When you are stretched to the breaking point, when
you have one nerve left and your darling is standing on it; when you
are weary and tired and feel like you can't go on—that’s when you
wonder what in the world God was thinking when He made you the way you are.
What was God
thinking?
At times it feels like your sensitivity is causing
you difficulties and you may be tempted to hate the way you are. I admit that
some of us have difficult or downright painful families. If your job in your
family is to be the emotional pressure release (they pick on you and then they
feel better), the scapegoat (you are blamed for everything) or the peacemaker,
these jobs can create stress. As stress builds it can overload your body and
your immune system…and down you go. Or, you might break out in acne or eczema,
or hives or “fat!” Yet God places highly sensitive people in hurtful families!
It happens all the time and we wonder why, but I can tell you that “it doesn’t have to make you sick.”
The root of the problem is not your sensitivity—that
is a good thing! The problem is our lack of knowledge of high sensitivity, what
it is, how it works and God’s purposes for it.
Highly sensitive ones are God’s “special forces,” one
of His solutions. Sometimes He sends you into battlegrounds, behind the lines
to begin moving people toward God so that He can begin restoring them. He knows
what He built into you. God’s plan is to have sons and daughters—Jesus was the
first and you and I are to use our life experiences like a pole-vaulter uses
his pole to boost himself further up and over what could limit him. As
individuals we work with Jesus to bring our experiences together to form a
spiritual workout that changes us so that we end up looking, living and loving
like Jesus. Our families are a “boot camp” of sorts, our spiritual fitness
program! We don’t think of painful families and painful life experiences as
being God’s grace to us…but we can choose to believe that God is good and He
does not withhold any good thing. We can choose to work with God to change the
family environment and in the process let Him build into us the nature and
character of Jesus—is that not His grace?
The trick when your family is toxic is to do what Jesus
sends you to do and not become sick or be taken out in the process! I like the
way Arthur Burke put it. He said, “God, I
never would have written the script this way, but since You have, I am choosing
to believe You see something I don't see, and from Your point of view this is
good and right and loving. Therefore I celebrate Your wisdom from my place of
limited perspective." It takes a lot of faith to say that when life does
not feel good or right or loving.
For a long time Christians lost the knowledge that
some of us are highly sensitive and the understanding of why that’s important
to know. Also lost were the guides who can show us how to be ourselves without
it making us sick or killing us. Today there are some; they are coming back and
speaking out. They are saying that we can
join Jesus in His job of introducing people to God and themselves. We can be His “special forces” and we can live joy filled lives. Dr.
Dalton-Smith’s book about the lies that make you sick, Set Free to Live Free http://www.ittybittyurl.com/eua is one of those voices. You can find
more help in how to live a joy filled life as a highly sensitive person in the
books The Mystery of Spiritual
Sensitivity and Highly Sensitive
which are available from Amazon.com. http://www.ittybittyurl.com/epr I hope these last few
posts have given you hope that you can have the grace you need to run the race
set before you—without it making you sick!
If you have been helped by this little series of
posts and would you let us know? You can find me on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Carol-A-Brown/152630201492318
and at my blog http://connectwithcarolbrown.blogspot.com
Blessings,
By
Carol Brown, B.A., MA (Guest Blogger)
Educator,
administrator, foreign student advisor, mom, pastor’s wife and author of The Mystery
of Spiritual Sensitivity and Highly
Sensitive
Help someone, somehow, in someway, everyday. God will lift your burdons from you as you do so.
ReplyDeleteJay Miller
Yes! I just read aquote a couple days ago about "doing what you can as often as you can for as long as you can...it takes the focus off of self and breaks the cycle of catastrophizing or getting stuck in only seeing what is going wrong. Of course there are those bona fide catastrophies! Still, helping someone else calls us back to being who we prefer to be and to trust in God.
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