overcoming your past
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How I Learned to Redirect a Rebellious Spirit Toward Purpose There is a peculiar strength in a woman who refuses to conform. She is rarely loud, seldom fashionable in her convictions, and almost never understood by her peers. Yet history bends in subtle ways because of her. She does not follow the crowd. She builds…
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There are phases of life with Christ, and they do not look like what you expect. At first, everything feels big and loud and full of emotion. You feel called, inspired, changed overnight. You want to fix everything, learn everything, do everything. The world feels wide open. Then He starts narrowing you. Not to punish…
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I’ve learned the hard way that a person is shaped by what they aim at…not by what they survive. Not by what they intend. By what they move toward, day after day, quietly, stubbornly. When I was young, survival was my goal. Not consciously. Instinctively. I aimed at soothing my wounds, protecting myself, dodging pain,…
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There’s a moment in a child’s life when a map stops being decoration. It stops being lines and colors and starts being a claim. This goes somewhere. Someone has been here before. If I follow it, I will not stay where I am. That shift matters. For a long time, the Bible stayed flat for…
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I am not the rare butterfly, the lone flame burning bright in a sea of shadows. I am not the chosen one, not the anomaly, not the girl with the golden key to the kingdom of suffering. The truth, stark and bitter as the taste of raw earth, is that I am ordinary in my…
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“Brilliant!” We all like to claim. What I’ve learned is that knowledge without wisdom is useless. Gathering information like squirrels gather nuts, we all run around trying to protect ourselves with it. Our stomachs are bloated with knowledge and our souls are sick from lack of rest. “Learn more about your pain, do more self-care,…
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Growing up I had very little of my own space. Someone or something was always in it! The abuse I suffered encroached into everything. Space was a commodity I didn’t have. If I wasn’t being sexually abused, my being was forced to gorge on the aftermath. Inside and outside my space had become the playground…
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When I read the book of life as taught to me by my father, fear is a dominating theme. It was taught to me daily, in small doses and served also as big feasts. I consider witnessing a murder as one of those lessons. A story written and directed by a man that was a…
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Clean and unclean. What does that really mean? Am I unclean because of the rapes and sexual assaults on my body? Can the act of another person relegate me to a life that is not worth anything? A life that is lowly and unclean? Absolutely not! The crimes that don’t come out of an act…
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Don’t talk. Don’t tell. Don’t remember. This seems to be a constant reminder to adult’s who have experienced childhood trauma. They want to let their abusers live out their lives unnoticed or unaffected by their crimes. This saddens me deeply. The only way to regain those parts of ourselves that were stolen by the perpetrators…