For as long as I can remember, I’ve had an inexplicable, powerful, and seemingly never-ending thirst to feel needed. I love to feel wanted, important, valued, and irreplaceable; I always have. I’ve searched in many of the people around me for someone consistent...someone that I loved that would never change their mind about loving me, or get tired of having me around. I over-loved, overprotected, overestimated, over-needed, and all the while overlooked Christ's love for me. I'm slowly realizing that I've actually known I've been looking for love in all the wrong places for years; I've known in my heart and I've felt guilty, not admitting it to myself or to anyone else for fear that it was too wrong and too late to fix. I would find myself eventually feeling lost, futile, and without purpose, yet I refused to look in the one place that I had been firmly pointed toward my entire life.
I’ve yearned for someone in my life to want to help me, hold me, and keep me safe so that I would feel and see it all around me, but I rebelled against and refused to believe the fact that God could, did, and does love me more than what I could ever want from the people I already loved so dearly. My relationships seemed healthy as I continued to love and to need, and He was intangible, abstract, and distant to me. I was determined to find the answers and the love I longed for in every other area and person but the only One who could truly fulfill me. God's been showing me these past two weeks just how much I've been putting Him aside and after the people He's created...and He's also been teaching me how to forgive myself for it.
Often, looking back at my life allows me to see what God has done. However, I tend to grudgingly acknowledge His hand in situations instead of praising Him for it, because I didn't feel Him at the time. It's sort of a spin on the Footprints poem that many of us know so well: I didn't feel Him carrying me while I was going through something, but I saw His footprints later and wished He would have told me He was carrying me. I've been so foolish. Why would someone who's carrying me need to inform me that I'm supported by their arms? The solidity under me, the difference in perspective, that self-consciousness that I'd be dropped because I was too much to carry, the whooshing feeling in my stomach that I could fall at any moment...all of these things should be more than enough. It should be so obvious that it would be silly not to know I was being carried.
But I had dulled myself to sensing Him. I didn't want to believe that He was carrying me, because I didn't trust Him not to drop me. If I acknowledged that He was the one who carried me through everything, I couldn't take the credit myself or give it to the people He used in my life. So I conclude and I pray that I will continue to give Him the daily credit He deserves, and attribute what great things He does in my daily life to His glory and character...but I'll be learning that all my life.
I'm still barely in that semi-conscience twilight between sleeping and waking.
