Previous Challenge Entry (Level 3 - Advanced)
Topic: I SURRENDER ALL (to God) (don’t write about the song) (05/07/15)
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TITLE: True Confessions
By Judith Gayle Smith
05/14/15 -
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I fell in love with You, accepted Your proposal, took Your Name.
I had excess baggage, You understood and loved me.
My weight of sin was more than I could bear. You gave me Your Gift of Repentance - and my life was changed and charged with Your Holy Spirit.
How was it possible to even imagine that by just professing Your Name, all my iniquity would disappear, be pardoned, without a desire to serve You rather than myself?
Oh yes - I could and did profess with my mouth - but did I truly believe in my heart that You are real?
How could I hope to breathe the precious scent of Your forgiveness, when I could not forgive myself?
I am a miserable mess. I have held onto pain so tightly that it became almost pleasurable. The consummate "whipping boy" that surprisingly relished in the miasma of self-hate.
But not self-denial. Taking Your precious time to wallow in self-afflicted misery and horrendous memories of times past that are best forgotten.
Funny - if I truly surrendered myself to You, why do I renege surrendering my guilt, my self-hatred? Why do I insist on punishing myself without just giving my pain to You?
Do I think logically that if I surrendered this suffocating passion to You, that I no longer would be able to refrain from committing the same sins repeatedly? Denying Your Holy Spirit the joy of renewing within me Your new Heart?
Intellectually, I stumble over the lessons unlearned in the past. Physically, the painful nausea chokes the present. Spiritually I am all aflutter, like a butterfly with no fragrant flower in sight.
Lord - oh Father! Dear, dear Father. Only You can free me from this terrible shame. This burden that I shamefully bear to punish myself.
You are the essence of forgiveness and love. Why haven't I seen that? What was I expecting or even hoping from You? To keep me firmly in line, as Your obedient child?
You have given me new life in, through and because of Your only begotten Son. I turn over all my angst to You, with all the tortuous memories of my former life without You. My greatest sin is not trusting You to take them from me.
What then, is faith? Do I take Your Word for granted, or for what it is - absolute Truth? Will I continue to tread Your Grace beneath me? Am I fooling anyone - much less myself?
I sing the song of Your salvation, loving forgiveness - and the inescapable promise of no more tears in Heaven. I pray that You forgive all who have been traumatized by my ungodly behaviors before I believed You. My "light" was buried so deeply that even I could not see to be healed by You.
Not my will - but Yours, Lord. Thank you immeasurably for Jesus setting the example of true surrender to Your Will. Thank You, Father - for You.
non-fiction
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