People...listen.... I've been actin a fool!

For a very long time, I have been very angry. The best definition I have ever read to date on anger, the kind that I've been experiencing is from the book The Love Dare by Stephen and Alex Kendrick. It states:

"Anger is usually caused when the strong desire for something is mixed with disappointment or grief. You don’t get what you want and you start heating up inside. It is often an emotional reaction that flows out of our own selfishness, foolishness, or evil motives." Boy, that is so on point to how I have been feeling for such a long time. Selfish motives led me to act in ways that I am not proud of, that have hurt others, including my family and have over all caused me to fall flat on my face.

Oddly, it was during this falling flat on my face, that I was able to see how much anger I
had built up and where it was coming from. The place that I blamed it on was a scape goat. You know, you blame someone for something when really your reacting from an earlier hurt? In any event, I have been acting and sometimes lashing out at the wrong person. The scary thing is, that I believed in what I was doing. I believed that he was to blame for all my pain. The more I lashed out the more his heart hardened and the more mine did as well. That's when the foxes entered the vineyard to spoil the grapes... Or as I like to say...my justification/reasoning/making my behavior ok. I blamed him for everything wrong. He didn't love me enough, he didn't love my children enough, he wasn't nice enough..he he he... Do you see a pattern here? The problem with that logic is that I was looking to him to fulfill some sort of loss that I had experienced as a child. But the real kicker is that, even if he, in all attempts could love me enough, I'd never receive it...because I was too busy trying to prove his guilt for all my wounds. He pays the price, for all my wounds. Umm, ya that sounds like something I'd want to sign up for. ..not. But he did, and I stomped on him, crushed his spirit, and betrayed him. Surely someone had to pay. I am not saying our relationship was perfect but that isn't the point here. I can only change me. So disgusting was my behavior. So self serving, so just mean. Way to show him the heart of God Wendy, awesome. Worse still, after waking up from wendy's justification land, I see my children...ugh, my children. The ones I fight for, the ones I try and protect from my past...the ones I was about to create the same mess I lived. I start realizing these things and I turn to God because obviously my own understanding is just digging a huge mess, well actually a pit.

Stasi and John Eldredge in their book,Captivating said that God thwarts us to save us. The thwarting came. It was hard on my heart. It was difficult. It hurt. It shook the hardness out of me...violently. But it saved me from myself. It saved me from the path I was going on. As if a light had been turned on, I began to see the value in what I have and be able to sift through the lies I had told myself in order to feel ok about my behavior. I was able to ask forgiveness and also forgive.

I'm telling you all of this because it is my desire to be authentic and maybe if any of you can relate to being in bondage whether it's anger or something else, that there is a way out of it. Was the process difficult, yes, but the cost of holding onto past hurts manifesting into anger almost cost me everything.

A wise man fears the Lord and shuns evil, but a fool is hotheaded and reckless Proverbs 14:16