One night, I can't remember which one, I was thinking about what I'm doing for step 7. What am I doing to turn my weaknesses over to God and let Him help remove them? As I thought, I just felt that I needed to pray. I haven't been able to get much alone time to pray. So I took advantage of that time, and I prayed.
Basically, I told God everything I had been thinking and my fears of really turning over my weaknesses to Him. As I prayed, I soon found myself telling Him that I know the one thing I really need is practice strengthening my weaknesses. I asked for opportunities to practice patience, dealing positively with change, not stressing to the max, and not blaming my husband for things just because I don't want to take responsibility.
It scared me that I prayed for that. I felt a lot of peace, and I knew I needed experiences to help strengthen my weaknesses and turn to God, but really. The idea of what could be coming my way was a little on the frightening side.
Without going into detail, let's just say that my prayer was most definitely answered. From that point on, I experienced A LOT of high stress situations. Many times, I had to ask myself what was going on and remind myself to think humility.
Actually, praying so vocally and heartfully (I think I just made up that word?) about humility that one night made it easier to remember humility when the situations arose. Whether it was a big or little situation, I thought humility, and then I felt peace. It helped keep my eyes open to what was going on and what I needed to do, rather than shutting down.
I was definitely not perfect. There were times when I felt like I was being completely overcome by Satan. Sometimes, I had to tell my husband to just let me lay on the bed while I battled it out in my mind. Sometimes I had to battle spur of the moment and try not to do something crazy because of my wrath or stress that was setting in.
This is the visual that always came to mind: I'm laying in a cold, dark room--fighting darkness, anger, and/or stress. It's overwhelming. I feel like I am trapped in a corner, with Evil approaching me with handcuffs. Evil is asking me if I want to do this the easy or hard way. I think of my options. I can give up and let darkness set in. And I fail. Or I can let someone save me. I see light. I pray. Eventually, I win.
That win was sometimes just barely, and I still needed to repent for harm done to others while I battled with myself.
The good thing was I managed all of the tough things that came my way this past week. During the times that I started falling too far into darkness, I could at least see what I was doing. I could see where my actions were hurting others around me, and I was quick to apologize. There were even times where I said, hey right now I am battling some extremely stressful emotions, so please don't take anything personally that happens in the next ten minutes.
I'm still learning, but I would definitely say this week helped me go a long way. I'm not perfect, but my I feel more purified.
While I worked on fixing my weaknesses, my husband and I grew much closer together. I can't really pinpoint why or how, but I do know that the main reason why is because that will happen when we are both working on drawing closer to Christ. He and I have both been making great strides. As we have drawn closer to Christ, we have moved even closer together too. We (I) have even been able to feel safer with intimacy.
I'm still afraid for relapses. But, I'm trying not to worry about that until it happens. I have learned that I need to take things one day at a time and focus on things as they come at me.
With that, I'm starting this week on a more hopeful note, and I hope that it won't be as stressful as it looks like it will be. But, I expect myself to keep turning my weaknesses and trials over to God, and I expect myself to continue being humble.
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