forward jump

Someone told me we can only move forward if we understand where we have come from. God made me cry today, a base emotional response to that overwhelming love, immeasurable grace and infinite mercy. I am an adopted daughter in the family of the Lord and sometimes the love is so raw and real that I cry my thanks.

Of course I wasn’t in private, sitting on a devotion stool, or on my knees in prayer, I was walking along on a road and singing to my Lord. Did I mention I don’t do pretty? I don’t do pretty anything but certainly never pretty tears. So with swollen eyes, red and runny nose and sobs I listened instead of singing. I heard as if for the first time, I was enveloped in a beautiful sweet love.

Last night I was reminded of dreams, bad dreams showing a person as two different people, one good (seen from afar) and one bad (intimately known). The assumptions made about these dreams were twisted in fantasy for many, many years. We are given facts by our families that are full of their assumptions and we add these to our list of assumptions.

I was told that the dreams meant I was scared of being without the person. I assumed this was true. As an adult and with the Lord’s help I revisited the dreams and discovered the exact opposite was my truth. I was scared of the street angel because they were false, I was scared of the house devil because although real, the reality I lived in was frightening.

In another conversation today I explained that if someone said they didn’t love me, which would validate what I have always known, the assumption from the past that I am unlovable. That “known fact” from my past, who could love me?

God loves me! I can just jump up and down all day long saying this, knowing this, feeling this. No longer digging my heels, I am all in.

JUMP                                                                                     JUMP

JUMP                                     JUMP

JUMP

I understand where I have come from, not the official family version, but where I really came from, my truth. In this understanding I can sit in this present, content and joyful.

BUT

Sitting is not what is needed or wanted. I must move forward, heel-to-toe. Jumping, skipping, hopping, whatever my Lord requires.

Psalm 8

¹ Lord, our Lord,

    how majestic is your name in all the earth!

You have set your glory

    in the heavens.

² Through the praise of children and infants

    you have established a stronghold against your enemies,

    to silence the foe and the avenger.

³ When I consider your heavens,

    the work of your fingers,

the moon and the stars,

    which you have set in place,

⁴ what is mankind that you are mindful of them,

    human beings that you care for them?

⁵ You have made them a little lower than the angels

    and crowned them with glory and honor.

⁶ You made them rulers over the works of your hands;

    you put everything under their feet:

⁷ all flocks and herds,

    and the animals of the wild,

⁸ the birds in the sky,

    and the fish in the sea,

    all that swim the paths of the seas.

⁹ Lord, our Lord,

    how majestic is your name in all the earth!