Who am I?

Topic: Our issues with abandonment and our true identity.

Tonight i remind myself that i am worthy, that i am loved and deserve to not be bound. I tell myself joy will come in the morning and that God's not done with me yet even after i have done more wrong than right. I tell myself i am forgiven even after hurting so many. Truly i am standing on your word oh God.

Hey Abba, i woke up today and i still feel heavy, if im honest im still struggling with believing.

i want to believe, Abba help my unbelief.

Hey friend, as we get into the rest of this blog post, i wanted to create a moment for you and I to simply breathe in the presence of the Lord.

Abba, we praise you. We need you. We welcome you and invite you in to search our hearts and be faithful to our dry places. May a brook be restored in our soul, may a river soon take its place. You are the only one who makes us as sure-footed as a deer and keeps us safe on the mountains. From everlasting to everlasting, Amen.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~SELAH~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So, abandonment. what is it? why does it matter? how does it show up or go unnoticed in our walk with God? what does it have to do with our identity in Christ?

"Abandonment issues can be caused by early experiences of neglect or rejection by caregivers. These experiences can have a lasting impact on a person's sense of self-worth and relationships."

Often, I’ve noticed if we haven’t paused to take inner inventory of our hearts, we can listen to a sermon, read a book, blog post, or even read the Bible and miss what the Lord is revealing to us. The Bible isn’t about us but to know Christ and yet through it the Lord is sometimes bringing us an awareness of something we have been too blind to see within ourselves. Romans 3:20 says it this way “rather, through the law we become conscious of sin.” Stories like the woman at the well, the woman with the issue of blood and the man at the pool of Bethesda all beautifully show us the truth of this passage in scripture which is that we are all in need of a Savior.  And we all need Jehovah Rapha- (the Lord who heals).

So why is it that we so strongly reject the very thing we actually desire most?

Well, let's take inventory of the person we tend to ignore most: the child within us.

In Matthew 18 Jesus speaks to His disciples and tells them this "and said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." ESV

So what is He saying? Jesus is speaking about our hearts here. True maturity in the faith requires a childlike heart. And what that means is that just as a child is fully dependent on their caregiver, so should we be. As children wait for instruction, so should we. As a child's faith is immovable on a promise their caregiver gives them, so should we be. And lastly, as a child knows the voice of their caregiver, so should we. So what then causes us to drift or become apathetic towards this posture of heart? Impatience? Sure. Lack of trust? Absolutely. But where does it stem from? Well, usually from an abandonment wound. And where does most of our abandonment first take root? For most of us who struggle with this, it stems from childhood.

I think we often unintentionally blame our younger selves to cope with the truth of our past. Why? It makes it easier. Blaming ourselves when reflecting on the past provides a feeling of comprehension and a sense of closure. We may believe that by blaming ourselves, we are being fair to ourselves and others instead of confronting those real events and understanding how they impacted us. Blaming ourselves can be as clear as believing we are at fault for experiencing abuse and can hide itself as telling ourselves that those words that hurt us or that overwhelming pressure to be as close to perfection growing up wasn't as bad as we remember it being, or that because we had siblings we weren't as lonely as we believed. If we use empathy for others as an excuse to avoid addressing those real wounds, we actually open ourselves up to the possibility of bitterness and suppressed anger, which leads to false humility. If your anger in times of turbulence or immense pressure is explosive in private, if it takes you a long time to come back from anger, it's because you are dealing with a lot internally but not allowing yourself to give it language. We can’t see the truth because we don’t enjoy dwelling in our pain. We don’t look at the past as a place to see the Lord's vindication but rather a place to run from, or a place to gain validation from to excuse why we refuse to heal when we know the answer is back there. The past is beneficial to us when we want it to be and a pest when we want it to be. When we bypass everything, we will constantly find ourselves grieving the same wound over and over again in different seasons because we didn’t want to mourn with the Lord. We didn't want to have a childlike heart, we didn't want to need God because when we did, we believe He didn't come. He didn't save us that time or send help, He allowed those people to harm us or belittle us, betray, violate or abandon us, etc. I don't know your story or the lie that has embedded itself in your belief system but... if you sit with the Lord long enough you will know it. For me? I believed that the Lord had failed me. And not in this season, or because of the trials I am presently suffering through, or those long moments of waiting that seem to never end, I believed my whole life He had failed me. That He had abandoned me. The parents He gave me, the brother He gave me, the abuse I endured for years, that friendship when I was a child that soon betrayed me so deeply that it altered the way I see the world. My looks because of how heavily I was bullied for years. I believed He failed me. It’s okay to ask the Lord why the person who failed to love you or see you, hug you, encourage you, didn’t. It’s okay to ask why He chose that mother or father for you knowing they wouldn’t be what you needed. It's okay to ask why that sin has become a thorn in your flesh. It's okay to ask why His children suffer so much. Your childhood did not have to be turbulent in order to acknowledge that you were deeply hurt in some aspect. I believe we often focus on the extreme sides of a word to avoid revisiting our wounds. For example, neglect may mean different things to different people - it could involve malnourishment and abuse, but it also includes emotional neglect, lack of care, and failure to communicate. Therefore, if we were raised in an environment where our emotions were suppressed or if we were criticized for expressing our feelings, we may have experienced neglect and could be struggling with feelings of abandonment. Even if we had loving parents who were not emotionally supportive, we might have felt neglected subconsciously, leading to unresolved feelings of abandonment. Perhaps our upbringing was generally positive, but a challenging romantic relationship later in life left us feeling unloved and betrayed, impacting our view on dating and life in general. Or maybe you are like me, a child who had a very troublesome childhood, otherwise known as a survivor because of all you went through. All of these challenges are valid and can burden our heart and soul. And With a burdened heart and soul comes broken trust and a fear of intimacy, which in its simplest form actually means we do not fear the Lord as Scripture tells us to. At least not how Scripture tells us to. Fear of the Lord does not mean we fear Him so we shelter our pain or shame from Him, nor that when we have failed, God is done with us. Fear of the Lord means we actually do the opposite of what our wounds tell us; we draw near to the Lord in those times, we are close to Him, we run to Him instead of from Him in our anger, impatience, weariness, and defeat. Fear of the Lord means to have reverence for Him, and what that really means is that we respect Him enough to consider Him above our flesh, trust Him above our wounds, honor and esteem Him so much that we seek His way even when we know it is inconvenient or against what our present emotions want us to do. We fear Him; therefore, we draw near to Him because a life without Him is no real life at all.

Have you ever gone through a season where the Lord was dismantling a lot of old patterns and mindsets within you and overall a lot of it sticks but still there is this disconnect with your identity in Him? It's like I know I am xyz; the Bible says it, and I've been working to believe and walk in it, but if I can be honest, it doesn't stick like it should. That feeling of dissatisfaction and hindrance comes from the root of abandonment.

Abandonment leaves us with the impression that something is fundamentally wrong with us. Something in us caused us not to be loved the way we needed or desired to be. something about us didn't deserve to be saved the way we thought we needed to be. It is usually a lie that has wedged itself somewhere in our subconscious and is altering our belief system. When unchecked we have constant cycles with the same ending and eventually adapt a belief that we are failures. This is triggered when something happens to us that would create the sense of feeling like we failed. Maybe it was the loss of a job, the ending of a relationship, the death of a loved one, or the realization that we aren’t where we thought we would be in life by this age, etc.

That language didn't just birth solely from those momentary short comings, it was already embedded in us since the moment we first felt abandoned. And is the reason these emotions seem to cloud our every judgement. a lot of times if we are struggling with an abandonment wound our discernment and our fear can sound like the same voice. If we can see this moment through the lens of Christ it is actually a very sobering moment to see that He wants to heal that deep neglected part of us. The part of us that deals with that pain by neglecting it because we were neglected. The part of us that abandons ourselves because we felt abandoned. He’s merciful that way. He's redeeming that way. He's patient with us in those wounds too. The truth is that if we believe we are failures we actually believe somewhere in our lives God has failed us. And not just in a moment or in one season but in an absolute kind of way. In a way that believes He can’t be fully trusted. and therefore no one else can be trusted either. and yes that includes even a lack of trust within ourselves. How this impacts our identity in Christ is that we don't believe Him. His words are used more as clothing versus as a sure foundation. what i mean by that is that we dress up our language to match what scripture says but our speech will always tell what we really believe. our speech will always tell someone what our hearts are really full of. It's the reason so many of us can quote scripture but aren't changed by it, because we use it to feed our egos instead of it birthing great humility and compassion in us. I want us to remember that compassion goes a long way when addressing a deep wound, I have learned this firsthand. Conviction in certain areas is jarring enough, what is truly our hearts position if we want someone to know about themselves, but we don’t have empathy with how that will actually affect them internally? Pain and suffering are real, they're a real by product of the fall and a real reality of the walk of faith. Suffering well does not equate to time, but posture. God isn't looking for performance He's looking at the altar of our heart, are we genuine with where we ache? Do we allow it to bring us to our knees so that we can see how needy we really are, or do we partially allow the Lord in and then run from that crushing pain after we deem it long enough? It's prideful to tell God when to end a season; when to lift the weight of what real suffering feels like. Christ on His way to the cross asked the Father " Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.” God asked God for the weight to be lifted and still He submitted in spite of how he felt towards the agony that he would endure. You and I in our humanness can become weary and lose our zeal for the Lord and His things in trials and long suffering and eventually close our hearts off as a sign to end the season. We do all the same things, we show up to prayer time, read the word, attend church, remain around godly community but in our hearts we are famished and unwilling to truly let the Lord complete His work in us. He is just as much consuming fire as He is a gentle father. when we feel let down by the Lord we may not pay it much attention, we figure we'll get over it because we are committed to following Him but in actuality it is that serious because it's an attack that if not addressed can lead to apathy, apathy then leads to lukewarmness and from there comes the death of our assignments, we settle for comfort over Christ and it stops being all about Him and more about how much of Him fits into our lives. It seems harmless but this is spiritual death. We serve a living God, a present friend, a Lord who is near. To settle for spiritual death is to deny Him.

To settle for spiritual death also impacts our witness. We often talk about power and powerhouse women and men, and they are always the ones dominating their lane and rising up in rank. But I rarely see the ones with real humility celebrated as powerhouses, the ones with true reverence for God without a platform or accolades, the ones who honor the process of the Lord with built-up patience and kind words, the meek ones who know their physical neighbor is as important as the one sitting next to them at church on Sunday morning. How many of our witnesses are celebrating our hearts reflecting Christ and His love for people? If someone doesn't look at our life and feel sharpened, are we truly walking the narrow path? And what I mean by sharpened is not that they solely want to start being more creative or more goal-focused, or get a better-paying job or a nicer car. I mean if someone isn't looking at you and saying, "Man, I want to know Jesus like her or like him, I want to trust the Lord like that, I want to have that type of compassion or heart, I want to be teachable like him or as disciplined as her," then what we are chasing is a worldly status of success. Christ got low, and He is the only one who reigns. How much lower than should we be getting? As a body we need to learn to be more empathetic with and towards our neighbor. Christ always saw the need in someone before their sin. The man at the pool of bethesda was lame, the woman with the issue of blood bled for 12 years and the woman at the well was isolated and ran to and from men to cure her insatiable thirst and yet Jesus never made the lame man with no ability to walk seem more painful than the woman who was physically healthy but was deeply wounded in her soul, so why do we measure pain that way?

If we are truly desiring to become more like Him in our walk it starts with remembering that though we may see sin in another brother or sister in the faith we don't lead from our hearts solely focusing on the sin but rather the need. But we can only do that when we are being honest with where our hearts are calloused. so that when we do extend ourselves it is with a pure heart.

Life is full of moments to get up and to keep it pushing and to see the truth of things but if we can’t allow someone room to mourn and break and fall apart without taking it personal or being so put off by it or rushing them to heal we should look at ourselves more than we judge them. Because in truth what that shows is that we aren’t as emotionally mature as we like to think, we are actually very immature with our emotions. Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks, if there is no empathy in our language it would be good to check if it exists in our hearts.

We were created to be loved, 1 John 4:10 tells us this. when we are robbed from feeling this way, we believe something in us is broken, therefore we've been failed. But, that is not true. If we need anymore insight of how safe the Lord our God is, look to the Cross. Look at how broken His body became, how humiliated He was, and remember He did not deserve any of it, therefore He understands. Therefore there is no greater truth than this “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

Because scripture is not about us but to know Christ there are so many truths to find about His character and heart towards us that can help equip us against the lies the enemy will try to have us believe through our disappointment. Go into your word and dwell with the Lord because there is where He will reveal himself to you and there His spirit will comfort you. His presence has been the only place i feel safest being seen so vulnerably by someone, it gives me strength to get through this wound with the one who knows and loves me, deeply.

To tie it all together the root of abandonment is an attack against our identity in totality, it's not a root that just causes confusion but a complete disconnect from our identity rightly given to us through Jesus Christ our Lord. It directly correlates to our belief system and our heart and slowly shuts it off. while we are trimming off branches over here and leafs over there we are missing the biggest silent killer of them all, abandonment. Abandonment in nothing but broken trust with our Lord and Savior, without trust it's hard to believe and even harder to have true faith and without faith we know it is impossible to please God, paul teaches us this in the book of romans.

If you struggle with trusting the Lord and fully believing his ways are better than yours, I encourage you to take an honest inventory of where you feel like the Lord has disappointed you (failed you). While you acknowledge His sovereignty, goodness, and holiness, I understand that you may struggle with doubts. Consider this as an opportunity to allow the Lord to address those deep-seated thoughts that you tend to avoid. Instead of suppressing or feeling ashamed of them, let the Lord minister to those thoughts that trouble you. It's possible to love the Lord and simultaneously feel let down by Him. I am placing an emphasis here on the word feel because our feelings and God's truth often are like water and oil and yet still He allows us room to come into His presence so that He can minister to our heart. With maturity we learn to not lean on our own understanding of things (our feelings about a person or situation or even God's character) and also with maturity we learn to not run from experiencing contradicting feelings. We learn to not only take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ but also be vulnerable about our emotions so that we can learn a new level of intimacy with the Lord. We become strengthen

in Christ because we learned to not run from feeling the frailty of our humanness. God is willing to listen and bear our burdens, as He has already done so. So, what is holding us back from facing these issues head-on? Dwell with the Lord friend, He’s right there, you don’t even have to go looking for him. My prayers and yours have already invited Him in.

This blog post was an open invitation to see what could be holding you back. If you aren’t struggling with an abandonment wound that’s great, I would challenge you to be mindful if you have overcome this that your language for others matches the level of grief you felt when overcoming it.

Below is a poem I wrote close to a year and a half ago. Notice how I speak about my abandonment wound and feeling like a failure without actually realizing that was what the root was. I pray this blesses you in some capacity.

Shatter my perception of love

Earthly love:

I experienced my first heartbreak when I was 5 years old. And no, it wasn’t when the first sexual abuse happened it was when my parents first stopped saying I love you to each other; at least that’s when I tell myself it happened. maybe I’m still protecting myself from some truth.

It was when I noticed the i from, I love you falling off and then fell the you; now love was something I questioned would ever come back. It was the hollow hearts that bled dry at the dinner table that was never set for anyone. It was the depression that forced my mother's hand to attempt to take her own life. It was my fathers need to drown out the screams of terror he heard with a poison that would slowly kill him over time. If I do it this way I can still, make it into heaven he thought. It was a silent belief he pretended not to love the idea of.

My parents broke my heart when I was 5 years old and ever since then I’ve worried that everyone else would do the same.

I’ve loved but not freely, given pieces of myself to those I’ve walked paths with then came back home and questioned why my heart can’t feel as deeply as theirs.

I’ve asked God if I was too broken?

In my mind love can't stay if I don’t open myself up to him; really, it’s that he can’t leave me if I never gave him the chance to hold me. I could never miss his touch if I never experienced it in the first place. I couldn’t make memories with him if I didn’t let him prove me wrong.

If I can cage him to my understanding of absence, then nothing was lost. I didn’t lose. Because to lose meant I had something to give. It meant I had to stay. It meant I couldn’t take life into my own hands like my mother did but this time I would succeed. It meant I would be my father. And accept that death is a slow process. It meant that I had to live in the agony of never feeling worthy of love. It meant I existed. And nothing would ever come from that.

Heavenly love:

You entered my life with the most gentle knock. Your consistency at first scared me. I was complacent with melancholy. Treated him as my friend and loved him most because he understood me. Yet you were patient. Your love for me quite actually saved my life. Actually, I was never alive until I met you, Abba. It was with you that I started to recognize that love was never going to leave me. I tried to show you the ugliest parts of me first, committed myself to running you away. I laughed when you said you loved the broken hearted and closed my eyes when you wanted to shift my focus to new heights. I don’t get you, but I want to. Your love to me is the safest place I am able to walk in. You’re my first and last breath. My echo of victory when the battle is internal. You celebrate me, you take me on trips and call me to rest when I am out in the field overworking my frame. You see my heart and take every chance you can to tell me how much you love me for it. You’re my friend, the best one I will ever have. You’re my Lord ordering my steps as I learn to heed to your direction.

my father: my understanding of that was so limited until you challenged me to forgive my earthly one so that I could understand that you are not him. You are my husband, as weird as that sounds and not because I can’t see you but because I never believed that that was in the cards for me. You have molded me into the wife you’ve called me to be and in doing so I now understand how revolutionary your love is. I now see how my fear was just shame from the place I came from. When my fear attempts to cloud my mind with uncertainty and questions of how someone could love someone with my past. I can muffle those fears and remind them that I am fearfully and wonderfully made. I am loved. That I can love. And that love with follow me all the days of my life because your goodness does. I love you. Show me how to love with an open heart like yours. Mold me into the distributor of love you have called me to be. Gift me with the vulnerability to look love in the face and smile as he and I walk hand and hand through this life. Love me until I am me. Again and again.

Hebrews 4:15 NIV "For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin."