Song of Long Ago

Every day, every week, every year we make choices that impact our present and future. Some of the choices we make turn out well, they advance us ... we can see the positive fruit that is a result of those past choices we made. On the other hand, there are the things we decide on, the actions or in-actions which we may regret and wish we had done differently.
Today I feel God has been speaking to me about letting go. I didn't really get it, didn't really listen well till now (1:30 in the morning).
We hear and see the wisdom of letting go all the time! The wisdom on finding a mate is: As soon as you give up the search, that's when you'll find the one! The wisdom on remembering something you can't remember: As soon as you start thinking about something else, the thing you're trying to remember will come back to you! And my favorite: When you have lost something (not just misplaced, but truly LOST lost something) one day, soon after you stop looking, you see the item you were SURE was gone for good. This, however, does not always translate to our more emotional territories!
Years ago there were circumstances in my life which created what I saw as an even bigger "bad" than the bad circumstances. An imperfect blotch in the middle of a specific assignment I had vowed NOT to mess up ... I had it so much more perfectly planned than it was turning out. From that point forward my goal in this assignment shifted from "doing right" to one of "making up for the wrong". Instead of letting go, forgiving myself and turning it over to God, I picked it up, and said "this is MINE, this is the thing I TRULY messed up". The funny thing is, I didn't know I had done this until tonight. Accused and serving a sentence I only saw effects of in my life! As though in prison and musing, "Gee this circumstance stinks. I want OUT" but having no knowledge of how or why I was there.
The second you give up control of something, is one and the same with the second positive change is free to occur. All this time, I've been carrying around this self imposed burden. The fallout is irritation and annoyance at my inability to MAKE things smooth. Loss of patience and frantic attempts at regaining control follow. This is not in every area of my life, just some areas ... and it's been confusing to me. It's been a mystery! "Why God, why HERE in my life do I have this problem???? Not HERE or HERE or even THERE, but only in this one place???? God, why can't this go away??? God why do I continue this????" Seeking Him desperately for answers and healing. I still don't know why it took me years to hear Him on this. Maybe my heart was not right before. Maybe this letting go and forgiving was a process which required my healing in another area before I could release this one. Regardless, tonight I had revelation that has impacted in a way that goes beyond significant. And it's so simple. Just, forgiveness. Forgive myself. Not even for a grievous sin, but for a law I had given myself and then broken ... and then judged myself for breaking.
To choose unforgiveness with myself means I won't let God redeem my circumstance ... and to have hung on to the this unforgiveness, to have let it impact the most positive parts of my life for SO LONG is so sad. I declare, the past is the PAST. We make our choices with the tools, and ability and wisdom we have at the time, and then we move forward. To carry around our decisions with us ... thinking we can "fix" it .... It's coming up against a dead end , running out of fuse, loosing that fingernails grip, every day when one too many straws drops to the camel's back and we find out we can't make it better.
So here's the short of it: Let's find freedom in the fact that our wounding will mess some things up in our lives, nothing will fully turn out the way we hoped or expected it to, the things that are MOST important to get right will suffer failures (at least from time to time), and, in life, we won't be able to make up for or fix the things we've broken. God can, and will if we agree.
All I have to say is, yes.

Posted in: on 7.8.08 at at 01:15