I have been having trouble sleeping at night for a while
now. Instead of just laying there
tossing and turning, I usually get up and read.
Last night when I was looking on our bookshelf in the bedroom for something to read
the other night I came across some of my journals. I used to keep a daily journal of the events
of my life and I love reading back through them on occasion. I randomly grabbed two of them and started
reading.
The first one was written in
the year that I was so sick with Hodgkin’s and believed that death was
imminent. There is a lot of poetry in
that one, a lot of talk of wanting it to be over with, of wishing I had the
courage to walk out into the woods and shoot myself so that my friends and
family would not have to watch me die.
Pretty self-absorbed melodramatic fare.
The other one was from 1988 to 1989.
I was in my junior and senior year of college and coming to grips
with the fact that I was gay, even though I had spent the last few years in and
out of reparative therapy, counseling and having been in the prayers of
everyone I knew, I was still gay. I
wrote about the death of my mother in August of 1988 and how much guilt I felt
by feeling somewhat relieved that I would not have to deal with her mental
illness and the effect that it had on me anymore. I wrote about walking away from God in September of 1989. I not only stopped
believing in Him, I actively cursed and hated Him. There is a lot of anger in the writings of
1989.
Yet here I am 24 years later alive and once again a person
of deep faith. All of this I owe to
God. The thing is, although I gave up on
Him, walked away, actively cursed His name, He was still there walking beside
me, loving me and caring for me. That is
how great God’s love for us is. I am
living in a state of gratitude now for that abiding, constant love. God loved me back to faith and to life. How lucky am I!
The past couple of months have seen a time of a deepening of my
soul. I find myself walking further away
from self-absorption towards living in the self- less image of Jesus. Not that it has been easy. I have spent to much of my life being self-absorbed and egocentric for it to be a smooth transition. Yet I see God’s work of transformation in
me.
The less I am - the more He is.
Love abounds. I feel
more love in my life now than I ever have.
I am hopelessly devoted to my family and the close friends I have. My walk with God is deeper than I can even
fully understand and I am experiencing a newness of spirit. The more I am able to put God and others
before me the happier I am. The less I
think about myself the more at peace I feel.
I find that I am smiling a lot these days.
There is a great song that I find myself singing in my head
almost constantly and I want to finish this post by sharing the lyrics of just
the chorus with you:
You placed the stars in the sky and You know them by name.
You are amazing God
All powerful, untamable,
Awestruck we fall to our knees as we humbly proclaim
You are amazing God
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