Hi Carolyn,
I loved your post, it was so much of what I needed to hear today, thank you. Giving up hatred and anger does not mean that I am not hurting anymore. It just means that I am not hurting myself anymore or as much. Now, I am trying to embrace the wounds, the aching bitterness of what it was like to be a baby, or a child, and to be left emotionally uncared for and despised by my caregiver, my mom.
I awoke this morning, noting my thoughts which were very much on my heart and the deep well of pain there. Although I can get up and move through life as if everything is OK, my heart aches, but through this I am healing, I can feel it.
This weekend I went to confession, confessing the ways in which I hurt myself, self-defeating or self-punishing behaviors, for anything done to ourselves is done to the body of Christ; we are supposed to respect ourselves and my lack of, or the last traces of it, are rooted in my early years when my mother despised me leading me to despise me.
I can feel God's grace working in me, it is hard to describe, hard to define the ways in which He works in my soul, but I know He is there; like a surgeon, cutting away at the flesh with His is scalpel and removing the unwanted growth of bitterness. The anesthesia that God provides is hope.
Lise
