Lessons in Change and a Steep Dropoff

“It is wonderful what God can do with a broken heart, if He gets all the pieces.”

-Samuel Chadwick

My life has changed more in the last 6 months or so than it has in a very, very long time. I ended a 5.5-year relationship, figured out I’m actually straight, not gay (I know, I know–that’s whopper of a blog post in itself), moved houses and states, and realized that my biggest passion in life is to share divine truth. Additionally, since being back from London, everything has completely fallen apart with my family and now I’ve chosen not to be in communication with all but one of my six adult immediate family members, something that’s unlikely to change soon.

Every month of this year has felt emotionally totally different than the month before, and at times that’s felt amazing and exciting and at other times scary and painful. Since being back in these last few weeks in particular, I’ve felt at the least, disoriented every day, and depending on the day, there’s a varied buffet of panic, confusion, restlessness, and sadness. On some days after I’ve felt through some fear or had a really good cry, that day I tend to feel still a little disoriented, but have a lot more faith. Overall though, I feel like I’ve been thrown in a tumble dryer and I still haven’t figured out which way is up, and though my faith is slowly building, it’s been an intensely emotional process that feels far from over.

I feel like I’m at a pretty significant fork in the road in my life. Even though I want so badly the next positive changes that will lead to more happiness for me, I feel afraid I won’t know how to make them or God won’t guide me. I have always had huge injuries about my passions being absolutely impossible to have, and since being introduced to Divine Truth, the way I could describe it is that I have almost no faith in the Law of Desire or that my desires and passions, even if in harmony with love, will be something I’m allowed to have or that will have any power at all. I’m still working through that big, lifelong aloneness feeling I mentioned in a recent blog, and sorting out the differences between God reliance and self reliance and self responsibility and what’s just plain fear. And of course, the family stuff is really hard as I still get worried that what they say about me is true, and I know that inclination to believe them covers some final layers of resistance to feeling the truth about their treatment of me and resistance to the gravity of how that would feel to accept. A lot of days feel like desperation and I’m holding on to every moment I’ve had with God, every teaching from Jesus and Mary that’s stuck in my heart and I know by memory, every song that reminds me of God’s goodness, all my favorite Padgett messages and quotes from Robert James Lees‘ channelled books. Also a great help is that I’m spending more time in the mountains than Julie Andrews as Maria von Trapp (the hills really are alive with the sound of music, y’all).

Things have happened faster than they ever have for me and I can feel the momentum of it, and I feel like I have to be super careful about what I choose to do in this phase right now. And I’m struggling with that. I’ve been so tempted to fall back into physical addictions–food, social media, TV–to calm my anxiety. And some days, I’ve chosen the addictions instead of to love, and other days are definitely better in that regard. And yet I have this sense that if I do avoid my emotions and numb things out, just how destructive it will be at this point in my life, even more so than it ever has been. It’s not that I don’t think I’m allowed to make mistakes, but I also have moments where I can acutely feel that it matters very much whether I go for that chocolate, spend my night watching (non-triggering) movies, or choose to go surround myself with people instead of feeling my aloneness. It feels like I’m walking on a narrow ledge and there is a fatally steep dropoff on either side. I’ve never quite felt the truth about this path being a “narrow way” quite so much as I do right now.

It feels like once real change on this path has started happening for any of us, things will then happen faster and faster, and it becomes that much more dangerous and destructive to try and slow or stop it. It’s like the train has left the station, picked up speed, and jumping off of it would be catastrophic. And the ways we jump off of it are numerous: engaging in addictions, controlling things, justifying avoiding the next set of fears in front of us. And maybe, it’s not necessarily more dangerous or destructive than before to choose avoidance and addictions, but rather we just become more sensitive to and aware of the implications of sin than we were before–I’m not quite sure.

I’m reminding myself that just because I’ve allowed a lot of change already and made a lot of progress in my resistance to change, this is no time to rest on my laurels. Fears will come up in the face of change, I’ll work through those fears and make the changes, and then more fears will come up in the face of the next changes, etc. I can’t try to control things and say, “Ok that was really intense, I need things to slow down so I can breathe for a bit and adjust to what’s changed.” Sounds reasonable, right? Except slowing it down is just fear, plain and simple.

I have had a few more Law of Attraction events that have helped encourage me to keep on keeping on. One day recently I came across a picture with the text again, “You are not alone.” Then after that, my LOA brought me the quote below.

I’m also learning some lessons about emotional overwhelm. It seems that if we’re really sincere on this path, the emotional overwhelm is going to be very frequent, and maybe during certain phases, constant. What I’m finding is that my bar for what I consider the extent of overwhelm to be is being challenged to a new level. It’s like right when I think I’ve got the overwhelm thing down (and maybe I did for where I was in my progression), deeper and bigger emotions are exposed, and more things happen all at once, and so now the scope of emotional overwhelm is going to be deeper and wider. I remind myself a lot that God made me to handle all my emotions, in their full intensity, even if tons of them are happening all at once.

I also get the sense there are spirits who are rooting for me to fail right now. I can feel them encouraging my self-judgement injuries, fueling my fears and urging me to engage in the physical addictions. I had a terrifying nightmare in the last couple weeks, one that I woke up from feeling total dread, short of breath and tight in my throat, jolted awake when my physical body sort of spasmed and I woke up, as if I came back to my body somewhat violently and suddenly. Of course, dark spirits can only fan the flames of my own emotions I haven’t dealt with yet, so I’m not a victim to them. It doesn’t help that one of my biggest fears is dark spirits–another thing hopefully I’ll start facing soon.

The overarching imperative in all of this is that I must keep seeking to move out of self-reliance and into God-reliance, to build my faith and to pray to God, and most of all, to seek God’s love in the process. To ask for God’s love and grace not to lessen the pain I need to feel through, but rather to love me while I feel it. Jesus’ urge to ask us all to consider, “God is good” has pulled me through so many tough days recently. One of Mary’s older but absolutely golden blogs, found here, has also been treasure for me lately.

So I thought I’d write this blog partly to challenge my belief that if I’m struggling and don’t have much profundity to share, I’d just be wasting time by writing because it’ll be self-indulgent and depressing and won’t help anyone. And yet, if I only post on the blog when I’m through the other side of something and never when things are messy, then I’d just be in facade with this blog anyway. And also, if some of these quotes, songs, thoughts–any of the bits that are helping me right now might help someone else, then I’ll be very happy about that.

With that, I’ll end with this song I stumbled across recently (cheers for God’s LOA again) that I had never heard. Some of the lyrics have helped me connect with some of my own feelings of a lack of faith and brokenness and get into some good tears about it.

*Edit 7/22/16 – I thought to clarify that while parts of the lyrics of this song have helped me many times into sadness and hopelessness and still does, God does not plan broken hearts, and God does not want us to give over our will to Her. I tend to think of those particular lyrics as coming from an error in understanding about God driven by brokenness, when we in error think God has created our pain (which I have indeed had the false belief about). I have thought of the Thy Will lyrics as pertaining to God’s larger will for us all to grow in love. Other lyrics in this song have also moved me deeply, but it felt important to clarify all this.

Love,

Courtney