Went to church yesterday because someone invited us to go. It was called the foundation church in Rangiora. I can’t say I really wanted to go but I said we would go so we went. The guy was preaching on the spiritual life following Jesus and being filled with the holy spirit verses the natural life following rules, moral codes or religious stuff. During the service he said he felt like the holy spirit was saying to pray for a guy who had an abusive Dad. Somone who was really carrying that abusive parent around inside them. He was talking about me. but I didn’t know it. I was always pretty strict with my kids but thought I was just doing what I was supposed to. Anyway he came over and asked me and my daughter next to me if we’d like to be prayed for. I just figured why not. So we did and then I started crying and my daughter started crying. in my mind I was seeing myself being really hard on my daughter next to me because when I was a kid my dad was hard and I had such low self-esteem that I was hard on myself. I adopted a really critical internal parent that would torment me over anything I did wrong and criticize everything else. Sometimes as a Christian I wauld imagine that critical voice in my life was God as well, superimposing my dad and everyone abusive onto God so I thought he was the same. So me and this child beside me are stnding there being prayed for and we just cried and cried. All the hurt for so many years coming out. I apologized to my daughter for being so hard on her growing up. Both of us got healed somehow and I don’t really know what happened but I felt free and felt like I didn’t need to be that hard angry dad anymore. I wonder how many of us Carry around these mean internalized terror parents that are critical and demanding whith very little praise over anything we do in life? I don’t believe that’s Who God is but it perhaps is the God we create for ourselves to punish us and make us tow the line. It made me think about society and it’s carrot or stick method of getting people to go in a certain direction. It’s not loving in anyway it’s just a belief that this is the right way and we must conform. What’s missing is the love. The wanting to do right because we were loved and want to be loving in return. I think you can still be corrected, in a loving way but I think most of us were corrected out of anger, frustration, mean spiritedness and Many other things that we thought were love but wasn’t. Some of the justification for it are things like, preparing our kids for the future and hard realities of adult life because it’s hard out there. The problem with that is that out there never changes if we keep creating our kids in the image of the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So as adults we learn to look soft on the outside in public and perhaps we try to be soft in the home but we’re often not and often feel guilty about some things we do and say that comes out of that pain, or unloved part of ourselves. Sometimes this stuff is so deep and if you’re older like me, can be from a long time ago, probably back further than we can remember. I’m sharing this because I’ve always tried to keep my blogs honest with anyone who reads them and I believe God changed something in me today and if you ask him I bet he would want to heal you too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"