Healing: 2 Year Anniversary

I can't believe it's been 2 years.  I think about it often though.  If I think about it long enough I can still bawl my eyes out at the wonder of it. My life is so different now.  I still love my sleep and I still hate waking up in the mornings but it's different.  

It's not just my sleeping patterns that are different though.  I'm different.  I think back to where I was in my relationship with God then and how that day God ignited a desire in my heart for Him that I had never experienced. My life was no longer about ME but what God could do through me.  I see that now.  I didn't then but I had the yearning.  I just knew that somehow I had to give back! I knew God didn't heal me so I could sit back and enjoy it for myself.

I think back to the guilt that I was living with.  All of the mistakes I had made.  The failure I felt for "knowing better" and yet stuck in a horrible cycle.  Wondering how I could make the decisions I was making knowing how I would feel afterwards.  I get it now.  There was no cure for any of it, there was nothing *I* could do but seek God.  HE would change me.  He would change my desires.  He changed my life.  The loneliness, the fear, the shame, the anger, the exhaustion, the frustration...He's taken it.  Unlike my physical healing it wasn't an immediate healing.  It's been a process.  He's brought so many things into my life....fostering dogs, small groups, a new church, a sponsored child, sermons, bible studies, friends, to just name a few.  Each thing refining me in a different way.

I have new friends in my life.  Friends that didn't know me the first 30 years of my life.  They see my life now.  They see the whole me.  I wish they could take a glimpse at the old me.  The pain, the hurt, the struggles.  I really DO get what they're going through.  I've been there. Oh how I've been there.  I've made the mistakes but God has redeemed them. 

I just recently watched as Jim Bakker came back to Heritage USA to celebrate how God has come full circle in his life and they called it a Restoration Weekend.  That hit home for me.  God restores.  If all this is nothing but babble, walk away knowing God can and does restore. I'm proof.