Cutting the Strings

This week I went to a home group church thing and the speaker talked about our love walk and how that relates to our being useful in the Kingdom and how it is all tied to forgiveness. Hummm, I keep hearing that a lot lately don’t I? Anyway, she said that

Our lives created hurts in us as we live and every time we have a hurt Satan attached a cord or band to it and he holds on to the other side. As the hurts “heal” and I say that in quotes because they don’t really heal so much as become numb or forgotten or buried, Satan allows the strings to be slack and we don’t even notice they are there. But, it is when those strings or chords are unexpectedly brushed that Satan, like a spider on a web, feels the slight vibration of the note and pulls the chords taught to make the slight brush become a resonating vibration and if we allow it to, it will continue to build in sound and vibration until we can no longer receive or consciously minister to others. In the chorus of God’s Kingdom our note in it has become a discord. The longer the discord resonates with Satan (who is holding the string that makes that old hurt rise up) the further we get from being able to hear God and the further we get from God, the less effective He can make us. The discord damages not only us, but also could damage those around us by “disturbing” their walk with God. If we allow it to continue, we will get so used to it that we will not even be able to determine the sound of a pure note anymore and will began to pitch all of our song to the discord instead of finding the true pitch of God to resonate with.

Following that talk, I began to recognize the sound of discord within myself. I never dreamed that I had SO MANY hurts. Really, I was very surprised at how many times I caught the resonance of discord after an unintentional or even irrelevant to my situation remark struck a cord in me that was attached to a long ago hurt and I felt Satan began to tighten the string. But, knowledge is power, and knowledge provided by the Holy Spirit is Holy Power, and with that comes the ability to choose what I will listen to. Do I allow the discord to resonate with the old hurt so strongly that I begin to shut down (like I always have in the past) or do I choose to cut the string? Cutting the string requires that we forgive. Forgive others who have harmed us, both intentionally and by accident, forgive their ignorance in their hurtful actions, forgive ourselves for the things that we have done to make the situations worse, and accept that ALL things are Father Filtered for the Children of God, therefore, it was the Father’s Will that I be allowed to suffer whatever hurts I have suffered and it is the Father’s Will that I overcome those things to be complete and whole in Him. Like Paul who suffered from something that caused him physical distress, some of our hurts are physical and some are mental and some are spiritual, but ALL are sufficiently covered by the Grace of God. It is our choice to cut the discordant string by forgiving what ever needs to be forgiven (each of us carries different burdens and hurts, both deserved and undeserved, but all of us have to forgive the hurter) weather they have remorse or not.

The forgiving is not for them. Hating or being unforgiving towards someone is, as I have been told, like taking poison and hoping the other person will die. There will ALWAYS be a discordant note from your spiritual song if you never forgive the past. And even more important to me, Satan, the monster and devil will have control over parts of me like a marinate on a string as long as I allow the old hurts inside me to rule.

So, do I still have hurts caused by life in general as well as damaging people? The answer is yes; I am still human and still a product of my past. However, it is my choice on weather or not to allow the past to control my future. Will I allow Satan to actively control my reactions and thoughts? That is the choice I must make, not a single thing done today, not once, or even twice, but every time I feel the strings of discord began to resonate within my heart and soul. This is not an overnight healing, for the hurts were not received overnight and are not simple surface wounds. These wounds are deep and often still bloody and infected under the surface and were received over a lifetime of “beatings” from the world. This is a call to acknowledge the wounds for what they are, for you cannot forgive it you believe there is nothing to be forgiving for. Then actively forgive the harmer and the situation and any sinful reactions I had to it. THEN, the hardest part, refuse to listen to the discord! Set your mind on the thoughts of God, not on the thoughts of the past. Think no more on those experiences and think only on the future God has in store for you.

Now, after all this LOL I have a few notes I wished to write down from the book my friend Wendy gave me by Beth Moore called Get Out Of That Pit. I am not in a pit at the moment, but the revelations God is making through this book are very in tune with the revelations God has been making in my life and I wanted to note them as well. This is the probably the first of many installments as I read through the book, but this is what I have received from the first chapter J.

Beth Moore “Get Out of That Pit”
1. We can be thrown into a pit without having done anything wrong. Totally innocent of sin, we can be pushed or shoved by circumstances, (Enron, illness, hurricanes,…) and by others (family members with mental illnesses, alcoholics, spouses leaving , parents leaving, birth of a handicapped child, someone rejecting your love, …). We don’t always deserve the pit we are thrown into.

2. It is one of the hardest when the person who threw you in the pit remains close and goes on living without a care. They even sometimes see our distress and anguish, but will not HEAR us. Like Joseph’s brothers eating lunch after tossing him in the well and seeing his anguish and hearing his pleas, did nothing. They may even despise us for our “weakness”. There is only one thing you can do. Forgive! Especially those who do not care to be forgiven. They have no clue how they have hurt you. They probably would not understand or care even if you explained it to them. They have no clue how what they did affected your ability to function and interact with others. So, humbly, but very specifically for give them, not only for their destructive actions, but for their ignorance as well.

3. Forgiveness is not about feelings, it is about willingness. It is an act of WILL.

4. It far more strength and personal fortitude to fall on our knees and submit to God than to stand and fight our endless battle for significance.

5. Suffering and loss make us wish we were dead. It is Satan’s goal to make us live in the constant wish for death, so he tries to keep us in the mindset of suffering and loss.

6. You can be in a pit of innocence EVEN when you haven’t always been innocent. Just because you sinned at some point, does not necessarily mean that the pit you are in is from your sin. Satan likes to make us believe that we deserve the pit, but you need to honestly ask yourself if what you have done wrong fits the pit.

7. We all have problems, but problems don’t dig pits. They just offer the shovels. We provide the sweat.

8. What do we do when we blame God for the pit we are in? Luckily God knows how we were formed (Psalm 103:14) from dust and gives us grace in our limitations. Satan’s ultimate weapon is to make us doubt, not that God exists, but that He is really good. As long as we are distant from God we are no threat to Satan. At the end of Job, he never had his questions answered, but he know that his God was huge, his God was wise, and his God was a redeeming God. Blaming God only sinks us deeper into the pit, however, holding God ultimately responsible in a healthy way, as His word says, will be our eventual ticket out.

9. God did not haphazardly or accidently let Joseph’s brothers throw him in the pit. He had already thought it out in advance. Considered it. Weighed it. Checked it against the plum line of the plan. He had looked at the good it could ultimately accomplish, the lives that could be helped and even saved. Then, and only then, in His sovereign purpose did He permit such harm to come to His beloved child. Had the incident not possessed glorious purpose, God would have disarmed it.

10. Sometimes the answer is that we are much better people healed, than we ever would have been had we always been well.

And number 10 is where I will leave us both to reflect on. What a powerful and difficult statement to digest. But we are no longer babies in Christ and the time for receiving only milk is gone. Now is the time to gain strength and health from the meat of God. Meat takes much longer to digest, but provides strength that other things simply cannot produce. When you are able to digest meat, you very bones gain strength. So like the revelations of God, when you are able to digest that which is hard to stomach, the internal spiritual fiber of your very being gains an internal strength that is not easily shaken or troubled.
Thanks for letting me share.