Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
I must have you!"
Thomas Parke D’Invilliers
Haha, I don't know what I am....hopelessly behind I guess lol I've been here for awhile, just not recently. Hopefully that'll change, it seems like I just get caught up, and I'm gone again :S
I try to love the sinner but it's more than the sin will allow. I've looked a long time into the dark,
hoping the truth would show me how
~Bad Cliché
Hi Casper,
Welcome to the thread. I know what you mean about fidning it difficult to connect with God when you are living in a house that is not filled with Christisan friends. I lived with my Mum when I first became a Christian, she isn't. It was really difficult to pray and read my bible, especially if I wanted to read it in the lounge rather than being shut up in my room.
Everntually I moved out and now have my own place which is filled with the peace and joy of God.
Anyway, when I lived with my Mum I had my own room and this became my sanctury, I ensure that there were no negative influences in the room and did my best tio fill it with Christian things. just simple things like a notecard on my mirror and my Christian jewelry on my dressing table. These simple things reminded me of Christ and my faith everytime I went into my room and it soon because a place that I could connect with God.
If this is difficult for you, and I hope you are able to do this, then spending time with Christian friends at their homes can also help. I spent a lot of time with a family from my chruch who welcomed me into their home whenever I needed a space, I could have stayed there if I had wanted but I didn't want to give in on my Mum and wanted to show her the Love of God.
Hope all goes well for you and i will pray that you will feel God is there for you no matter where you are.
God Bless
Liz
Tom ~ really?
Does that make me one too?
I thought vets were older...
well vets are 18+ for the most part.
Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
I must have you!"
Thomas Parke D’Invilliers
yummy--your friends and their families will be in my thoughts and prayers.
tears of blood--hey, it's great to see you here! welcome home :)
So...I have a lot to say, and probably won't get all of it down now. To start with, one of my favorite bands has a Hymns EP that's out of production. You can get it for free online--it's old, and the sound on some of the tracks is less than stellar, but I'm mentioning it because I've been listening to a few of the tracks nonstop all day. There's one specifically I wanted to share. I couldn't find the version I'm talking about, but here's a video...
Liz,
Wow, yeah. Thank you so much for the advice and your story. It really helped me to kind of realize that even though its difficult to connect with Him now, He's still there, and always will be, and I just need to keep working on it so I can feel Him 100%.
And I know what you mean about spending time with Christian friends, my uncle's childhood friend is Christian, and ive been going to church with her and her husband. [=
I think Im going to take your advice and re-vamp my room. Because it is weird trying to connect with God when I have my family cracking jokes and treating me like some loony over it.. but i know that i can do this.
thank you again! [= you really helped me to re-realize all of this! [=
Hey guys im in need of a little prayer. I was in the hospital a few weeks ago and it was actually a great experience for the most part. I learned a lot and I got really close to God and ever since I have been great. But just last night I had a dream that I went back into the hospital...but in the dream it wasnt so great. I got scared of it. I woke up shaking and anxious. Then I called a friend to calm me down. He did...then I had another one after...I had to go lay with my mom...how pathetic. But in my dream I was upset cause I had to leave my mom. Me and her are really close. But then I had another one...I finally just had to get up. Now it's starting to trigger me. I'm so anxious and I guess still kinda scared. I dont really know why its affecting me so much...so maybe I just need prayer to figure that out. Thanks guys. <3
Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
I must have you!"
Thomas Parke D’Invilliers
He will never reject you eliose. That is the beauty of him
Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
I must have you!"
Thomas Parke D’Invilliers
in-a-pickle: I was planning on posting this sometime soon anyway, but you just gave me the push I needed to do it right now.
I have this tendency to return to what I'll call my default setting when I'm not paying attention. For me that means cynical and faithless and closed off. My perspective on the world goes back to how it used to be--no one can be trusted, I can't let myself need anything, I can't let myself feel anything--bad or good. And you know how people say that everyone thinks of God as being like their father until they learn better? Well, I go back to that, too. God becomes someone who's just...impossible to please, always angry with me, hateful, mean, prone to flying into unpredictable rages about things I don't notice I've done wrong. And I still want his love and approval more than anything else, but part of me is so convinced that he must think I'm disgusting/dirty/stupid/[fill in your negative adjective here]...I get so terrified he'll say those things, so afraid he'll reject me. At least to my mind, suspecting is still better than knowing it's true, because then I'd have nothing left.
[Does that sound as ridiculous as it actually is? I hope so. God is nothing like that.]
God's love has always been sort of an impossible thing for me to believe. I've had days where I was so determined to trust God, to let him in, and I'd sit on my bedroom floor shaking and just generally being terrified. I could rarely manage it for more than a few hours at a time, and then after that I'd run so far, so fast that it was hurting things more than it helped. And then there was the SI/ED connection...the more I thought about letting a perfect, holy God inside the walls I'd built up, the more ashamed and dirty I felt. The more I thought about God, the more I felt a need to punish myself because I wasn't good enough.
So...this is one of those things I've been struggling with for years. I became a Christian at 13, on the floor of a hospital room at some unreasonable hour of the night, and it's been nothing but one long battle since then. It gets better and it gets worse, and there have been times I've been badly burned by people I thought I could trust which really didn't help, but...overall, things are getting better. It's not exactly getting easier or less scary, but as time goes by I find myself actually developing just a little bit of trust and faith.
One day a few months ago God gave me a rule. Just one, because even just this one was a lot to believe at that point. The rule was, "You can always ask for help. Always means always."
Quote:
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said; “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
--Alice in Wonderland
It takes practice to believe the impossible. God, for some of us, is one of those impossible things--at least, God as he actually is. So God asked me to start small. Uh, really small. Kind of embarrassingly small. But it's my starting point--I'm allowed to ask for help, because he promised. And maybe I don't have enough faith to believe in all his promises [or even close to], but I think even I can manage to believe just one thing. [Well, I just got my second rule/promise yesterday--but that's for a different post, this one's long enough.] I've been living by this one promise for a few months now, and it really does make a huge difference.
Of course, the first thing I asked for help about was "Please help me believe this, because I don't think I even have enough faith for that. But I want to." God, ever true to his promises, did...or at least, he keeps reminding me of it when I need to be reminded. There have been so many times when everything just gets to be too much and I feel so powerless to change anything. I'll look at myself and see everything I hate, and my first instinct is to hide because surely a holy, perfect God must hate me and be angry at me...surely God would reject me as I am now, and I'm powerless over the horrible things I see in myself and can't change them...
But God keeps reminding me, "Come as you are. You are always allowed to ask for help. Always--even when you think I'm angry at you. Even when you think I hate you. Even when all you can think of is how you've been punished for needing help in the past, for not being good enough, for not being perfect. Always means always, not just when you think you deserve it. I'll never be angry because you can't do something on your own, and I promise to never punish you for asking for help." And that reminder will always come at just the right time to let me push past my fear. I'll suddenly find myself sobbing and saying, "Okay, I'm terrified but you promised and I can't do this alone and I miss you." And sometimes it's a lot less dramatic. I've been learning to ask for help a lot sooner, too. It's okay to need help.
I don't know where you guys are spiritually. I wouldn't be surprised if none of you are as bad at this as I am...Most 5 year olds probably have more faith than I do. But believing God really does love you, the real you, can be hard and scary [and for some of us that's the understatement of the year]. It's possible, but it takes practice.
So try it. Ask God for one promise to believe--just one. And then hold on to that promise with everything you have, and watch how God uses that tiny bit of faith and makes it grow and starts to change your life.
Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
I must have you!"
Thomas Parke D’Invilliers
So, I know you guys don't know me - I just pop in every now and then - but I just wanted to share this.
There's this guy I go to school with that sings/plays guitar/writes songs. I was recently directed to his music on MySpace, and to my surprise, he has a song about self-injury! Pretty sure it is my new favorite song
It's called "Open Arms", and I hope it is as much of a blessing to you as it has been to me these past few days! He just describes the struggle so well...and the perspective of a friend watching someone they love hurting so much, and trying to point them back to God. Hmmm...beautiful song.
I also have to recommend "Thief of Hearts" - my favorite part is the end: "Oh sister, you are a daughter, God is a Father, know you are loved."
Yeah, I am definitely loving this music. Especially because I've really been struggling with my faith lately, and these songs have been such great reminders of how loving and faithful God really is.
“The good things don’t always soften the bad, but vice-versa, the bad things don’t necessarily spoil the good things and make them unimportant.”
“Nobody important? Blimey, that’s amazing. Do you know, in nine hundred years of time and space I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t important before.”
“If it’s time to go, remember what you’re leaving. Remember the best. My friends have always been the best of me.”
So, um, when I just posted a little while ago, I didn't go back and read anything, just wrote out my post. And just now I looked back at the page before, and I'm so glad I did!
First, the video with "Before the Throne of God Above" - I had just recently discovered this hymn, and I absolutely love it. And I thought it was so cool to see it here, tonight, because we sang it in Praise Chapel at my school this morning. (I go to a Christian college - chapel every day, and Friday is usually Praise Chapel, which is amazing.)
Like I said in my earlier post, I've been struggling with my faith a lot recently. Recently meaning over the past few years. Had a bad experience that pretty much shattered my faith in God, but I won't go into that now. Anyway, just over the past couple of days, God has been showing me, in all sorts of small ways, just how loving and faithful He is. And it keeps surprising me.
First there was chapel yesterday, talking about how Christ is the one who gives us our worth...how we are redeemed not by any merit of our own, but purely because of God's goodness. It's a message I've heard before in various forms, but for some reason it just really got to me yesterday and nudged me back towards God. Then I went and checked my mail, and was very pleasantly surprised by a letter from one of my best friends in the world. (I never get real mail, so it was exciting!). It was a support letter for a mission trip he is going on, plus a short message to me on the back of it. He just always seems to have this way of pointing me back towards God, whether it's through advice/encouragement to me or telling about his own walk with God. His faith and eagerness to follow wherever God leads him is such an inspiration to me. And so reading about how God is working in his life was another nudge back in God's direction. That evening, I discovered Drew's music, which I wrote about in my last post. Those two songs especially, "Open Arms" and "Thief of Hearts," just really touched me and reminded me of God's love. This morning there was Praise Chapel, drawing my heart back towards God. And now, just reading through the last page of this thread...the "coincidence" (yeah right!) of that particular song being posted, when I just sang it in Praise Chapel this morning.
And then the longer post by acquatickitten...I feel like you've just described my own struggle over the past few years. Wow. Being closed off and "strong" and not trusting anyone or needing anyone and not feeling anything... and seeing God as being like my (emotionally abusive) earthly father, even while rationally knowing He is not like that...just...yeah. That's me. And you say you wouldn't be surprised if no one else here is as bad at this as you are...well, I am. And while it makes me sad that you are struggling through this too...it is also a relief to know that I am not the only one. It's not just me. I'm not just a horrible Christ-follower. And what God has been teaching you is a big encouragement to me, so thank you for sharing. I hope your trust in God continues to grow...and I hope mine does too.
I think it's time I started sharing some of this with the brothers and sisters in Christ I have all around me here at school. There are so many wonderful people here, yet I shut myself away from them all, hiding behind these walls ... I don't talk to them. I pretend everything's fine. I just keep on lying to them and to myself. I think it is time that I humbled myself and admitted to my struggles and asked for help...from God and from my Christian family here at school. I can't do this on my own anymore - I never could. We weren't meant to go through this life alone.
God is nothing like that.]
Had a bad experience that pretty much shattered my faith in God, but I won't go into that now. Anyway, just over the past couple of days, God has been showing me, in all sorts of small ways, just how loving and faithful He is. And it keeps surprising me. 
