As a young girl I was taught so so much about how to dress, how to act, how to behave around grown folks, how to speak when I was supposed to speak and how to remain silent when I was supposed to be quiet and with all of the learning how to do this or how to do that, I didn't learn one thing about how to take care of ME. You know the real person, the inside person, the person that cries to sleep at night and doesn't even know why. The person that is depressed and needs an outlet to speak about what has happened and try to understand why. The person that is broken and in dire need of repair. The person that is showing you outwardly with shyness, backwardness and clumsiness what is truly going on on the inside.
I look back on those days and realize just how off the rails my emotions were but I didn't have an outlet to express them. I had suffered from childhood depression and was considered in early grade school to be "mentally retarded", by my very aggressive teacher, because I didn't speak much and if I did speak it was in a muffled mutter. I was painfully shy and didn't want anyone speaking to me directly and I surely wasn't going to speak to anyone I didn't know or care for. I was easily frightened and usually just wanted to be alone. ALONE, ALONE, ALONE but yet did I really want to be alone? or did I want to be cared for and left alone? there is a difference here. There was always so much activity at our house. So many people milling in and out that I kind of got lost in the process and fell through the cracks of depression somewhere along the way. No one fully realizing what had happened to me or how to make it any better. The motto of the house was, "Get over it!"
I learned how to make folks laugh and how to serve people and how to be so so pretty but I never ever learned how to guard my heart and mind because at that time I had not been taught any of those important things. All my Aunts ever seemed to think was important was to catch a man, catch a man, catch a man and I thought well how hard can that be? Which to me wasn't very hard because apparently I wasn't fishing in a really good spot and caught the first fish that nibbled and boy was that a horrible tragedy! I learned all about jealousy and anger and fits of rage and just CRAZINESS in general but I still hadn't learned how to guard my heart and my mind. I learned really well how to walk on eggshells.....and to say just the right thing at the right time but I didn't learn how to take care of myself. So..I continued allowing everyone to just run rough shod over me and do as I was told and my heart became more bruised and torn and the depression got deeper and deeper.
You see I had not yet learned what the word of God says about guarding your heart and your mind with all diligence because out of it flow the issues of life. I had not learned that. Oh I am sure at some point I had heard a sermon on it. Lord knows by that time I had heard thousands of sermons on just about any subject you could pull from the Mad Hatter's hat and still didn't understand or know how to take care of me. Not take care of everything and everyone else, but to take care of me. Not the outward appearance but the inside. My broken heart, my crushed spirit needed help and needed it desperately. Many more years of trying to catch that fish (man) different fish, same fishing hole. Until I finally gave up on all of it and just checked out of it all. I literally had a mental breakdown! It was so bad, in fact, that the doctor didn't expect me to ever recover from it. But, slowly I did recover. No, I was never the same and that is ok cause look what I was working with. I learned to stand up for myself, I learned to say NO!!!! and most importantly I learned to turn to the God that made me and say hey, you are the manufacturer if you don't fix me, I won't be fixed! I had to learn that I was important. I was worth loving, I was worth saving and that God loved me with an everlasting love and it really didn't matter what anyone else thought or said about me.
This has been a life-long process people. This did not happen overnight. I have only a few paragraphs here to sum up a lifetime of pain, sorrow, regret, mistreatment, discouragement, then help, joy, love and the oil of the Holy Spirit that heals, protects, guards, mends. I am still a work in progress but I am progressing. I don't know who will actually take the time to read all of these early morning ramblings but I needed to write it out for me. If any hurting broken woman will take the time to read it, it will help her too. So win/win. Don't allow the enemy of your soul to keep you so wrapped up in doing that you forget that you are a human being. God loves you, He created you in His likeness and in His image and you are very important to Him. YOU, just you, not how you look, how talented you are, how many clubs you belong to, how many Pinterest projects you get done today, YOU just you and YOU are enough! Tend to your precious heart. Learn to meditate on the word of God. Learn to allow the Holy Spirit to minister to those deep and wounded places and be healed in Jesus name.
