This is not going to be one of my funny stories. This one is more of a warning to others to not do as I have done. I am going to get real and expose my self here for the purpose of sharing how I was delivered from the depths of the despair I had allowed myself to fall into.
I hardly know where to start…..
Perhaps it started the day I was standing by my kitchen sink and started to cry thinking about how much I had enjoyed when my daughter and my nephews were young and how the boys would come up to the farm to spend a night and now they were all teens and no longer were interested in playing outside making forts in trees or riding on the tractor, etc. and those days would never come again.
I could not look at photos of when the kids were little and watching home videos would send me into great wracking sobs.
I longed for those days with a ache so strong, I felt it in my soul. I felt the best time in my life was over…..I was 46.
As the years passed, the ache subsided somewhat but was like a part of my heart had died and an emptiness had moved in.
It got so much worse when my daughter got married and left our home to begin her life with her husband. I was not prepared at all for the changes that took place in our relationship with her. She now had a different priority in her life (as she well should have) but I had been under the delusion that nothing would change except we would now have a son in OUR life. Things went from bad to worse and it was all because I did not want to “let go” of the way things had been.
We had been an extremely close three~person family. We home educated our daughter and she was happy living at home even after she graduated and got a job and marriage had never been a big desire in her heart but when she met her husband, all that changed. I was blindsided by it.
I want to make sure now, you understand that it was totally MY unwillingness to let go that caused all the problems in our relationship. I just did not see it until a few years later when God revealed to me that I had made my daughter my “idol”. My world revolved around her…..my husband was just a moon that was in my universe.
Looking back now, with a clearer mind and a healed heart, I see so much pain I was the cause of…..not on purpose….but because I wanted to keep living in the past.
And the numbness and emptiness in my heart grew until it was barely beating. I saw no reason to keep on living and would pray to be taken up into Heaven. I was drowning in a vast sea of blackness and I could not find a light to dog paddle to.
I spent at least 18 years in this ocean of despair. I become more and more recluse. My body tormented me every waking hour with pain and to~the~bone fatigue. I could not find any joy in my being even though I was blessed with four wonderful grandchildren and a restored relationship with my daughter and a new understanding of my place in her and her family’s life and I saw that it was a good place to be.
But I still in my heart, longed for the past…..to where she was young….like my grands.
Sometimes God allows you to go through a “trial by fire” to refine you to be the person He made you to be. I believe I went through that to burn away all my wrong thinking and ideas and my strong, strong will of rebellion. I had to be melted down to nothing so He could mold me into the person I am today…..July 30, 2019 (which ironically is my daughter’s 37th birthday!!!).
Today I feel joy and happiness and contentment and peace and hope and no longer am stuck in the past. I see today and that is all I need to see. I feel like I have come up out of the grave of hopelessness into the sunshine of LIFE. I feel alive again. I had to choose to make that first step but God put those stairs in front of me and I finally had the will and the wisdom to step on that first one and then He took my hand and lead me up the rest. He was there with me in the dark black waters but I was too self~involved to take His hand then. Man, that can be another serious post!
Today I was reading in the Bible in Ecclesiastes 6:10 {“Don’t long for “the good old days” for you don’t know whether they were any better than these'”} and I knew it was a confirmation of my “”rebirth” if you will, and that I needed to share my story for someone who is in the same sea as I was.
To that person, let me encourage you that you just need to lay your will down and admit that you cannot fix/change whatever your circumstances are and that you are now WILLING to give it all over to God and you WILL trust Him to take care of you NO MATTER WHAT THE FUTURE BRINGS. No more looking at the past. The past is gone. It shaped your present and now let God shape your future. I promise that you, too, will feel the sunshine and the joy and the peace and the security that He has given me. Going through the fire of refinement is not easy, not by any means. It hurts like nothing you have ever experienced before but when it is over, the new vessel you are is beyond anything you can imagine. God is good ALL the time…..today, tomorrow, forever…..
If you want to discuss this with me, please email me at: robynbelsvik@gmail.com and I would be so blessed to share more with you of my journey in the furnace or what my first step was…..I am an open book (much to the chagrin of my family!!!)
With love and joy and peace,
Your new Queen