No pictures to include with this post! I bet you are relieved!
Once the majority of the snow melts, there is a lot left to be seen under the surface.
Apparently our puppy has come across more crayons and other coloring items than I was aware of based on my "patrol" of the backyard this morning. Mental note: Keep better track of my budding artist and his tools!
Another thing exposed in the thaw was a giant vat of unforgiveness I had buried rather deep.
I pray "I choose to forgive" prayers regularly. I thought I kept short accounts until God exposed something more disturbing than the backyard rainbow...
"I choose to forgive" is powerful and very hard to say/live but I discovered there can be a deeper cesspool created if that is all I do. I never really asked God to reveal the depth of the wounding of the offenses I was forgiving. Some had left imprints in my being that festered and grew.
I needed to do something BIG, bigger than anything I'd ever tried before:
Trust God to descend into that stinky cesspool and remove the tragic waste of my pain.
I have lived with what I would call "chronic heart pain" for a large chunk of my life - a naturally designed "feeler" I feel everything with intensity. Joy, sorrow, peace, heartbreak, etc. Life events or things people have said to me were locked down, distorting my ability to become all of who I was originally designed to be. Finally diagnosed with Severe Clinical Depression in August of 2013, I realized it had really taken over my life and no amount of "spiritual thinking" could contain it. (That is a WHOLE different blog!)
As I sought help spiritually (inner healing prayer - literally "seeing" Jesus walk with me through places of tremendous pain and bring healing in the midst of unchangeable past events), mentally (behavior modification), emotionally (counseling), and physically (healthier eating and exercise) the long buried wounds are bubbling up.
I wrestle within the muck sensing God's presence in it. It is a process I am not finished with, but, like the frozen rainbow nuggets, the stench is faded and I know there will be fresh green places soon!
