I lost my dad to suicide at the age of five.

No matter how much I tried to get better, I kept falling flat on my face. The unbearable anxiety and suicidal thoughts occupied my soul. The ugly reflection from my mirror flooded my mind with atrocious lies. You are never going to get well! You will remain living with this hell! You will never escape and be free! I picked up drinking again, hoping to find relief. Escaping from the monster in the mirror forced me to run towards things even more gruesome.

I needed a way out

Then one night my turbulent way of living caught up with me. I couldn’t handle my extreme highs, lows, and the stack of baffling conditions I juggled. I didn’t want to continue on the wild roller coaster ride any longer. I couldn’t handle the disabling hours in the bathroom, nor tolerate the self-destructive behavior in the bars. I felt ashamed of my life and needed the madness to end. Out of dire desperation, I prayed to God.

“God, I don’t want to wake up to see another day. I’d rather be dead! If you must keep me alive, then you have to help me get better. Please rescue me from this misery! God, let me die!”

To my surprise, when I awoke the following morning, I prayed to God to guide me into a church. It was Sunday morning and for some odd reason I longed to be in his presence. I fought a dreadful conflict in the bathroom as I prepared myself to get ready. The tormenting obsessions nearly destroyed me but I survived the onslaught, the hideous grooming ritual.

As I got into my car, a strange feeling encompassed me. I had no idea which church I was heading to. As I drove down the street, it felt as though a gentle hand was chauffeuring me. I pulled up along the side of an unfamiliar church. I hesitated for a moment, deciding whether to park my car or not. Is this the one? Look at all the people. Will they stare at me because I’m ugly? Should I go in or not? Within a few seconds, an incredible sensation empowered me, urging me inside.

Finding relief in a church

As I walked towards the entrance, several parishioners greeted me with open arms. This made me feel welcomed, so relieved. I found a seat and immediately participated in the singing taking place. I’d never done this before, but my heart longed to connect. The songs were uplifting and joyous.  I cried as I joined in. I don’t recall the exact message spoken, but it infiltrated my heart. As service was about to end, the pastor asked everyone to close their eyes and bow their heads for prayer. After a minute or two of prayer, he announced an altar call, something unfamiliar to me.

He asked, “Is there anyone who would like to accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior? Please raise your hand.”

Without hesitation, I raised my hand.  I knew in my heart, right there and then, that I needed Jesus Christ in my life. I had no idea the pastor was going to ask all of us, who raised their hands, to go up for additional prayer. Right away, I walked up to the front. The pastor had me recite a special prayer, accepting Jesus Christ as my Lord.

Shortly after, elders of the church prayed over me. Tears poured down my face as we prayed together. Later, as I walked towards my car, I felt different. I didn’t feel dirty and ugly. I wasn’t troubled! I feel like I was finally alive!

Everything changed

Something inside me vanished. I felt all cleaned up inside. The obsessions and anxiety disappeared. For the first time in years, I felt good about myself in a healthy way, not in a self-destructive manner. I attended church on a weekly basis. I began to break out of the shell I was locked up in. The greatest feeling anyone could ever experience—imagine a prisoner, set free after being wrongfully locked up for over thirty years.

If you feel lost there is hope for you. There is hope for the aching heart that can not love. There is hope to the one that might be thinking about taking their life. Cry out to God and He will send you help.

For God says, “At just the right time, I heard you. On the day of salvation, I helped you.” (2 Corinthians 6:2)

God is ready to help you right now. Today is the day of salvation.

Do you want to accept Jesus just as Barbara did? All you need to do is pray. Prayer is just talking to God. There is no right or wrong way to do it. God is not concerned about the words that you choose, he cares about the state of your heart. He hears you, the words aren’t that important. You can pray a prayer something like this:

Jesus, I want to know you personally. I know that I am a sinner and that nothing I could do can make up for that. Thank you for dying in my place and paying the price for my sin. I know that my sin doesn’t separate me from God anymore. Thank you for forgiving me. I know that you love me and that I will spend eternity with you. I want you to be my Savior. Come into my life and take control, make me the person you want me to be.

God invites us into relationship with him. He’s not here to condemn, although our sin makes us guilty. God is inviting us back, ready to welcome us home.

Then Jesus said to his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” (Matthew 16:24)

What does it mean to deny myself?

The primary thing that springs to mind is the idea of doing without things desired – a picture of a monk leading a strict and harsh life, far from luxury.

Although the concept of doing without is found in the dictionary under “deny”, the first definition under “deny” is “to declare untrue”. Of course the dictionary was referring to denying a statement, but I began to wonder if it might apply to denying oneself.

If I declared myself as being untrue, I would point to someone or something outside myself as the ultimate source of truth – it could not be found in me.

If I declared myself as being untrue, I wouldn’t trust my feelings or my interpretation of the facts.

If I declared myself as being untrue, I would admit that I am not right, that my ways are not right, that I indeed have a sinful nature that desires what is contrary to what God desires.

Is that not what Jesus is asking us to do? We must acknowledge Him as the only true one. God’s ways are always right.

We are called to choose His way rather than our own, to surrender our will to Him and to follow Him where ever He leads.

Help wanted: We need more mentors! Questions keep pouring in to the site and we need more mentors to help answer them.  Isn’t that a wonderful problem to have? Every day we get emails from people with prayer requests and questions about all aspects of life.  At the moment we have a particular need for help with relationship questions.  You don’t have to be an expert, you just need to be available for God to use.  Your experience is just what someone else needs to hear.  Learn more and apply to be a mentor today.

Question: What does the idea of “declaring yourself untrue” mean to you and your approach to God?

April 12th, 2009 forced a change in my life.

Change comes suddenly and without warning, often in ways we are not prepared for. A loss of a relationship, job loss, bad news, unwanted circumstances are all outside of our control. The change forces new challenges and opportunities to navigate the road ahead and forge on to allow God to lead us to new destinations.

If you are facing change in your life there are a few keys in making change your friend rather than foe:

1. Allow yourself time to heal emotionally, physically and spiritually from the shock of the unexpected. Making decisions to soon or for the wrong reasons can complicate your situation. The Holy Spirit can heal the brokenness and emptiness and bring wisdom in making decisions about your future.
2. Surround yourself with wise friends who will guide you and provide Godly wisdom. Be open and honest even transparent in the feelings you are experiencing.
3. Accept the fact change is a part of life and understand your setbacks can be followed by comebacks.
4. Know your steps are ordered by God and He has a plan and purpose for your future.
5. Understand that disappointments have meaning. If you separate the word dis from appointment it means cut off or separated from your appointment. Stalling in the land of disappointment will keep you from reaching the great and exciting destination God still has for your life.
6. Postpone major decisions but when you are ready aggressively take action to move ahead. Don’t allow  doubt or fear  to camp in your thinking.
7. Believe that nothing happens that God is not fully aware of and has provision to bring you into a new level of faith and wisdom.

Got change? Whatever change you are facing today God is still in control. The clouds will roll back and the sun will shine again. Change when accepted constructively will become deposits and investments that will become more valuable over time.

Take the Next Step
Coping with Change
Finding Peace in Troubled Times

Recently, several bloggers tackled a highly sensitive and debated topic— the need for women to attend to their beauty and appearance.

A Sensitive Issue for both sexes

Woman’s appearance is a sensitive issue, because from a man’s perspective, a wife’s effort to be beautiful for her husband speaks of her care and respect for him, and communicates her desire to be sexually attractive and available for him. Making a reasonable effort to care for and beautify herself is a demonstration of her devotion. In his view, a lack of effort in this regard demonstrates a lack of concern for him. Bottom line – whether we like it our not, it’s important to our guys.

When it comes to beauty, women react against the burden of expectation, the fear that they will fall short of the desired standard, the inevitability of decay, and the resentment that the script is different for men than it is for women. A woman wants to be loved and accepted as she is. From a wife’s perspective, a husband’s attraction to/desire for beauty can magnify her feelings of personal inadequacy and insecurity, and she may fear that his love/acceptance depends on her ability to measure up.

So who is right? The stalemate in the discussion often boils down to the fact that women resent the fact that men are so attracted to beauty, while men resent the fact that women don’t make the effort to properly attend to it. So how do we resolve the impasse? In my opinion, we can’t hope to make sense of the question until we view woman’s beauty and beautification through the lens of the biblical typology of gender, and the eternal, cosmic meaning of sexuality.

Beauty has a cosmic meaning

Psalm 45 is a song celebrating the marriage of a Hebrew king to a foreign princess. But it’s also a messianic prophecy pointing to the relationship between Christ the King and His Church-Bride. The Psalmist notes that the king “desires her beauty”, and that the princess, in turn, makes herself beautiful—“all-glorious”— for him.

Scripture uses this imagery to illustrate how we are to make ourselves beautiful for our King. The Lord wants us to clothe ourselves in fine, spotless garments of righteousness—in holy character and holy deeds. (Rev. 19:7—8) He wants us to be beautiful, and through Jesus, we are!  The great story of the gospel is that God gives us the opportunity to clothe ourselves in the beauty of Christ. He provides the beauty- and we don’t need to work or strive to measure up, nor do we need fear that we will fail to meet the standard.

So what does all this have to do with our discussion about female appearance? It has a great deal to do with it. We live—as C.S. Lewis coined it—in the “shadow lands.” The earthly, physical realities of our lives are but shadows—copies—of true and heavenly realities (e.g. Heb. 8:5; 9:24-25). The physical and temporal exist to point us to the spiritual and eternal. And nowhere is this more the case than in the relationship between male and female.

Human sexuality is a parable —a testimony to the character of God and to His spectacular plan of redemption through Jesus. This spiritual truth is so magnificent that God chose to put it on display permanently. Everywhere. Men were created to reflect the strength, love and self-sacrifice of Christ. Women were created to reflect the grace and beauty of the Bride He redeemed.

I believe that men are “wired” to be attracted to beauty in women because our Heavenly Bridegroom desires the beauty of His Bride. And I believe that deep down, every woman wants to feel beautiful and desired. This is the way that God has created us as male and female—and the illustration points to something far bigger than ourselves.

Beauty is more than a passing pleasure

Many scorn beauty as “a passing pleasure.” They think that the illusive, fragile, fading, temporary, and wrinkle-and-stretch-mark-prone nature of female beauty indicates that men (and women) should just “get over it” and focus on more important things.

Beauty is indeed a passing pleasure. But I think there’s a deeper meaning here that we dare not trivialize. The symbolic importance of beauty/beautification is not unlike the symbolic importance of marriage. Woman’s beauty, and all the broken, distorted ideas about it, will not so much pass, as give way—in the end—to that to which beauty points. There will be no marriage in heaven because the shadow will give way to the reality. Likewise, the illusive, fading, temporary beauty of women will one day give way to the breathtaking, spectacular, eternal beauty of the Bride of Christ.

The gospel doesn’t negate man’s desire to enjoy beauty and woman’s desire to be beautiful, but it does shift the focus of our attention beyond the symbol to that to which it points. When we consider the jaw-dropping picture painted by Scripture, it would seem that our Lord finds our desire for beauty not too strong, but too weak. We get all wrapped up with the earthly and the superficial and temporal, while the supernatural and eternal is offered us. Like an ignorant tourist who spreads out his towel under the picture of the umbrella on the sign, because he does not know that the sign points to the beach. We are far too easily pleased. (Again, a favorite C. S. Lewis thought)

Embracing beauty

Followers of Christ know that the symbol is not even fractionally as important as the reality. But they understand that it is not totally unimportant either.

So girls, let’s give the guys a break. Let’s stop condemning them for feeling attracted to beauty and wanting us to make a reasonable and sustained effort in that department. And guys… give us a break. Please understand how very personal and painful this issue can be for women. It’s very difficult to stay engaged in fighting a battle we know we are destined to lose. The beauty of our youth will inevitably fade. And most of us don’t have a hope of even remotely resembling the airbrushed model on the cover of the magazine.

In my opinion, the answer to the conundrum surrounding the discussion about female beauty is not to diminish or deny its importance, but to exalt and embrace the all-surpassing beauty to which it points.

Let’s always remember that the whole issue of female beauty is merely a signpost. It’s reminder to all of us—male and female—that the King desires our beauty, and that we ought to carefully attend to our character, and to making ourselves spiritually beautiful for that great destination wedding on the other shore.

Read more about Beauty:

Take our study on Beauty
Beauty: To What Extreme?

One clear September morning my son packed up his car and headed off to college.

But my heart, my mother-heart stared sadly at that rumbling car as he drove away.  He turned and waved at the corner.  I waved back and blew a kiss.   A deep melancholy overwhelmed me.  A chapter of mothering had just turned that corner with him.  Well, that is, it had always looked like a corner, up until now.  In the clarity of the early morning air, I felt a certain kinship with Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, when she proclaimed to her dog, “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” That corner was not really a corner it was a precipice, a great abyss, a free fall into the great unknown.

I was now the mother of an adult son, and mothering would look differently than it had up to this point.

What happens now?

Questions, doubts, like balloons, floated between my heart and my head, vying for attention, squeezing aside trust, obstructing peace.   Had we prepared him for the journey ahead?  Was he equipped to withstand the hard knocks, to make wise decisions, to be responsible?  Was his faith strong enough to walk him through the difficult questions that the future would bring?  What did my new role look like?  A hundred and one questions collided inside my head.

And then, quietly a bubble of faith floated into the air before me.  I reached out and took hold of it.

“I will never leave him, nor forsake him.   For I know the plans I have for him, plans to prosper him and not to harm him, plans for a hope and a future.  When he asks for wisdom, I will give it to him.  I have given my angels charge over him.”  And softly, gently, peace and trust returned to my soul.  A calm assurance pushed aside the melancholy.  “I will instruct you, and teach you in the way that you should go.”

Our Father is a parent to so many adult children.  He would instruct me.  He would guide me.  This same God of peace would also carry my son as he steered towards the hazy precipice of the future.  Oh, I knew that he wouldn’t sail through life.  No one does.  I knew that he might drag his feet at the bottom of that chasm more than once.  But I also had the calm assurance that God would not allow him to get stuck in the mud at the bottom, but would carry him on angels wings to fulfill the plans and purposes for which he was created.

My reverie was broken by the sound of a familiar distant rumble.   I glanced towards the sound, and caught the sparkle of the sun, glinting off my son’s car for just a brief second before he slid out of sight.  I smiled.  I almost had a sense that my prayers, like balloons, were wafting silently upon the morning haze, across the hilltops and were lifting him, carrying him into the future.  He had not fallen off the precipice.  He was being carried.

We can’t see the road ahead.  But, we know the One who can!  It is this One that guides our journey; that carries us through the melee of life.   It is also this 0ne that is always within our reach, waiting for us to inhale His truth, His love, His presence.  As we inhale His Presence, He lifts us up above the fears and mysteries of the unknown, and fills us with peace, wisdom, guidance and trust.

I stood to my feet.  As I turned to go inside, I glanced once more at the hillside.  A quiet refrain soughed gently in the breeze.

I will lift up my eyes to the hills –

From whence comes my help?

My help comes from the LORD,

Who made heaven and earth. 

The LORD is your keeper;

The LORD shall preserve you from all evil;

He shall preserve your soul.

The LORD shall preserve your going out and your coming in

From this time forth, and even forevermore.  

Psalm 121: 1, 2, 5a, 7, 8.  

Related:

Do you need to find shelter in God’s arms?
Trust God through the Seasons of Life

Take for example the other day, I was talking with a friend, I mean really pouring out my heart, only to realize they were downloading an app on their phone or checking a text message. I was instantly deflated and I just wanted to get out of there, I mean what’s the point? I felt totally unheard, unloved and insignificant. To me, this experience only underscores the importance of my own listening habits.

If I’m ever going to connect with people in my life  to Christ, I need to be an effective listener. I must be able to hear their concerns, their heart, and their questions in order to connect their story with God’s story, and I must demonstrate a quality of listening that communicates love, value, and respect. What’s your listening saying about you?

Related: Do you crave to be heard?
Intimacy
Meaning
Destiny

Take the next step:

10 Tips to Effective & Active Listening Skills
Train Yourself in the Art of Listening
Do you need to talk? 

If I’m ever going to connect with people in my life  to Christ, I need to be an effective listener. I must be able to hear their concerns, their heart, and their questions in order to connect their story with God’s story, and I must demonstrate a quality of listening that communicates love, value, and respect. What’s your listening saying about you?

Take the next step:
Are you a good listener? Become a mentor

1.  Ask God to bring to mind everyone that you’ve created a sexual bond with—voluntarily or involuntarily. Wait quietly, allowing God to bring names to memory.

2.  Write down on a piece of paper the name of every person. If you don’t know it, write a description of the person or event.

3.  Ask God to show you His perspective of each bond.  If the bond was created through your own choice, ask God to show you why you participated, and the part you played. If the bond was created through someone else’s choice forced on you, ask God to show you how that event affected you.

4.  Pray that your heart will be humbled and your spirit contrite (Psalm 51:17) so that you will experience true repentance.Please note: If you’re praying for someone who’s sexually abused or raped you, you do not need to ask forgiveness for your violation of that person, because he or she violated you. However, you still need to ask God to sever the negative bond that has been created with this person.

5.  Pray the following prayer with each name or incident:

“Lord, I ask forgiveness for sinning against you and against my own body. In the name of Jesus, I sever and renounce the bonds I created with _____. I release my heart tie with this person physically, emotionally, and spiritually. I choose by faith to forgive _______ for their violation against me. Please forgive me of my violation against _______. Please remove the negative emotional baggage I’ve been carrying around with me. Restore to me a virgin heart—as though I’d never been with this person, and heal me completely of the damage this sin has caused me and my marriage. Thank you for your forgiveness. I accept it fully. Amen.”

Return to the main article for more information and four books that can help you on your way.

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