bedroom door in college that I begged to stay -- the one I could see smiling in the dark through his excuses as he left.

There were the people I in turn used to get what I wanted, and tossed aside their hurt feelings as I literally pushed them out of my front door.

All this leads me to...

Guilt

Sometimes we  feel it, sometimes we should but we run away from it.

Sometimes we think of buying people big old phat gifts to make up for the guilt we feel we've caused them. Beg God for the money, in fact.

And He tells us what we should do.

He haunts us like Celie's proclamation in The Color Purple: 

"Until you do right by me, everything you even think about is gonna fail..." 

Pride

Ah yes, that spirit of pride.

Wow.

Basically, I've been forced to look at myself and all the prideful ways I've acted -- especially over the last year. At times we might think we're being the most humble, the one most wronged, when actually we're the ones operating in a spirit of pride.


So yeah, I had to recount the ways I've walked around thinking I'm cute or smart or basically just trying to lift myself above others in order to probably mask the insecurities therein.

"This thing is eating me alive!" Toby Mac sings on the Start Somewhere song below.


"I messed up and you're broken," he says, leaving me wondering what the hell he did to write lyrics like that.


Anyway, back to my lyrics. My words.


I hope the spirit of pride has left me and others. After all, God gives favor to the humble, but opposes the proud.

So Lord help me be humble, because I love all that favor!

He just showed me a shooting star...

Walking my friend outside in the frigid cold 31 degree air, as I continued to pour out my soul and pulled the blanket tighter around my torso in the driveway, I thought about love and heartbreak and recovery and strength.


"Show me Your freedom," I looked up and asked God, and just like that, I saw a shooting star streak across the sky.


Reminds me of the very first blog post on this blog from December 13, 2005 -- oh my God! -- this blog is exactly 6 years old today! Happy birthday, dear blog...

There are no coincidences with our Father.


Anyway, I wrote about becoming Motherless, about returning to Ohio in deep grief once the funeral and repast were over, and I was left with the ravages of my feelings in the wake of her death, God showed me a shooting star in my backyard in Copley, Ohio.

"I didn't cry this much when my mother died..."

That's what I told my friend about my most recent heartbreak, and it was oddly true.


And her death during the wee hours of October 4, 1999, was sudden and shocking to me.


But in its wake, I turned to the Lord Jesus for real, and He's made my life better.


Not perfect, obviously, but going through that valley of the shadow of death eventually gave way to better things on the mountaintops.


So this latest dip in the road is on the upswing, I pray, and I'm already surprised at the way He's strengthening me and changing my desires to not even want to go backwards in some ways.


Other ways, yeah, I'm still leaning on Him to help me through.


But I'm ready for the good part.


Okay, since I'm staring down at 2 a.m. pretty soon here, I think I'm ready for those visions on my bed.


Let's pray for great ones -- ones that continue when we wake up.

Big blessings came into my life after Mommy died and I let Jesus take my wheel -- "Lord, You create my rhymes," LeCrae says.

After this unspeakable and inexplicable heartbreak felt by a few of us, I can already feel the huge release and Christmas miracle the Savior is bringing -- and has already brought. It's like that shooting star was one more confirmation of great things on the way soon.

This next year 2012 is going to be something AMAZING. ;-)