Beginning

The magnitude of writing all of this out is quite daunting, but it is a challenge that I know God will help me with. My biggest hurdle is always, where to start... My head is going so fast that slowing it down enough to catch a thought & get it captured is pretty tough. You see, I am a systematic kind of person, I love order & systems to create calm & peace. Trying to figure out how to write this in some sort of order that will make the most sense is proving rather difficult. The best way to write this is to just start, so here it goes.

I was born on a pew. Ok, not literally, but I was in church from my earliest memory. All of my childhood memories are centered around church & I have never known a moment in my life where God was not the focus. Even as a small girl I loved to climb the trees in our backyard & I would just pray. My favorite time was around dusk when the air would be still & warm; I could just feel God's presence in my life. When I was 10-11 years old, we lived on an acre of land & at the back of the property was an old fence. Every evening I would run to that fence to watch the sunset & pray. That intrinsic desire to know Him & be in His presence was deeply in me from my earliest memory.

Along with my desire for His presence came an annoying side effect that I did not particularly like; His hand of protection was on me & I could not get away with ANYTHING. From my earliest memory I knew I was different. Now I know that may seem arrogant or snobby, but I assure you it is not. I knew I was different & I hated it. I desperately wanted to be like everyone else, to be normal. I yearned to be normal so much that it hurt. This desire for normalcy even caused me to get feisty with God at twelve. There was this boy, who mind you was eighteen years old, yeah I was twelve, anyway... I was in love with this boy & he knew it. He took advantage of that & would "make out" with me. Now when I say "make out", it was more like him shoving his tongue down my throat & me gagging. It wasn't very nice, but I wanted his love even if that "love" was his lustful groping, I would take that. One particular time when we were making out, he began to go much further, but being young & naive, I had no idea where he was going. Well at the exact moment when things were going to go very *wrong*, a fellow church kid walked in on the room where we were. He did not see me, but he knew that the boy was in there with a girl. He ran out to tell & I ran away in fear of being caught. I remember going to the girl's bathroom & having an angry rant towards God. "Why can't I just do what I want?? Why do you have to stop me from having fun? You always keep me from being normal & doing what I want. Take your hand of protection off of me."

I would never dream of saying that to God now, but back then in my foolish adolescent way of thinking, I truly believed God was just stopping me from having fun for His own weird game. This is just a small viewpoint of how warped my thinking was. As weird or horrible as it may sound, I genuinely did not know that God loved me & that everything He did in my life was for my good & His glory. Instead I had a terribly warped viewpoint of God & I saw Him as more of a disciplinarian than a gentle & loving Father. May I go as far to say that many of our viewpoints of God are defined by the way we are loved by our parents or by our elders in our lives as children? It is very rare for me to encounter anyone who has a healthy & un-tainted mindset about God. Whether He is a disciplinarian to you or a genie who gives you things to make you happy, they are both unhealthy & inaccurate. This warped thinking would dictate much of my life & self esteem even to this present day. In fact, the depths of how deep the vein of my warped thinking went much further back then I knew. Generations before me had been in bondage to chains in the spirit realm that were stronger than I could have realized.

Thus begins mine & my family's journey to freedom from warped thinking & into a healthy relationship with God.

~Danielle