Why is January so stinking long?

Today is a low mood day, in truth the last couple of days have been low mood days.

There’s no particular reason other than not feeling 100% in my physical health and so my mental health seems to have taken a bit of a nose dive.

You know those days,

Where you wake up and would rather not get out of bed, to be able to pull the duvet over your head and curl up in a ball and have another go at life tomorrow.

Where you’d rather cancel things in the diary rather than dig deep and ‘get on with it’.

Where you numb those feelings that you don’t quite understand with whatever it is that brings relief.

Where food shopping is a bad idea because you just come back with a bag full of chocolate eclairs, doughnuts and creme eggs.

Where you dread the school run because you just rather not speak to anyone.

Where it’s just easier to shut up shop and hide yourself away instead of trying…

But what is it we’re trying to do?

Trying not to feel like this? Well that’s a bit pointless! Because I do currently feel like this. I can’t pretend that I don’t (although again in truth I still do try to pretend, especially in front of others) but not acknowledging our feelings doesn’t get us anywhere. It’s what we CHOOSE to do with them that matters.

So at 11.21, after a good coffee, the M&S bubbly bunny and creme egg I had on the way home from food shopping (I did say it was a bad idea to food shop!) I’m choosing to do something different with these feelings that leave me on the edge of tears. I’m looking them straight in the eye and seeing them for what they are, FEELINGS! They do not define me, they are not the sum of my being, they are simply feelings and I can choose to sink in to them, let them pull me under and envelop me or I can choose to look towards my Father in Heaven and say

This is going on at the moment, I don’t understand but I feel fragile, a bit lost and I’m hurting, can you hold me on this

I’m not saying that it’s easy to do, it’s damn hard and you know what, it may not even make anything feel better but it puts me back in alignment with God and shelters me just a little from the bombardment of my emotions and feelings.

So I’m choosing to press in and not retreat from God, and a fridge magnet has just reminded me of this

May you know that too

Blessings upon blessings xx

Bring the lies into the light

Over the weekend I went to a women’s breakfast in a nearby Church. They had a guest speaker in talking about how we live in freedom, what it looks like to walk in the freedom He has promised us.

Its so easy to get caught up in the struggles of life isn’t it; financial issues, daily practicalities of getting children here and there, heavy workloads, family relationship difficulties, marital problems, poor mental health, food difficulties and so on, we can forget that the Bible tells us in Galatians 5:1 “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by the yoke of slavery“.

Christ came to bring us freedom, imagine what our lives would look like if we could truly take hold of that truth.

One of the things that prevents us from walking in the freedom Christ offers us is that we believe the lies whispered to us. We need to call those lies out into the light and see them for what they are. But we can’t call them out if we don’t even recognise and acknowledge them!

One of the things which struck me at the women’s breakfast was the sentence “the crisis is not the problem, the problem is the lie you believe as a result of the crisis”

SAY WHAT…??

“the crisis is not the problem, the problem is the lie you believe as a result of the crisis” 

I know how quickly I blame what’s going on in my life for the impact it has on my mood, how I become short-fused, snappy and angry with my husband and children, how I become critical, judgemental, sarcastic and bitter. What if its not the event or situation which causes those behaviour changes but the lies I believe about myself as a result of those circumstances?

Recently we have had a difficult time with one of our children and I have believed a whole lot of lies as a result of that (and I only just recognised this yesterday!!) I have believed that I have failed her as a parent, that I am a rubbish mother and for that matter human being, that she doesn’t think I like or love her, that she resents me and thinks I resent her, that she feels excluded by me, and the lies just keep coming. But you know what I realised yesterday? THEY ARE ALL LIES! And do you know how I know that? Because they don’t match up with what God says about me. Satan was running rings around me and getting me to doubt both who God says he is and who God says I am. If we agree with the lie we empower the demonic, we need to reject the lie and break the agreement with the liar. The speaker yesterday said that “the only power satan has is the power we give to him – don’t give it to him!”

That was such a lightbulb moment for me, I have been giving satan all the power he could need to derail me, to send me off course and really I was doing all the work for him, he just sent in the little seeds of doubt and I watered them for him.

That’s a lot of effort on my part for nothing but weeds to grow!

But you know what I’ve noticed, there doesn’t need to be a crisis for lies to creep in. Lies can come from just a little self doubt. I have been employed as the family outreach worker for our Church, there haven’t been any big crisis since I started the role but I have doubted my ability and believed my feelings “I’m not doing a good enough job, I should be doing this or that, things aren’t perfect, I feel like I’m failing, I’m rubbish at this, other people would do a much better job, I feel out of my depth”, lies spread out like wildfire from a little bit of doubt and there I am believing that I am not good enough, that I am not enough!

John 10:10 “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy” that’s his main goal, and a whisper in my ear was all it took.

Yet these things are not what God says about me, It doesn’t say in the Bible that God sent his son into the world to die for a bunch of people who weren’t good enough, or who weren’t achieving enough,  or who he didn’t particularly care about

It says that God sent his ONLY son because he loved the world SO much! And yes, we are all sinners and have fallen short of the glory of God but God sent his son because he wanted a relationship with us, he wanted us to know who we truly are as sons and daughters and not to believe the lies which rob us of that relationship.

So what do we choose to believe? Because it is our choice, we have free will. Do we chose to trust our doubts, fears, insecurities and anxieties? Or do we chose to trust the word of God? Do we chose to believe what we feel about ourselves or do we take those feelings and give them to God?

I know what I am doing, I am taking a step closer to freedom!!