As I reflect on the last couple years or so I realize, direction is difficult to find when everything is a shade of gray… This reminds me of one of the final paragraphs of my last post (over a year ago from this one)

“A man born blind knows nothing of color, of light, or how it can be bright. He knows nothing of the sun but the warmth on his face, a shadow of something greater. We are all thus born blind, but knowledge by itself does not teach us to see, we see simply by opening our eyes and believing what they show us…”

It makes me see a part of my own struggles with mental health as not just an internal struggle but one made harder by my actions.

We are emotional creatures, but I’m not a very good person at managing those. Oh I can be fairly agreeable whenever I want to be, but to actually understand what I feel or (to even more difficulty), explain it to others. Those are not easy things for me to wrestle with. I’m sure I am not alone in that struggle either, but sometimes you have to walk a path and fight for something before you know why or what you are fighting for…

Ok, that’s a little hard to follow maybe, but if you have struggled like I have maybe you get it… I hope. In short, when you feel a lot of things at once it takes time to unravel them. I have fear, grief, pain, worry, anxiety, and sorrow, fill me for the last couple of years. It’s been a journey to say the least, but I think I’m better for it. I wasn’t in the same depression I found myself in back a couple years before that, but it was in part the journey to get out of there.

Speaking of journeys, I’d like to share a little bit of my spiritual journey as well. It’s not something I’m going to push too much at this moment but maybe it might help someone as it played no small part in getting me out of the pit I was in. So, I’ll be somewhat brief but we are condensing over 20years into a few paragraphs so not too brief.

I came to believe and put my trust in Jesus when I was 8. I understood that made him Lord in my life and that meant obeying his rules, and living to serve him. I knew I would fail, but all the people I had seen go through this process had changes in their actions and behavior that I never could have believed if I didn’t see it for myself (a few years eariler my Dad was Saved and the change I saw in him had no small part in my grounding that there was a genuine God and this was how to find him).

What I didn’t know (partly because all I knew were older people who came to Jesus as adults) was it didn’t always work like a thermostat. I had thought sanctification was like getting one degree more like Christ at a time. I had Salvation and assurance that God was in control, but sanctification wasn’t the straight path I thought it to be, at least not for me. All the stories I heard were “I was an x y z kind of person and Jesus helped me not be such a terrible person and became more like him” kind of testimony. Which is great, but I was young when I came to Jesus… And all my “worst” Sins (rebellion against God) were in front of me, not behind.

I was better than I would have been for sure, but that wasn’t real for me until about two or three years ago. That is when I saw how wicked my heart truly could be. Partly in action, and mostly in thought, I began to see who and what I would be as I struggled to get out of depression. The sins I committed were but a small taste of what I wanted, and what I wanted was wicked by all but the worst of human standards. How was I being sanctified? Why was I getting worse in thought and deed? Because to get out of the darkness of my own depression I had to face everything I ignored about my heart, about my soul, and about my mind from about 8 years old until now…

I understand now what Jesus meant about the Log in your own eye needing taken out before you should be helping others, so much is hard to see when you are blind to your own issues in your heart, mind, and soul. That dark part of your thoughts, that thing you are not comfortable talking about, that capacity and temptation of sin you hope will go away if you ignore it… It doesn’t go away, it festers, infects, and makes life worse than you realize it can even though you think you aren’t feeding it… So face the darkness in yourself, accept that you are not a “good” person. The only good person to have walked on this earth is Jesus himself. The rest of us… We need a lot of work, even then we are not “Good” but at least we aren’t what we could have been… Again I’m not talking about salvation in all that, salvation I believe is a debt paid by Jesus on the cross for us, we can’t earn that in the slightest. Sanctification is our walk with God after we accept that gift.

Aaaannndd… Wall of text done, if you made it this far I’m sorry… Maybe it helps, it wouldn’t have helped me much but I can be hard headed and have to learn the hard way. Anyway, I’d like to announce that I am slowly getting back into writing again. I’ll try and start making posts here a little more often again, I had a draft from last year I should finish too… If it’s even worth it at this point haha. I’ve figured out what I was lacking in the new series to help broaden the scope, story, and setting. That’d make a good subject for another blog post though.

So until next time, may God bless you and keep you!