A little less than a year ago I opened up about a dark time in my life. First with my team and then I wrote a blog about this season. My senior year of high school I got into a four-year long relationship with a girl that turned violently abusive. This relationship affected every area of my life then and it still has rippling affects in my life today. In the past year though, since talking about it openly for the first time, I have found a lot of healing. My identity is now as a son of God and not an abuse survivor. I no longer carry shame about having been abused. I have been set free from my past.
One thing that I never realized was an issue until just a couple weeks ago are my emotions. During this relationship I had to learn to never let myself get too high or too low because I knew in an instant everything could change. I learned kill off most of my emotions that were off center. I learned to kill extreme happiness because that would just lead to me getting let down when the good things I had planned were to fall through. I learned to kill pain because when you are getting beat up regularly its easiest to just learn to not feel the pain rather than hurt all the time. I have been living this life of little genuine emotion for probably at least six years now and I never realized it until recently at leadership training.
A couple weeks ago during leadership training for Semesters I realized how much of an issue this had become. I was talking to a girl leading another trip when she talked about her prayer language of tears. This made me sad because I had realized that I don’t really cry anymore. It used to not take much for me to cry when I was sad, or when something sweet was happening, or when I was feeling it during worship. Now that’s not the case. When I feel tears coming on my body quickly unknowledges that emotion and then promptly shuts it down. My eyes might water a little bit on a good day but that’s about it. I miss feeling the true emotions that I know I can feel.
A couple days after I realized that I had become so numb to my own emotions, I told this friend that I wanted what she had. I asked if she could be praying for me to feel again. She said that she would, but to prepare myself for when breakthrough happens. Well, breakthrough has not happened, but God is still so faithful. This has been a thing that I have been praying into hard since I found out it was a thing. These emotions are something I am trying to work on my vulnerability with. I have used this struggle as an opportunity to open myself up with others. I have been using this bad thing as a tool to glorify God. This struggle has allowed me to spend more time with the Father in prayer than before. I know I could spend the rest of my life praying for breakthrough and receive it at my last breath or it could hit me the second I hit the post button. That does not matter. I trust in God’s good and perfect plan for my life and this is just a small piece I know He will put into place at the right time. I am just going to continue to sit with the Father on this and to trust in what He has for my life.
