Level Up: Burning up the disappointment

At the First Freedom Night I attended, the Lord placed upon my heart these scriptures:

Those who hope in the Lord will not be disappointed, put to shame, etc.  (Romans 10:11, Psalms 25:3, Isaiah 49:23)

You can read about all of that here.


So now onto the Cleansing Streams Class.

This past week we wrote out the Lie we believed and the weeds it has produced in our lives.

Mine was:  I will be disappointed because you cannot trust people.  It is much better to be alone.

The offspring of these lies were numerous:

• Built Up Walls because I didn't want to run the risk of being ruined
• Went after emotionally unavailable men because I wouldn't be disappointed since I knew it wouldn't work anyway
• Manipulative and Controlling so I would always have the upper hand
• Intellectualize everything so that I wouldn't become emotionally attached
• No new friends
• Figured it would be better to be alone where I KNOW I could get it done than to live in community
• Making sure to always look for problems so that I could find a reason to leave

This was also my view of God.

I think deep down I believed that God will ultimately disappoint me.  I always keep going back to that scripture about Stones for bread, snakes for fish, and scorpions for eggs because that is really how I think.

Side bar:  Why did my Bible Study Community send that out as a download?  See that's how it goes though!  Confirmation is all around.

Anyway I know where that came from.  It came from my earthly family.  They were disappointing and I never felt like they had my best interests at heart because they were so broken  I couldn't trust them.  

Even now I'm pretty guarded with them and don't tell them of my plans or what I'm doing because they weren't supportive.

Well God is not my earthly family 
and neither am I

Sometimes I think that we are so afraid of ending up what we don't want to be that we end up talking ourselves right on out of what we most want.

I never wanted to be an unsupportive wife, Mama, or person.  

I never wanted to be a failure.

However I was going right on down that road in a different way by being all about self preservation.  

• If I ever ended up getting married I would have been totally unsupportive if I wasn't getting my way or it wasn't going the way I thought it should have been.

• If I had kids, then I would have been unsupportive if they didn't fit my definition of success because it was important to me to have a certain picture of success.

• I would have definitely been a failure because let's say I allowed my fear of being in a relationship and community to get the best of me so I would have missed out on a whole Volume of my life.  It would have been selfish.

Burn it down

At the end of our class we burned those papers containing the lies and the subsequent offspring they produced in our lives.

Level Up

What does this mean in the context of this season of Level Up?

It means opening my heart to community and relationship.  It means not going into things ready to evaluate everyone and figure out what's wrong with them so I can prepare myself for disappointment.

It's going in knowing we're all human and it's much better together than it is alone.

Am I ready for what's about to happen?

YES!