LOVED. HEARD. SEEN.

It is amazing what a paradigm shift can do to you. In the course of our journey through life, we tend to take a lot of things for granted; the people God has placed in our lives, the fact that we have food to eat and a place to rest our heads at night, waking up in the morning, being able to sleep at night, but the greatest thing we take for granted is God. There is nothing we take for granted like God. Our opinion of grace has made us the most powerless, undisciplined Christians of all time. We take sin for granted; we take mercy for granted; we take the forgiveness of sin for granted. We have become lazy, uncaring, self-centered, prayerless, Word-less. I have been thinking a lot these days, especially last night. In my struggle to grow out of a poor self-image, to be healed of the damage depression had wrecked in me and to gain self-confidence and self-love which I was totally lacking, I had become lost in the process and elevated myself and my healing to become the most i...

On the first of November, 2013, Evangelist Duke preached on the grace of God at my local assembly. I never really understood what grace is. I was told it was the unmerited favor of God, but then I didn't really understand what favor was either. Again, dictionaries didn't help me much; I was missing something. I studied Romans 4: 16 & 17, but I think I ended up understanding what 'guarantee' meant, more than I understood grace. Honestly. On this Sunday, he said "grace is the excessive goodness and kindness of God." I swear you could almost hear the wheels in my brain screech to a halt. EXCESSIVE GOODNESS AND KINDNESS?!   There is really such a thing?!   That sounded really weird in my hearing, maybe because goodness and kindness were concepts I had had very little experience of in my dealings with people in my life, and I could not imagine it being excessive. Anybody that knew me eventually came to realize that I have "daddy issues...

Hello everyone! Good morning! So, I was going through my old journals last night, and I read through the entries I had made in trying to figure myself out and the plethora of emotions I was having at the time. Journals for me have been almost therapeutic; they allow me to talk and express myself when I have no one to talk to or confide in. It hears me out without judging me, drawing the wrong conclusions or thinking I am wasting it's time. So I have at least 5 filled journals. Yep, I had a lot to say. In this journey, I would like to take you through some of the entries in my journal in 2013. Many of these things we will eventually look into and discuss in depth. I just feel that many people will identify with some things in it. I just want to open up and share and build up to the point where I was healed as I said in this post , hopefully building up to your healing too or that of a loved one. So here goes. July 23, 2013 Yesterday morning I was thinking on a lot of thi...

Hello again! So, continuing from earlier today, here's a bit of why I was away for so long.  I was suffering in silence for so long, and it just took it's toll on me. I had to disengage from most things and heal. I was swimming in dark waters when I started this blog and the blog was supposed to be an encouragement for others that may be suffering like me, but a drowning man cannot help another drowning man. My depression reached an all-time high in 2013, and by August of 2013 I began to plan my own death. I had come to the point where I was soooo certain that it was the only solution to all my problems. I had been plagued by suicidal thoughts since I was 14, but this was the first time I was actually going to go through with it. My mind had spiraled out of control so bad that the only time I had peace was when I contemplated death. Let me give you a brief background info about me. I suffered from chronic depression for 24 years, since I was about 11 years...

Hello everyone. Forgive my extremely long hiatus. It hasn't been just months of absence, it has been years. My life took on a weird turn and I lost so much. I was in the deepest pit of depression I've know, for someone who had been clinically depressed for 22 years, to the point where I had decided on suicide until God pulled me out. I sunk so, so, low, and I couldn't see any light or any way out. Things got so bad that I could not afford my own meals if I had to live on my own, a thirty year old jobless, dependent female (I am now 36). My old laptop fell and shattered, I had no access to the internet or  my blogs, and my phone just wasn't smart enough. Still isn't. I was still writing though. I filled three journals! But my entries were really sad and depressing, and I didn't want to put my problems on anyone reading, so I didn't think of blogging then (not like I had a choice; I didn't have the means to). Maybe if I had, I would have som...