This song is about blocking love and traveling life in a way that protects us and keeps us from soaring.

 Desperado

We can’t live like this and be all GOD wants us to be.  Balance Beam

I have the tee shirt and coffee mug on this.  I am thankful for healing and still have much to learn. GOD has done a miracle for me so far.

Childhood and life damage can cause us to have a life that is hard wired. If we do not deal with it we will stay in the pattern created by our damage. We will always be self limited and not God free.  A childhood of low self -esteem, being made not to feel important, being slighted, unloved or loved in a broken way and not feeling good enough creates a person who has relationships where we filter everything through that damage. We usually get to a place in the relationship where our damage is triggered and we feel like we were made to feel in our childhood. Our damage taught us to feel and block love. Our damage comes in and out of situations and confuses us and drives us. It ramps up and rides over our life like a shadow.  We seek out people that trigger what the person who damaged us caused us to feel. We always feel unjustly treated. If we are blind to our damage we feel like it’s everyone else and never us. We never see intimate relationships clearly and we always end it, sabotage it or have rocky ones thinking we are a victim. We spend the whole time in the relationship for the most part looking at the other person’s liabilities.

We can’t have a relationship concentrating on the wrong things.  That sets the other person up to fail us every time because expectations can not be met. Forgiveness goes out the window. We never truly see the other person and they never have a chance. You will hurt people that way and cause them damage as well. No matter what you intend YOU WILL HURT THEM. We become consumed with anything that might be askew in their lives and negate all the good. All the love is blocked at this point and we ride on fear of what is wrong not faith in what is right.

Damage control becomes the motivator and the relationship develops on wings of distrust or neediness or you name it.  We do not trust people we can love or be vulnerable to. The people we do trust in our life completely will be people who are unavailable for intimate relationships because that is safe. People who affirm us are safe and people who stretch us are not. We will use those people to tell us what we want to hear because we present our “story” from our damage.  Our walls are high and thick.   Until We address the damage we always think we have rotten luck, fail, are unloved, unimportant,  pick the wrong person, or that we are right and the other person is wrong. Our life will be challenged a lot by this.  We feel our damage and not love, peace, joy and contentment. The other person can never win our heart.  We have a shadow that overrides the truth. It’s not a question of if we will succeed in a relationship but always a question if we will fail. Damage causes us to play not to lose instead of playing to win. We have to ruin the relationship because we can’t process without those filters until we recognize it. We will wonder why this or that always keeps happening to us. We have a trail of failure that has been caused by places in life where our damage filtered out the truth we should have seen.  It’s usually always the other person and never us. We go from one thing to the next in the search for significance and peace.

Christians have the hardest time with this because we will explain away the damage by saying I love GOD.  God is not immunity from the flesh. The WORD is clear that WE have to put our flesh in subjection. Damage is the fleshly man reacting to the temporal world.  We think GOD is going to wave some magic wand and make us ok.  We think just because we have a good relationship with GOD we are ok. We may think we are at the best place spiritually than we have ever been. When what we are doing is hiding behind a relationship with GOD and pushing the damage down thinking that we are ok.  It’s a cruel thing to do to our life because without healing that stuffed down damage will rear its ugly head every time. You can bet on it. We will say, why do I always do this. You can have a good relationship with GOD and still have broken love with others.  God said he came to heal the broken hearted and set captives free. If we are not healing we are not free. Freedom always comes after healing. Damage is bondage. Healing the broken hearted may involve getting help for knowledge we don’t have or help to understand how we are wired and how we sabotage our life. Our relationship with GOD is sometimes strained too because when life collapses we even transfer the damage of that collapse to feeling unworthy in God’s eyes.  We have to convince ourselves that God loves us and doesn’t see us like those who damaged us sees us.  There is healing in God but damage always requires work to get healed by God.

Time doesn’t heal wounds only God does but damage comes in to our story for us to learn and heal and grow so that we can use what we have learned to glorify God. Learning and growing always takes work.  .  It doesn’t just poof into our lives. If you don’t feed a baby it dies, if you don’t teach it how to live it’s life is always in danger.  If GOD did just heal us we would never be grateful, learn and grow or take it as serious.  We could never help others because we would just go to God and get fixed so we don’t feel anything. He would become a doormat. There would be no learning in that. We would just use God as a prayer doormat and magic genie for all the messes we create. We would probably create a lot of messes because hey, you can just get healed. GOD is much more wise than that. God wants us to depend on him for everything. He wants to demonstrate his love in our pain. He wants our lives to be victorious and loving.  He wants us to reach others with what we have learned. Unhealed damage always creates more damage in lost relationships, jobs and passion.

One of the worst things we can do is not heal and try to manage our damage. It always blocks love and forgiveness.  We will go from one damaged event to the next damaged event.  Or we will build fences and block everything out that could hurt us. The damage behind a wall is just as bad because we become the person who is now damaging us that way. We become deceived to thinking this is the best because I just can’t do the rest. That is why it’s important to unpack it and understand it so that we do not repeat the cycle.  Damage is a vicious taskmaster that robs us of joy, peace and happiness. No one is immune to damage in this life. Everyone has some to varying degrees. Sometimes work to resolve our damage requires that we need others to help us walk through. That’s why we have members in the body of Christ with calling and passion to help us do what we haven’t been able to do for ourselves.  If people are telling you that there’s healing needed in your life seek it out.

I am on a journey that is teaching me daily about this. I have learned and healed to a really great place. This has been possible because I surrendered to help outside of my life and healing through members of the body of Christ who were trained, true and patient.  God gave them different gifts in the body for a reason. They   could see what I could not see and refused to believe.

If we don’t heal we will be one lonely mess always trying to figure it out.

The bottom line is we can ride fences like Desperado or we can be free. It’s our choice to do the work or stay in the murk.

“Counselor”. Greek word paraklesis – “to come alongside to encourage”

Christians should encourage one another to growth and healing because that is the reason Christ came to heal the broken hearted and set the captives free.

It’s our duty ….

Romans 15:1 We then that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak, and not to please ourselves.

Galatians 6:22 Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.

You can’t do it alone sometimes….

Eccel 4:8-10

8 There is one alone, and there is not a second; yea, he hath neither child nor brother: yet is there no end of all his labour; neither is his eye satisfied with riches; neither saith he, For whom do I labour, and bereave my soul of good? This is also vanity, yea, it is a sore travail.

9 Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour.

10 For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up.

There’s a reason it’s difficult…..

Gal 5:17 For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.