Who do I want to become? [Me: Part III]

Hey again.  See, I'm good at this keeping up now.  Don't get used to it.

Last post, I talked about how same in myself and lots of dark, depressing feelings forced me to change the way I look at my future.  I decided to take "the high road," if you want to be cliché about it.  I like to think of it more as the road personally mapped out for me specifically by God, a road that no one else can take.

The first step of that road was to get beyond the shameful experience that had brought me there.  Shame, guilt, fear...they're all very useful emotions and shouldn't be discounted or avoided simply because they're unpleasant, but they can cripple us if we let them.  So I had to let them go for now.  In order to do that, I had to begin again with my timeless mantra of "you're special, you're wonderful, you're perfect," but that wasn't going to work now.  I knew that I wasn't perfect, I knew that I had failed.  How could I be loved when I was a failure?  That's the opposite of what I've believed my whole life.

Almost immediately, I realized that love doesn't work that way.  Maybe I knew that before, but it had never meant to me then what it does now.  My mother and my brother especially, but others as well, showed me that I was special and perfect and important because I was loved, not the other way around.  It was their love that made me who I was.

But that's...not ideal.  My mother is an amazing woman and I wouldn't trade my brother for any other brother in the world, but they are just as flawed as I am.  There is a chance--slimmest of the slim, and I only believe this as a philosophical theory of general human nature, not of the love of these people--that something could cause them to stop loving me, and then where would I be?  Back exactly where I was.  I had to find a source of love that was beyond fault, beyond beginnings and endings, that was big enough to cushion me when I failed again, as I would, and strong enough to hold me when no one else would.

And there it was.  My new faith.

I've always believed in God's love, and I've always known in my head that I needed it.  But kind of like you can't describe to someone what it feels like to attempt to balance yourself on a bicycle, when that someone has never ridden one, I did know know what it felt like to believe I needed God's love.  Like I said, up until my realization of my own brokenness, I thought that I was good enough to be loved by God, not that God's love was constantly overcoming my not-good-enoughness.

Again, the transformation sounds like I went from point A to point A, when really it's just...really complicated.  I'm sure there's a lot of psychology or religious jargon that I could toss in here to help my explanation make sense, but I don't know the jargon, and I'm just hoping that there are enough people out there who have been where I was that they will just innately understand.  If you don't understand, please contact me and I can try again.  It's as important to me to learn how to articulate myself in this matter (I am training to be an English Teacher...so...) as it could possibly be for you to understand what I'm saying, so if you're interested enough, please let me know.

Thanks for sticking with me this far.  I hope you're getting something out of reading this as much as I am by writing it and processing it.  But really, if you have questions, concerns, etc., talk to me about them.

<3 spadeALLcross