flashbacks
Flashback nightmares ⚡
Jesus.
Thank you for this uncomfortable and debilitating mental problem.
Holy Spirit help me to submit and learn from my stuff instead of wasting my energy fighting it.
I intensely want Your comfort. My vision of myself and my life is broken. I am weary in every way.
I need You God. I intensely want You. 🌻🌷🌻🌷🌻
Refresh my hope 💔
Lift my chin 👍👍👍
Renew my strength 💪
(Image from YouVersion)
Flash back recovery
I went to sleep worried about my closely related offender, and feeling guilty for unfriending him. His life is so pathetic and sad! You know?
It’s complicated when you grew up with your offender.
I’ve always felt super responsible for this person. I know how bad it was for us growing up: I was there.
Some of you will know exactly what I am talking about.
Ambivalence. That’s what the text books call it.
Disturbing.
That’s what it’s like
when someone you love
is
someone you also need to be afraid of.
Most of my nightmare was about me trying to convince my family of a rather unusual thing:
that this guy is capable of killing me and my kids and they need to not tell him where I live.
And them
not being able to
believe me.
Yikes.
I want to blog this So that other people who love and also fear their family members, and people whose family choose not to believe them about crimes that have been committed…can know they are not alone. 🌷
It’s crazy-making, isn’t it?
I know how you feel friend.
Grief is great.
Let us be good to one another.
–the magicians nephew by cs lewis
Reboot my heart
A thousand years 🌻
God gave me this song when I was really low and vulnerable ten or so years ago. Before I got my diagnosis. Seven years? Whenever this movie was popular.
I’ve never forgotten what He said in my spirit.
Or how it felt.
We love You back, God. So truly. So sweetly.
Thank You for being so cool about all this messy life stuff.
You are the most incredible person I’ve ever come in contact with and I love You. 🌻💕🌻
Dawn by my daughter’s house. 🌷
Blogs ROCK 🎸pretty much
first, I have been walking through the hardest time I’ve ever known the last ten years or so. Ugh. I feel like Mrs Job sometimes!
So many tears and sleepless flashback-ey nights (is that a word?) and lonely achey broken-heart and whatnot. You know the drill.
I got so desperate that I had to start a blog for myself (and hopefully others too, but honestly that did not really occur to me until the last year or so. I was just desperate for encouragement myself. #surviVal
–I am by far my best follower, and that’s okay. (💰 where my 👄 is.) But if I can help other PEOPLE, that is ESPECIALLY when I start to love it.
My friends and family cannot carry me. I found that out at about six months of being sick. They cannot babysit me. Would I really want them too? It would kind of spoil it.
NOT that I don’t think they’re all FABulous, cause they are and I totally do.
#luckygirl
So here I am.
And my psychological issues are so monumentally difficult for me that I need to remind myself and re-center many times each day. My blog let’s me do that.
—I don’t think my life is any harder than yours, btw, it’s just mine you know? I bet some of you could tell stories that would top mine by about ten miles.—
I named my blog REBOOT MY HEART because that’s what I need to do. 🌻 and maybe I’m not alone.🌻
Me and God are determined to break my family cycle of ritual abuse and witchcraft and mental illness and crime and depression and anxiety…
…for the sake of my children and their children and their children. (God enabling me, of course. )
Know what I mean? I mean with you’re own stuff.
Jesus.
We need YOU.
come. 🌻
Fill us and
light up our world 🌎
You are amazing God. We are comPLETELY in love with YOUR gentle, kind, wise ways. 💕🌻🌷😁,
What would we do if You were a jerk? Umm…you’re GOD.
But You’re not. A jerk, I mean. 😍
Show Yourself strongly to me and my friends and help us all to believe in fairy tales and poetic justice and happy endings again.
Like my main man CSlewis said,
Some things are just too good NOT to be true.🌻
Superheroes
Put on the full armour of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes.
For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.
https://bible.com/bible/113/eph.6.11-18.NIVUK
Nona nails it
“Lord, I have so much to be grateful for despite the past disappointments and pain I’ve experienced. Thank you for giving me beauty in my life and helping me to focus on what I have, not what I lack. Amen.” -N Jones
Reading about Victor Frankl in my YouVersion devo by Nona Jones. So helpful! I’ve not got it nearly as bad. Yikes!
My pampered soft American self is pretty fussy about some of the personal stuff that is going down the last little bit. Aging. Grandparenting not going smoothly. (coronavirus) Hubby got laid off. Marriage stuff. Cabin fever…..
You too?
Gratitude.
Gratitude is the ticket.
You and me.
I have a chance to be developing the discipline of Gratitude.
How I think about what I’m thinking about. That is IMPORTANT.
Reboot my heart
-Sunshine through leaves…green and gold dapples
-quiet country gravel lanes
-internet sermons on autoplay
-bagged Asian salad with crunchy noodle thingies
-being firm but kind to bill collectors or phone salespeople…they have to feed their families too. Not their fault they have a sucky job.
-brushing my dog
-watching my cat hunting outside. Graceful and quiet and kickbutt
Math teacher
Math was ALWAYS hard for me: too left-brained for my piano playing, wonder woman watching, artistic self.
Enter sandy-haired, intense, Mr. Gunther, with his handle bar mustaches and his piercing gaze.
I remember Mr Gunther being short (but then everyone seemed short at almost 6foot.) And when he spoke, I was occasionally surprised that he did not have a thick German accent and carry a baton.
Unable to get more than Bs and Cs on my daily assignments, I scheduled a meeting with Mr. G. (Perfectionist. Im better now.)
Come to find out, luckily, the only thing he counted points for was the weekly quiz on Friday.
So even though I absolutely floundered my way through the daily work, …when it was time to talk turkey and show what I knew, I would turn in a stellar performance.
So I decided to ask him:
“Why do I keep bombing my daily work but acing my tests Mr Gunther? Am I doing ok?”
His answer was another question,
“Maybe you work better under pressure? “
Hmmm.
Math mystery solved. And so I went on dealing with my stressful private life of sexual abuse and pain and squalor and SRA. And flunking my math practice sheets but acing my math tests.And hating math. (Until I was 16, at which time I decided to like it. It’s like puzzles; I enjoy it now.)
One of my favorite stories is about a group of cloistered nuns who suddenly inherit the rural north eastern estate of a mysterious recluse.
” …if she has grown the strength of fifteen men in cloister, would you have her waste it on mending a printing press? “(*A Nun in the Closet” by Dorothy Gilman)
Hmmm.
Mom and Dad did their best; (What mammal doesn’t love their babies?) I don’t wish for other parents.
But I’m not gonna lie: I used to be jealous of my Mennonite-ish friends and their apple cheeked, fresh faced, cousin-rich, related-to-everyone, wholesome country upbringing.
I used to listen to their tractor and barn stories on the bus during choir trips.
Wistfully.
I did not make peace with my lot until I was in my 40s. After lots of counseling.
Now i like my origins. It is part of me.
God picked my parents. GOD picked ME. He wanted to love ME.
I once heard Rick Warren preach that though there are accidental parents, their are no accidental babies.
God picked for me to be born in 1970.
The dna of my short, feisty, codependent, abuse-surviving, cooking and canning mother and my tall, taciturn, ragaholic, abuse-surviving, hard-working, handsome, Swedish-descent dad.
Their love made me and my brother. God picked us to be born because HE loved us and wanted us to exist.
Our chromosomes. Our dna. Our laughs and cowlicks and freckles.
Im a love child:
and so are you.
So I dont wish for other parents anymore. Every mammal loves their babies. (They are both with God now.)
My mom and dad. did their best. It just wasn’t very good.
But what else is there? You can’t do better than your best.
It’s your best.
I used to gaze wistfully and with longing at my classmates’ industrious, super-connected, hair-netted (at least the moms…Mennonite) families.
Now I trust God with it. I am content. I love my parents and brother. I wouldn’t want any others. I am grateful for the good and the bad things in my life. It makes me who I am. God wants me and loves me and planned for me.
I am grateful.
So I guess I do work better under pressure.
And this hope will not lead to disappointment. For we know how dearly God loves us, because he has given us the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with his love.
Romans 5:5 NLT
https://bible.com/bible/116/rom.5.5.NLT
