For years I was so numb.
When you become numb as a child, you really don’t even know it. When it’s been your reality for as long as you can remember, then how do you even stop being numb?
Suddenly, when I came to the age of awareness, in my mid-twenties, I realized I had been numb my whole life.
When I say age of awareness…I mean the moment when you brain develops the ability to see and understand cause and affect…the time when you become much more responsible in your actions because you see how you affect others and how they affect you. It’s the time when the reasoning part of your brain finally begins to work…much to the relief of all the adults around you.
The age of awareness is an interesting thing and something that I often wonder about. Why did God create our brains to develop this way? Especially when in days past people were married so much younger than now. They usually married years before that awareness came.
I wonder if it wasn’t so men would be willing warriors in their youth, and already being established as such, when they grew older simply become more intentional and clear-headed warriors to lead the next group of young men.
I wonder if women also were made this way so they’d fall in love and marry those young warriors and be blissful and happy homemakers in their youth…and become wise and patient mothers as that part of the brain developed.
Maybe it was for good reason.
Then we, in our own reasoning, reasoned ourselves out of it…thinking ourselves wiser than God.
I believe there’s a reason God seemingly encourages youthful marriage. It’s far easier to become one with someone when you haven’t been one with yourself for too long.
It was within the safety and confines of marriage that I felt free to allow myself to bring my numbness to God and ask for feeling to be restored.
I want to feel. I don’t want to avoid any of it. If God gave us feelings, then we should learn to manage them well, don’t you think?
Maybe if we encouraged being responsible with our feelings, then the enemy wouldn’t have been able to hijack that and make it something so petty, perverse, and disgusting. He wouldn’t have been able to create a handicap generation. Handicap because suddenly feelings are god.
It was never meant to be so.
Feelings are indicators. They should point us to God. They show us something needs an adjustment, and we must take responsibility of our own feelings, not force others to cater to them. Such nonsense.
What if we start a revolution?
What if we become people who learn to manage our own feelings by taking them to God and allowing Him to use them as a catalyst for growth and maturity in our own lives. Then living by example, lead others toward this same process…
What if?
Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry. Because of these, the wrath of God is coming. You used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived. But now you must also rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips. Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator. Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all. Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity. Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. And be thankful. Colossians 3:5-15
365 Days in the Presence 