Wow.  God is so awesome.  This week has brought so much joy my way.  I don't think I EVER felt joy like this before.  My Christian walk was sidetracked so early on... I had only been a Christian for a few months at most when the tragic event I blogged about before happened.  I hadn't really had a chance to develop a solid walk.  I don't say that as an excuse,  I am done making excuses, but its just a fact that I was still getting over a lot at that time, and hadn't really started to walk with consistency.  I was still weak, and Satan took advantage of that.  Don't get me wrong, I am not saying, "The devil made me do it."  Satan doesn't make a Christian do anything, but he does try to trip us up with lies, temptations, and deception.

Anyway, I am not trying to justify my sin, I am talking about the fact that I was such an immature Christian, still so new to the faith, that I wasn't grounded in the word, wasn't strong at all (obviously).  I also was not walking with any kind of consistent joy, still experiencing frequent times of doubt about God's forgiveness.  I was saved, but I had a weak, shaky faith. 

So what I am experiencing now is something new.  I have NEVER known such a feeling of utter forgiveness and joy, and I have never been so grateful before.

I feel like hugging everyone!  I mean, when I go to church and I see these people who have put up with me all these years... I just feel like running up and thanking them for everything they've ever done for me.

Some have put up with some pretty strange shenanigans from me during the times when I was walking in my flesh.  At times some of them have let me know, so gently, that they sensed that something was wrong... but they didn't know what it was.  It was clear to those regular "core" members of the church that something about my walk just didn't seem genuine.  Yet they have always been there for me.  Always been forgiving, accepting, and loving.  I feel like calling all of them and telling them what a blessing they are. 

I am determined now to be real before God from here on out.  I refuse to give Satan a foothold.  If I have a doubt, I will confess it to God and ask for help with it.  If I am struggling, I will seek counsel.  If I catch myself doing something for the eyes of people, rather than out of an honest desire to serve and obey God, I will stop what I am doing and repent.  At least, I will do my best, and pray to God to help me!

During these 20 years of self delusion... God has always been there for me.  The offer of forgiveness was always there if I would accept it.  I didn't need to deny Him and claim to not have been a Christian at the time.  I just needed to confess my sin and do what I could do to set things right.  I new start could have been mine at any point, if I would just have repented from the heart and been willing to face up to the consequences of my actions.  Instead I went in circles in the wilderness for 20 years.    Oh well, I can't get those 20 years back, and God did use them to teach me a lot of valuable lessons.  What I want to be sure of is that I don't lose any more time.  I want the remainder of my days, how ever long they may be, to be dedicated to the Lord and His purposes.  I want every day, every moment, to belong to Him.  I want to let Him use me, use my life, for whatever He wants! 

I have a real burden on my heart for all of those people out there who, like me, think they've gone too far, those who think there is no redemption for them.  Whether they be in the church while dying inside like I was, or whether they be outside having never known Him at all... it breaks my heart that they should stay as they are when there is an offer of real redemption and real joy available to them.

I don't know what direction God will go with all this, but I feel that He must have something in mind.  Whatever it is, I want it to glorify Him, not me.  My eyes have been too much on myself and too little on Him for all these years.  I pray that He won't let me fall into that trap ever again.

Another thing I've noticed. These past few days, if I don't get into the word and spend time in prayer... I just don't feel right!  I mean so far in my Christian walk, I've had times when I was into the word regularly and times when I wasn't.  Times when I was in prayer regularly and times when I wasn't.  But then, when I was in the word regularly it because I would write it on a schedule and check it off.  The same with prayer.  It was because I made up my mind to make myself do it.  I was blessed by those times, I enjoyed them and got fed from them most of the time, but you know... if I forgot it I really didn't notice.  Now, I get an uneasy feeling in my heart... I feel... like I am missing something vital, like my air supply has been cut off.  I feel thirsty for His word and lonely for time in His presence.  I still have that joy, like being newly in love, but I long for the One I love.  That internal feeling drives me to prayer.  Its not just a task on a list of other tasks... it seems like I'll die without it.

This is amazing.  I've never felt like this.  I love Him so much!  I am so grateful to Him for saving me initially, and then also for staying with me all these years, and finally for restoring me to a right relationship with Him.  All I want to do is worship and pray.  The other things I have to do seem like interruptions to my time with Him, instead of me viewing my quiet time as an interruption to my other tasks!

Well, now I'm rambling.  I am just so overwhelmed with His love!  I can't believe I spent so long separated from Him!

It's been a long time since I've written anything for any of my blogs.  So much has been going on, it's very difficult to put into words, but I am going to try anyway:

My Christian walk has been a strange one, to say the least.  I first started seeking God at age 18 or 19, after committing such an act of blasphemy that I was pretty sure God could never forgive me.    I was sure that I was beyond Salvation, and I lived in terror, convinced I was going to hell forever.  I thought about suicide, because life like this was so painful, but my fear of hell stopped me from acting on those thoughts… because I was sure I would go straight there if I took my life, at least if I continued living, I could delay the judgment for awhile, and maybe, somehow, could find a way to be forgiven.

I knew about Jesus, a teacher in my Junior High School had told me about Him years before, I believed in Him in my mind, I knew He was the Son of God and the only hope I had for salvation, but somehow I still couldn't believe that He was able to save someone who had blasphemed the way I had.  I was convinced that I had committed the unforgivable sin, blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.  What I didn't know at the time, was that one can only truly blaspheme the Holy Spirit by continuing to resist His promptings until the day they die.  

Anyway, after quite a while of living in fear, I knelt down alone in my Mom's bedroom.  I remembered all that my teacher had told me about Jesus dying on the cross; I realized that I had to put my faith in Him.  I prayed, and asked Him to be my savior and Lord.  I asked Him to come into my heart and save me. For a long time I had been begging Him to forgive me, but this time it was different, this time it wasn't me pleading and going away still convinced I was doomed to hell.  This time I was choosing to take Him at His word and trust in Him to save me despite my doubts.  I still had doubt, and I admitted that to Him and asked Him to help me overcome it.  I told Him that I was choosing to take Him at His word, and proclaim my Salvation through Him, and Him alone.  That when doubts came I would rebuke them and remember that Christ had purchased me, and I belonged to Him.

The doubts began to lessen, and I found myself beginning to grow.  Beginning to be able to worship and pray without that sense of terror in my heart.  To have times of sweet fellowship with Him.  To serve Him, and to begin to feel joy.

Then one day I did something awful.  I won't say what it was, because God doesn't call us to air our dirty laundry for all to see, He calls us to bring it to Him and let Him wash away every stain.  Therefore, I won't name the sin, but to help you imagine how serious it was, I want you to take part in a little exercise with me:

We all know that Biblically speaking, sin is sin.  No one is righteous in their works.  We are all dead in Sin.  If we have transgressed the law in one area, we are guilty of it all.  So to God, its not like one Sin is really worse than the other, it is all sin.  But we also all know that to human beings, there is a difference.  Depending on our background, we all have some idea of what is the worst sin possible.  All of us have one thing, or several things, that to us, according to our view of the world, our experiences, and our own opinions, are the most despicable things a human being can do.  What this is may be different for each of us.  For many people the worst thing you could do would be murder.  For someone else it would be kidnapping.  To another person it would be armed robbery or arson.  Each of knows what we consider to be that one thing that is so horrible that we don't think we could ever forgive a person for it.   Therefore we, in our heart of hearts, have trouble believing that God could truly forgive and save a person who had done that thing.  

So here is what I want you to do, get that thing in mind, whatever you would view as the absolute worst thing any human being could do.  Now, imagine that in a moment of utter stupidity, YOU have done that thing.  

Imagine how you would feel about yourself.  

Imagine how hard it would be for you to look in the mirror, to go on living.  How hard it would be for you to even admit to yourself that you had done it.  

Imagine that you had done this thing AFTER coming to Christ, so that you couldn't even claim to have done it in ignorance, so that you couldn't even claim that it was the "Old, unsaved you" that had done it.  Imagine how tempting it would be to rationalize it, call it something else, put it out of your mind, and deny it ever happened.  Imagine how tempting it would even be to deny that you were really saved when it happened, to tell yourself that you were still in an unregenerate state at that time.

Now that you are imagining all of this, you have an idea where I was.  I had committed the sin that according to my judgment, my take on the world and life, was, if not THE worst, certainly one of the worst, despicable, disgusting, vile things a person could do; and I had done it AFTER coming to Christ and putting my faith in Him.

So how did I respond?

I ran.  I denied it really happened.  I tried to call it something else.  I still felt the conviction about what it really was… so I denied Christ by denying to myself that I knew Him at that time.  But, of course, He was still with me.  All along, He was still with me.  I could deny Him, but He would not deny me.  He still was present in my heart, so I still felt a tug to fellowship with Him.

So what did I do?  I changed churches, pretended to have a glorious spiritual experience at the new one, and claimed that now, after this experience, I was truly saved!  Of course, deep inside I knew the truth.  Deep inside I was still on the run.  

I ran for 20 years.

In that time, God still worked in my life.  He brought me a wonderful husband and three beautiful children.  He taught me spiritual truths.  He moved me to good church with solid teaching where I could grow in Him.  He used me in ministry.  He gave me times of joy and times where the Holy Spirit moved in me.  But, for the most part, I was manufacturing the "Spiritual life" through the "power" of my flesh.  While I can't deny that the Holy Spirit did work through me at times, I also can't deny that a great deal of what I did for the next 20 years was just my own efforts in the flesh.  The heart can be so deceptive, that it can almost convince itself that a lie is the truth.  I so wanted to believe that I had not done this thing as a Christian, that I almost believed that my Salvation had truly happened later.  I would share my "testimony", giving that later date as the time of my Salvation.  I pointed out that church to my kids and told them that it was where I had become a Christian.  I did and said these things without consciously lying to others, I had lied to myself so long that I was starting to believe it.  In my heart I began to be truly confused about exactly when I was first saved.  Twenty years of deluding oneself can be quite confusing.

For 20 years…I ran.   For 20 years, no matter what happened, Satan stole my joy.   Whenever anything good happened, when I would find myself happy, the voice of my accuser would say, "You don't deserve this!  How dare you be happy!  You are scum!  How can you be happy after what you've done?  How dare you experience joy when you have hurt others the way you have!"  This is what happened for 20 years.

When I got the blood test back that showed that I did NOT have the deadly disease I feared, I was only happy for moment before Satan took that joy away.

At the time of my wedding, when I was caught up in love for the man God chose for me, in the back of my mind was the thought that I didn't deserve that man, that if he REALLY knew all about me, he wouldn't be marrying me.

At the births of each of my children, as my heart swelled with love and joy over the incredible gift of life, the enemy was there accusing and taking that joy away.  

For twenty years, this went on.  Twenty years in the wilderness, twenty years in a desert, twenty years in choking darkness with no sign of light of at the end of the tunnel.

Then God said, "Enough!"

He worked through a woman who didn't even know me.  He worked through my husband.  He worked through my sin finally "finding me out".

First, I got a phone call from one of the people I hurt through my sin.  This phone call gave me a chance to come clean and ask for forgiveness.  Instead, I denied again what I'd done, and tried to rationalize it and explain it away.  

Next, He brought along a story of a woman who was jailed for something she hadn't done.  It was proven she hadn't done it, and the people who falsely accused her even recanted their testimony against her, but she had already been in jail for almost 2 years at the time this happened, and ironically our justice system would not just automatically release her when the testimony was recanted, they still held her.

Our church began praying for this woman, and continued praying for her for a year.  I prayed for her a few times, but unknown to me my husband prayed regularly.  Through that prayer, he started to feel a deep connection with this woman even though he didn't know her.  He asked God to bless him by letting him meet her.  Then one day he did meet her.  He was overwhelmed with Christian love for this woman.  God began to teach him and show him things about his own spiritual apathy, and he was responding to God and learning more and more.  He was experiencing revival, and he was telling me about it all the time.  He was also getting a little obsessed with talking about this woman, but I knew that it was innocent and didn't really mind that much.  

What I did mind was his constant jabber about how God was blessing him, God was amazing, God's Spirit was so awesome… blah, blah, blah, blah!  I couldn't take this!  My husband just wouldn't shut up about the awesome work of God, and in the meantime, I was feeling like an old dried out piece of filth that was petrifying in the desert.  

I prayed.  "God, why am I so dry?  My husband has such joy, why do I have no joy?  Why is my spirit shriveled and dying inside me?  What is wrong?"  

Of course, God showed me what the problem was, and of course, I tried to run again.  I tried to hide my pain and pretend to share in my husband's joy.  I plastered a fake smile on and tried to go on.  

Then one Wednesday night, not too long ago, Joel, (my pastor), gave a message.  The scripture passage was about Jacob and Esau, and how Jacob stole his father's blessing from his brother.  One of the points made, was how Jacob argued with his mom as she planned the deception, how he told her that if his father caught him doing this, he would "seem to be a deceiver" and would bring on himself a curse instead of a blessing.  "Seem to be?!!!"  Joel talked about how we are worried about our reputation, but God is concerned with our character.  Jacob, rather than being concerned with the fact that if he did this he would truly be a deceiver, was worried that if he was caught he would "seem to be" one.  In other words, he was more concerned with what others thought of him then with what kind of person he was inside.

The message moved me, and I felt compelled to talk to Joel after service.  I really didn't plan to come clean about this issue.  I had so deeply buried it that I was able to sometimes forget about it, but to focus on other small things instead.  That is what I started doing that night.  I confessed to Joel about some other thing that I had done.  I had drunk a few wine coolers a few days before, and had hidden them from my husband because I knew he would worry about me drinking.  It wasn't a huge deal; I didn't even drink enough to be drunk.  I had gotten away with it and had already disposed of the bottles.  I told Joel about it, and then I said, "You know, it's really messed up when you get away with something, but you don't REALLY get away with it.  You don't get caught, but you feel guilty, and your own guilt won't really let you get away with it."  

Joel said something to the effect that guilt and shame were terrible burdens to carry.

Those two words, "guilt" and "shame"… those two words struck a chord somewhere deep within my heart.  I said, "Guilt and shame, yeah, I know all about that.  It's like having a weight hanging on your neck, dragging you down wherever you go, and having a thick cloud of darkness around you all the time, choking you so that you can't breathe."

At this point, I think Joel realized that I was talking about more than drinking a few wine coolers in secret.  He waited for me to continue.  I told him that I had done something once, years ago, that I just couldn't get past.  We talked for a while, and finally he turned to me and said, "Why don't you just tell me what it was?"  I gasped.  I shook my head.  I looked around to make sure no one else was in earshot.  I looked at him and opened my mouth but the sound wouldn't come out.  I wanted to run away.  Finally, in a whisper, I told him. He didn't condemn me; he kept on smiling at me.  I covered my mouth as if somehow I could stuff the words back in.  I was overcome with a sudden rush of sorrow, not of being caught, but of having done this thing in the first place.  At the same time was a huge sense of release after having finally named the sin after 20 years.    We talked more, and I don't remember that much of what we said.  However, during the conversation I purposely left out that the person I'd sinned against had once confronted me and I had denied the sin.  My biggest fear was having to go to this person and ask forgiveness.  So I didn't mention that.

The next day I went through a very dark time, I won't go into details about it, but I did some things that seem very foolish now, but at the time served a very real purpose of distracting me from the intense emotional pain I was in.  Of course it was only a temporary distraction, the real pain was bad enough that I knew I had to tell Joel the whole story.  I called him up and told him about the conversation where I had once again denied my sin.  He told me that we would pray and have more counseling over it to decide what I should do now.

Over the past few weeks, I have counseled with Joel, and with a woman from church named Mona.  I have set my husband down and have told him the whole story.  God spoke to my heart, causing me to remember the times of sweet fellowship before this thing happened, causing me to have to admit to myself that I DID know Him before this event.  Most significantly, two days ago, I called up the person I had hurt all those years ago.  I apologized, first for having done this thing in the first place, but also for denying it before.  I admitted that I had denied it out of fear, but had known the truth all along.  I told them that I had been sorry for 20 years, and had let fear stop me from apologizing before.  I asked for their forgiveness and held my breath.  Then, this person forgave me.  I hung up the phone and cried my heart out.  There was such a sense of release.  I called Mona and told her about it and we prayed for the people who I'd hurt.  

After that, things got much better.  I have been so exhilarated in God's forgiveness.  I have felt like climbing up to the housetops and shouting out how amazing God's love is.  I have realized how God orchestrated things.  How he drew my husband closer to Christ and used that to stir in me a sense of holy jealousy for that closeness to Christ.  How He used Joel's teachings in Genesis to show me that just like Jacob, I have been on the run for twenty years.  He has been working in my heart, through all of the circumstances, to make me ready to finally, finally, come out of the desert.  Out of the darkness, and into His glorious light.

In this light, my sin was exposed, but in this light, I was also able to finally see, finally realize, that Christ had already paid the price for my sin.  

God has made me clean.  He has set me free.  He has brought me into the light of His love and His truth, and I never, ever, want to go back into darkness again.

Okay, this is my 3rd blog.  I don't know why I decided to blog on here also, except to make more contacts who homeschool their kids.  So anyone want to connect?