My Spiritual Family

Pss. 16:11 “Thou wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore.”

My Spiritual Family

I’m always talking about my family back home and about my past but I think I’m going to write a little about this Spiritual Family that has taken me in for the past thirteen years, walked with me through my healing and has had a major impact on my life. 

It all started with Steven. He was the one who came on his white horse and carried me away from the hellish life I had known and lived in Baltimore. We had known each other online for ten months prior to meeting in person and he had read my writing, my poetry, understood my gift and thought that I deserved to be nurtured and taken care of. 

He got me started on the writing path with Christian Writers Guild and after I completed that course he enrolled me in a free 6-week writing course. My life did a 180-degree turn from when I left home. Like-minded people surrounded me and I was helping total strangers learn a craft I had only been new at myself. 

I always felt that I had a gift and back home it was never appreciated or explored. I was never ‘allowed’ to be a part of the internet because that was the work of the devil in my family and my ex-husband’s eyes. Little did I know it was streaming gift from God that would take me worlds away from the pain I had lived for nearly thirty years.

It was as if God placed a spiritual family around me that would nurture my soul on so many levels. These people would care for me, love me, help me when I was in need and just basically be the new family in my life, but I would never meet them face to face. I would only connect to them on a spiritual level meaning connecting through our writing and the virtual world senses.

Bob Hembree, (WVU) would introduce me to my writing family who consisted of Benning, Dixie, Debbie, Leona, Birdie, Shanna and a host of others, some of whom have since passed away, God rest their soul! This is the family that I would communicate with on a daily basis whether it was about our writing or our personal lives, we soon became a tight-knit loving writing family. 

Then the doors continued to open via Jason Elkins. I still don’t know what he saw in my writing that he befriended me, which then led to more of my God-sent spiritual family appearing almost out of nowhere. People of faith were drawn to me through either my writing, my blog, through facebook or Twitter. I felt a sense of God working in His wondrous ways spiritually to bring people whom He knew would care for me and encourage me. It was He who placed them in my life.

My spiritual family then became my fortitude of strength behind the woman you see today. Sure you can all read about my unsavory past and draw your own conclusions but I know that God set me on this path for a reason, maybe the reason is still being researched by me but I feel God wants me to change the world, one word at a time. 

While He placed me in my blood family, He also drew me away from the blood family that would hinder His purpose for my life. He had me give up everything I practically owned and as many of you have read in earlier postings, I only came to Texas with Steven, with my son and our basic necessities in tow.

I gave up my life to follow God’s grand plan and to this day I am still following wherever He may lead. If you are reading this and are a part of my journey please know, God handpicked each and every one of you to accompany me on this leg of the expedition. I don’t know if you consider that a blessing but rest assured, I most certainly do because you have all had a hand in the Master’s Plan. I feel extremely blessed to have met you on this journey. 

God Bless Everyone!

Mistakes

Pss. 19: 12 “Who can understand his errors? cleanse thou me from secret faults.”

I’ve made quite a few mistakes, I’m sure we all have and usually ones that we have to live with the rest of our life, like it or not. Since I began writing, well no, since I began blogging, my paintbrush of mistakes is in vivid color here. I hold nothing back and my truth is my healing place.

Some people deal with their mistakes, some timidly live with them, some take the mistakes they made in life by the horns and wrestle them to the ground and shed them from their life never to be seen or heard from again. 

To me, mistakes we made in our past shouldn’t be forcefully thrown in our face so that we have to live with the pain on a daily basis. Some people don’t deal with their mistakes very well and they live in denial as if the mistake is a joy in their life, never to be admitted as a mistake, but the pain, the pain is so evident when people live in denial. 

One mistake I made, was not getting an abortion at 16 and spending nine agonizing months pregnant only to give birth to a stillborn child whose memory still haunts me to this day, some thirty-odd years later; then marrying the guy at 17 and spending 20 years of my formative life owning up to a pledge I had made more to God than my husband.

Looking back at my mistakes helps me to see God’s hand in shaping me. I was the clay and he was the potter molding me into the woman I am now. I don’t have regrets in the choices I made and some may say I’m in denial but really; the CHOICE was mine, an act of free will that God gave to us all. 

Isa. 64:8 “But now, O LORD, thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou our potter; and we all are the work of thy hand.”

Have you ever lived in a moment of should’ve, could’ve, would’ve? I normally don’t but as flashbacks come back to haunt me, writing about what could’ve been helps me for some odd reason. 

It helps me because with all of the looking back, I see myself exactly where I should be and any amount of changes in what ‘could’ve been’, only changes segments in the here and now. At this juncture, I would not want one thing to change. My pain and my suffering, (that of which no one understands except myself) is what helps me to be non- judgmental to others who are suffering through their own mistakes.

I do believe that our mistakes are little tools in our life that carve out who and what we become. I need to see that living with no regret is where my mind and body is supposed to be at this moment.

Job 19: 4 “And be it indeed that I have erred, mine error remaineth with myself.”

Mistakes should never be used to make people bend to your whim, they should be treated with the soft-skinned hands of a person who has grown and learned from their mistakes. A mistake can be seen as a work of art instead of a hold-over-your-head lifetime of remembrance.

I think what I’m trying to say in short is this: Mistakes are sometimes blessings in disguise. Not that they are rainbows and unicorns and should be seen as such but that they are clay and mistakes are what molded you.