FREE!

There was a time in my life I thought that God had thrown me away. I always knew that God was invisible but I still couldn’t see him, I couldn’t feel him. I had made progress with him before so it was easy for me to quickly realize that I was at a standstill. I no longer had that joy that everyone could see and partake of in my spirit. All through this period, I really did not have any emotion. I felt so empty; I wasn’t happy, I wasn’t sad, I was nothing. My mind was spinning but I couldn’t feel anything. It was like I felt alone with lots of people around me. I could feel myself drowning and I could do just nothing about it. I cried myself to sleep several times. I loved the old me, not this present one I couldn’t even define. What I knew was that I needed love, I craved attention, I needed to be held and be encouraged. Nothing at that point seemed to matter to me. I knew or I can say now that I thought I was alone. I had gone far away from God.

For weeks, I couldn’t find the right person to talk to. And through those days, all I could remember were my wrongs, the negative. All my achievements and happy endings seemed to disappear. Everyone that had ever seemed or was a mentor to me, all of a sudden were unapproachable. And so I kept sinking. I thought about the days that were still ahead of me with so many fears in my heart. How was I going to live sin free? How was I going to keep living right when at this age, I feel like this?

I have heard countless times that we as young people are at the stage where we just want to do a lot of things. Whether wrong or bad, we are prone to yielding completely to our feelings, emotions and desires. As young people, we are at a stage where you would naturally do some things that are not wrong per say and will condemn yourself for it when you realize that it is not the best or when it has put you in almost destroying position. I said they are not wrong because we just always want to be free, not to be told not to do something that we want to so badly or whatever we want to get involved in. Especially when we have a lot of voices in our heads saying; “do this, be this”. There are too many “ought to’s”, “should’s”, “you’d better’s” piled on top of what we want to do or what we want to be. To us, it is that those ahead of us expect us to do far more than we think we can. I knew these but during these moments, I just did not feel right and could not apply all the things I have heard.

I was at home one day when I remembered the exact words of a mentor. He said “create your future from your future not your future from your past”. When I thought about this, I realized that whatever is in the past is not qualified to be in the future. Even the Most High God, our father doesn’t condemn us when we do wrong things. He does not remember our wrongs at all, what a caring and loving father. I decided to drop the memories of all the wrongs I had ever done and how they made me feel. It doesn’t matter how much I do, it has already been forgiven. We have to live a life free of condemnations and criticisms. Your greatest condemner is YOU.

So drop the memories of the past, take the lessons and move forward. Just because the past taps you behind doesn’t mean you should look back. I realized that I was punishing myself for no just cause. I kept piling up my wrongs. But these were the words that brought soothing to my soul. You might not have it in mind to do wrong every time, you just find yourself doing it bot concentrating on the evil things you are doing will never help you do the good things that you desire to do. 

It is okay that we have a lot of desires. Jonathan Martenson once said “feelings are like waves, you can’t control them but you can choose which one to surf”. Feelings are there all the time. We all have emotions and we never know when they will show up or go away but we don’t have to let them rule us. You discover that in a day, you have hundreds of emotions. If you find yourself in a mess, probably you have behaved wrongly or you don’t like the things you do, feeling sorry for yourself is not the way out.

The next time you have a desire, weigh the advantages and disadvantages on a scale in your mind. You might never know. You just discover that it has more disadvantages than advantages. Whenever you have a desire you are not sure about, answer these three questions concerning it.What do you want, why do you want it and how badly do you want it? I believe that these three questions will guide you in a way in determining how good whatever you want to do is or bad it is. If you find yourself doing the wrong thing, you have not been self- conscious, you have not been God conscious. Make a decision today to live your life by decision not emotion; that way you can be rest assured that you remain free.