Friday, December 17, 2010

The Hunger

All my life I've been hungry. Well, soul hungry that is. Ever since I can remember. So, all my life I've been trying to fill this hunger. It started with trying to fill it with my parent's love. Coming from a broken a home, that wasn't so easy to do. So when I still felt hungry I started trying to fill it with food, literally. I ate and ate and ate and got quite big for my young age. When I saw that still didn't satisfy me, I tried to fill that void with men. Bad relationships that always started and ended in the same place, leaving me still hungry. So eventually I stopped trying to fill the void. I started ignoring it, starving it. That's when life became really dark for me. Anger, bitterness, depression, attempted suicides. My life definitely wasn't reflecting what God truly created me for. I had built a wall up against society, against love, against Him. That hunger, that void that I had felt all my life, was my need for love. My need for acceptance, forgiveness, and faith. Now, I wish I could say that once I accepted Christ that emptiness was filled, but it wasn't. I believed in God, I said I had faith in God, but did I really? I had faith, to a manly extent. I trusted God like I trusted man and in reality, that wasn't a whole lot. After a life of betrayal, how am I suppose to learn to completely and utterly trust a God that I cannot see? That question alone is completely doubting God.
In just a couple short weeks God has been working majorly in me. He has been stirring up all sorts of emotions to try and remove the clutter that has been darkening my soul. However, without me completely surrendering every little thing, I will never fully trust God. A friend told me that I needed to be vulnerable with God, and he is absolutely right. When I prayed, it was always in the general sense. "God heal my hurt, God release me from these chains, God take away my anxiety." I would commonly say, "You know me God, take away what it is that keeps me from you." Not a horrible prayer, but not a truthful one, not a vulnerable one. Last night i started praying for specifics, "God, take away mu anxieties stemming from a lack of trust for you! God, retrain my way of thinking that I am not worthy of your love because of my sexual sins!" Well, prayers like that continued. I went through just about every bad memory from birth until now. Praying specifically for healing, wisdom, guidance, patience, and His love. I have never in my life prayed like this before and I'll be honest, it hurt, it really truly hurt. For once I was being completely vulnerable and open with my God. Not one detail that popped in to my head was spared from enthusiastically giving it over to the Lord. I felt like I was being emptied. If you have ever felt like this you know what I mean when I say it is hard. With my history of trust issues, spilling everything one by one before the throne of God hurt me like I had never been hurt before. I cried and screamed like never before (the neighbors probably thought I was being murdered or something). Yet during all this, I felt like God had a magnet hovering above me. This magnet was attracting all of the darkness in my soul. It literally felt like he was extracting everything from me. Then, He began to fill me. Replaced my fears about intimacy, with His promise of His unending love for me. Replacing my trust issues with His history of always staying true. Then the lord literally commanded me to go to bed.
I woke a few hours later with no anxiety, a first for me, I always have some sort of anxiety but God took it. I have realized now that God placed that hunger for me. That hunger is mankind's drive to seek God and to ask Him to fill it. So even though I may have been feeding it nothing but garbage my whole life, I am thankful for that unending hunger. Now the hunger is being filled with light, God's love, mercy, forgiveness, and faithfulness. Now the real journey, the journey God planned for me, can begin.