From Shackled to Freedom

The Path to Freedom

It was the end of another Christmas, and I was loathing myself… again.  I had spent the morning with my family enjoying the exchanging of gifts but now it was over, and I was back home, sitting alone with a glass of wine and a lifetime of memories.  Within a few hours, I had succumbed to the entire bottle.  It seemed no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t find a path out of the darkness of my past without drinking to drunkenness.  The following day I was physically ill, emotionally disparaged, and spiritually depleted.  A part of me had lost all will to exist in this world and I knew there was only one way out of this despair.

I had been blessed early in life when my grandmother taught her daughter, my mother, to love God, who then taught me:

Train up a child in the way [she] should go:

and when [she] is old, [she] will not depart from it.

Proverbs 22:6

Thankfully, I cannot remember a day in my life where I did not know about God.  But even though I knew about Him, and had even professed my belief and been baptized, I did not really KNOW God. 

And I hated who I had become, there seemed to be no light in my future, and certainly, no God.  I didn’t have a clear path in front of me because I was always looking back at the deep trench of guilt, sorrow, and shame behind me.  I had grown accustomed to reminding myself of my tragedies and reliving them every day.

At ten years old, I was sexually abused... by the time I was seventeen, I was in a physically and emotionally abusive relationship with two babies... at eighteen, I met and married my knight in shining armor but was unable to reciprocate his love for almost twenty years... when I was forty-two, I buried my first-born son after a tragic accident... at fifty-four, I said goodbye to my knight as a terminal illness ripped him from my arms.

Then, while in my forties and early fifties, I lost a young niece, my father, my father-in-law, my brother, and my mother.  All these relationships were people I loved dearly, and each loss compounded my anxiety, my fears, and my loneliness.  Each time I found myself closer to my vices and further from God.  I had chosen to believe that if God was as all-powerful as I was taught then He could have saved me from so much of this sorrow and heartbreak.  And if He truly was “my Father who art in heaven” then maybe He didn’t love me at all, or maybe I wasn’t worthy of being loved by a father, here or in heaven. 

What was complicating matters even more was the fact that I did not understand what it meant when people referred to God as a father.  I didn’t have a good point of reference for what a good father was, only a faulty and broken one.  My father was the one who abused me when I was ten, and he was the one who taught me, by example, to use alcohol and cigarettes as he was a heavy user of both.  I didn’t want to hear God was “my father” because that made no sense to me at all. 

These were the kind of thoughts that tormented me day and night. 

What was I to do with all this?  How could I make sense out of any of it?  I had grown so weary of this never-ending battle with coping mechanisms that only made everything worse and were rapidly speeding up my demise.  But I also wasn’t ready to say goodbye to my other son or my grandchildren... or the deep-rooted feeling that I still had some purpose yet to be fulfilled. 

So, I made the decision to ignore all the voices in my head arguing against God and do the only thing that felt right, I cried out to God.  I begged Him to show me what a real Father was and asked Him to protect me. 

Do you think He answered?  Do you think He showed me?

The answer is a resounding YES!!! In that very moment, as I was pouring out to Him every last bit of hurt, anger, sorrow, and pain, He reached down and touched me.  With tears streaming down my face, I fell to my knees and begged Him for mercy and forgiveness, for all the mistakes I had made while wallowing in my misery and for all the times I had clenched my fist and yelled at Him or doubted Him.  I sought forgiveness for the pain I had caused others and for all the mistakes I had made along the way.  Then I asked Him to help me forgive anyone that had hurt me throughout the years.  And as a loving Father should do, He held me, He forgave me, and He poured Himself into me.

I felt His forgiveness of my sinful behaviors and I felt Him lift the burdens of my childhood pain, the burdens of my deeply held unforgiveness, and the burdens of losing my beloved family members, most especially my son and my husband.  He lifted the burden of being abused and feeling unloved and replaced those heavy burdens with an outpouring of His love, a love only a loving Father could give. 

Today, I am free from the burdens of the past and have been set free.  I no longer feel a need to relive my past in any negative or sorrowful way, so now I have no reason to seek ways to cope with it.  My chains are gone, I’ve been set free, and now I am free to tell my story of how Jesus set me free and how Being Set Free has opened up a new path in front of me.  I can only hope and pray that He will set you free, too.

So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. ~ John 8:36

Will you let Him set you free? 

Listen to Amazing Grace, My Chains are Gone, by Chris Tomlin while you pour yourself out to Jesus and allow Him to break your chains, set you free, and fill you with His love.