I am a foreigner in my own family, a stranger to my own mother’s children. Psalm 68:9
How do we ever get here? So many people I talk to feel like this within their families. Recently the Lord led me in an exercise of timelining relationship interactions with members of my “family of origin” - the family I grew up with which is my mother and two sisters. Two glaring revelations came as I obediently looked into this timeline to let the Lord show me whatever He was trying to show me.
The first glaring thing I saw in this timeline is how the glory of the Lord would hit our relationships and interactions and truly amazing things would unfold in our relationships and then soon after, the enemy would drop a bomb and all hell would break loose. I wasn’t expecting to see this and especially not so clearly, so traceable. You can scan your eyes down the timeline and marvel at how clear this pattern is, time after time after time.
The second glaring thing that then became crystal clear as I kept scanning the timeline and seeing that pattern was a shout in my spirit, led by writing in all caps on the page, “WE’RE NOT WARRING WELL!!!” Hallelujah!!! There’s our answer! WE’RE NOT WARRING WELL! “Well duh” - but God had to get up in my face in order for me to see it for what it was. There’s a meme of a cross section showing a man with a pickaxe who has hammered a tunnel trying to get to the diamonds. However, he has given up and turned around just one inch short from where a load of diamonds were waiting to be plundered. This is how I see myself and members of my family and members of so many other families.
This is the second entry in my blog series on the song Yellow Rose. In the first blog, I talked about the unfortunate ways my ancestors viewed the problem of PTSD which my grandfather suffered from after World War II - a disorder very much misunderstood in those days. "All of that post war confusion and his world was never the same." This lack of understanding caused irreparable damage in his lifetime, damage that was inadvertently passed down through the generations.
So, Let’s talk about mental illness. Let’s take a sharp right turn here and talk about trauma based psychosis. I’m standing on my two feet as sober minded and stabilized as I've ever been and I’m here to say EVERYONE IS “CRAZY” at this point! What I mean by this is, we live in a world that operates under the influence of the enemy of our souls and in a sense, it has driven us all somewhat mad. Everyone I know deals with some form of trauma based psychosis. I have experienced trauma upon trauma in my lifetime, much of it connected to the trickle down effect of my grandfather's struggle. My husband and I laugh at the question of which of us is more “neurotic” and we are spending time getting our minds wrapped around the use of words like psychosis, disorder, and neurotic. What do we mean by these specific labels. For example, dis-order simply means things are out of order and need to be put back in order. This is true of so many things in so many people's lives. I want the whole world to stop hiding in shame over these labels, hiding in their houses as if they belong to the only “dysfunctional” family on earth. We are all in one way or the other dysfunctional. I don’t know of one person who’s got it all together or one person who doesn't deal with "the battlefield of the mind" in the same way Stan and I both do. But, we both hold fast to the biblical promise, that God gives, and in fact, has given us sound mind.
At the lowest point in my life, I decided to get help and purposely got counseling from a non-Christian counselor. I just wanted the absolute pragmatic truth about my never ending, plaguing relationship issues. At one point after several sessions he asked, “Why are you trying so hard to get diagnosed with something?” I laughed and replied, “Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not trying to get diagnosed. I have just become completely willing to find out the truth of what is wrong with me even if that means facing a diagnosis. He stood up in his office and said, “I’ve tested you for everything there is to test you for. I know all of your history and all of your points of trauma and I want to show you something.” This man was ex-military, very black and white and almost impatient for me to get this. He pulled a flip chart on an easel to the middle of the room, flipped to a blank page and said, This is what Bipolar looks like and then drew the following:
As he drew the waving lines he said, “These people experience high high highs and low low lows, and no one is a perfect straight stable line - no one. Then he said (and I quote) “I can tell you that in your early adulthood you were bat shit crazy." Then he began drawing the following:
Then he said, “You have found something that empowers you to stay very close to that straight line and just ride the waves and whatever that is, here’s my advice to you: You need to go back to songwriting and teach young women whatever this is.”
My heart lit up because here I had chosen a non-believer to counsel me and I KNEW what it was - it was JESUS! and more specifically, it was the many - countless forms of healing and deliverance ministries Jesus continues to lead me to in order to bring me through the tormenting effects of any psychosis or disorder or neurosis that ever attempts to operate in my life. This is the GOOD news of the gospel. We are set FREE from these tormenting “spirits” (attitudes/mindsets) in Christ Jesus. Let me be clear, I still struggle, because as I said in the last blog THIS IS WAR. So, I submit myself to the Lord’s help over and over and over again. He is my hope! He is my joy and that joy is my strength!
I have become unafraid of words like psychosis and disorder, etc. I don’t receive a stamp over my life - a brand on my forehead that says “Crazy” or whatever label someone would want to place there. The Lord has taught me to see that this is low-level thinking. I have learned through these ministries to instead, turn and embrace the Hope of the Word of God that shows me how to war well by allowing the Holy Spirit - the Spirit of Truth to reveal the root causes of any related "symptom" and allow the Lord to then heal it. I have to be reminded again and again and again to come up to a higher way of thinking in order to see and believe in the victory in these truths! The Bible says:
In our union with Christ Jesus he has raised us up to rule with him in the heavenly realm. He did this to demonstrate for all time to come, the extraordinary greatness of His grace in the love He showed us through His Son, Christ Jesus.
This makes me shout with Joy! Victory is ours in Him!
I have to use the “recipe of reconciliation” and own my stuff, submit myself to the refining, sanctifying fire of God again and again. I have to heed these words:
Let the wicked forsake [her] ways and the unrighteous her thoughts! Let her return to the Lord and He will have mercy on her, and to our God for He will abundantly pardon her!
“For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways.” says the Lord. “For my thoughts about mercy are not like your thoughts. As high as the heavens are above the earth, so my ways and my thoughts are higher than yours. As the snow and rain that fall from heaven do not return until they have accomplished their purpose, soaking the earth and causing it to sprout with new life, providing seed to sow and bread to eat. So also will be the word that I speak; it does not return to me unfulfilled. My word performs my purpose and fulfills the mission I sent it out to accomplish.”
Lord, let this be a declaration of better warring on my part. Let my ways become aligned with You ways, my thoughts aligned with Your thoughts, and let my love become Your love. Amen.
I will be sharing more details and other effective weapons and strategies in the upcoming blogs of this series. I will also be sharing Biblically based relationship solutions in a future video series called "Come To The Table." In this series, my main objective is to point people to the experts and resources I have learned (and let me be clear - am still learning) from. These are the solutions that have empowered and enabled me to keep my head above water in mental and emotional stability over the last 20+ years. In addition to the video series, I am building and offering a well organized resource library on the website which will help you find your way through the maze and get you directly to the solutions for your specific relationship issues.
Love, love, LOVE to all,
Jill
LINK TO THE SONG:
https://tinyurl.com/m8ppm7wh
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