Lovingkind Counsel

This kind of feels like a loaded question but I’m excited to answer it. By most accounts, to know fractions of what I’ve lived through, you might agree that I’ve had a pretty traumatic life. I feel blessed to say that I’ve always made it out on the other side. I just remember “I know the plans I have for you. I know the thoughts I think towards you”. I have and do spend a good amount of time thinking about the past. I think many of us do and for me it depends on the day. There are days when I’m mostly thinking about the future, but there are days when I can’t help but think about the past. To be clear, the past can be a few hours ago and 20yrs ago. I think the “Why?” is what’s most important.

There have been points in my life where I visited the past like I was visiting a prisoner. My trauma was found guilty and locked up in my mind. I was stuck in this cycle of pain and suffering and the only way I could feel like I had any control of what happened was to keep it in lockdown.

There were points where I had to revisit the prison because I needed to know why. Why these things happened to me. Why I had to go through so much. I launched my own investigation replaying every detail and gathering any new information. Like double jeopardy didn’t exist.

This might’ve gone on for the rest of my life except I came to a moment when I realized that the same people that I had under lock and key in my head -looked quite free and HAPPY outside of it. Suddenly the math wasn’t mathing for me anymore. I went through a period of anger because they was living life like nothing ever happened. I was angry that they was allowed to be happy? Turns out I too was allowed to be happy and free, but it required me to give up my control, hand over the keys to the prison cell and free them. I didn’t realize that I was the one who was trapped inside revisiting the trauma. I was torturing myself. I can’t take the credit for this change of mind. It took a great big loving God who didn’t find it beneath him to put off his majesty for a little while to come see about little me.

The craziest thing is the closer I’ve gotten to God the more my perspective of my past has changed. I went from being a victim of my past, to a survivor of it, to a victor from it, to a spokesperson for it. The higher you climb on a tree, the more different the things on the ground look. With every new height, I gained a new perspective on my past, but I also gained a new perspective on my future because things not only look different on the ground, they look different above me too.

Today’s AJ would sound crazy to the AJ of 15 years ago, but I’m so grateful for my past. I want to go back to the people who hurt me and say thank you -truly thank you. If I had never been hurt, I could not help someone else who had been hurt. God is always right. He doesn’t put more on us then we can bear so if I went through this, and I made it to the other side, then I bared it. It may have hurt… It may have been hard… It may have been bloody and ugly, but I bared it! Sacrifice isn’t pretty. The weapon may have formed but if I’m still here then it didn’t prosper. What if this is the plan he has for you? What if the love he has for his children or the world requires that this is the plan for you? [Don’t worry I had to (forgive) release God from my prison too.] It’s not that crazy an idea. We have done an incredible job of making God bite-sized so that we can remain in control in our minds. He love the world so much that he sacrificed his only son to save it. God’s love does not change and neither does his plans for your future. He said it was for good things. You just have to hold on through the ugly parts and you’ll get high enough to see how it all worked together for your good -for your future.

I love you but not more than God