Choices – October 7th 2021

In less than a weeks, I will turn 54 yrs old and I’m just learning some truths. I’ve gone through life with blinkers on. I feel I was ill-equipped for the world’s realities. I knew at a young age that I never really fit in. I was made to feel like I didn’t have choices. I was told this was what I was doing and there wasn’t any questioning it. I never had that one person that took me under their wing and saw the real me. To ask the hard questions. Like, who really was Katrina, or what does Katrina want, or more importantly what did Katrina need? Sure I had friends, but none that I felt I could totally entrust my deepest darkest secrets to. I mean, didn’t everyone have secrets that could ruin life as we knew it if we spoke the words out loud? I felt as though I was so beyond being loved by anyone, including God. Feeling broken and beyond repair I suffered all these years with suicidal thoughts and deep depression. I tried so many different pills, self- harming behaviors, counsellor after counsellor and nothing seemed to work.

More times than I could count I thought of suicide and how I was going to achieve this. This was my reality as I knew it. No hope of anything better. I lived a life that I felt I could never fully speak what was in my heart. Believing my voice didn’t matter. These were the truths I bought into all my life. Someone recently asked me how I could live without making choices. It’s easy. If you didn’t know there are other options or the consequences were too severe, you kept doing what you were doing. Sure I’d pray to God asking for Him to either make the “bad” things stop or that someone would see me. But it was almost as though the harder I prayed the more life became unbearable. Sometimes you just quit fighting, quit asking. I felt like that was what I had done. Lost the will to live life any other way.

I’m not sure when this started to change. What spark ignited this journey to self-acceptance. But I remember the people that have spent hours in person, over the phone and online helping me to start recording the new tapes I now play over and over in my head. I am now learning that although God doesn’t like some of the things we are going through, there is evil in the world and people to carry that evil out. God may not have made bad things stop, but He was there helping me through it. Someone once said that God doesn’t move the mountain, but instead makes a way through it with Him. Looking back I know this has to be truth because I’m living it right now, right here. I used to get stuck in my own head. And now I don’t live in that space anymore. Sure, I have moments of confusion and un-clarity, but when this happens I remember who puts those thoughts there. And sometime I even call a friend.

I’m learning this is the true meaning of a body of Christ, a community. I’m asking the hard questions and searching out the answers. I’m learning that it’s ok to ask questions. I’m learning that I have a need to have as much information possible on whatever is important in my life at this time. Knowledge is good. It makes it easier to make choices. Choices, I’m free to make them. And it feels good.

In making choices I’m learning a huge truth, one I never believed before. I’m learning that my voice is important. And I can be confident not because of what I am, but because of who’s I am.

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