In a time when holidays are coming up, I have to ask myself, “why do I try so hard to keep the peace?” Falling on the cross has become a necessary component of keeping those family members who judge unjustly at bay. For me, I have been told I am “weird, emotional, unable to respect, worthless,” and often an “outsider” until became an adult and left the wholeness of my family behind me.
My family is predominately brunette, with dark eyes, and darker olive colored skin. They tan easily, they have thick manes of black or brownish hair and they all have hourglass figures. Smaller breasted, and big on the bottom. The majority of them are short, stocky built, with almost French looking features. I on the other hand am tall, statuesque with lanky arms and long legs. I am thin, sometimes pencil thin, no hips, and blonde hair. So, for me, I look different. I became the “white sheep” of my family.
Those wounds never truly healed for several years, not until a seminar in 1998 cracked the bonds that tied me to the baggage of disappointing rejections I received. It was in that seminar when I began to put the pieces of my life and the tragic understanding of violent events unfolded before my eyes in a memory that I could only experience as a child, having all but forgotten most of the memories. See, when you’re an adult and you’re reminded of painful memories, you don’t recall them with an adult intellectual brain, they bubble up with all the emotions of the age you were when it happened. Yeah, to say it was a painful process is an understatement.
I don’t bring these things up to cause you to think for one minute I am a victim nor that I am triumphant in my ability to raise out of that. I tell you these things because later – much later in my life I understood why God brought me through the immeasurable pain that others inflicted so that he could believe the promises of my desires. Yes, that happened too. I also bring them up because I have something to say about the emotional brain that we get into because of our families lies about us. You see, the deceiver uses these wicked hurts to keep us in the bondage of our faithlessness. As long as we’re focused on the pain it’s hard to get to thankfulness for the blessings we do have. That’s not from God nor is that what he wants of us.
The other day one of my family members said I live in a fairyland. They wondered if I am a liar, that what I went through wasn’t real. That it didn’t happen. Certainly not the way I said it did. I used to personalize and question myself when I heard these lies. I no longer do. Maybe the reason I do not personalize their truth as my own is the very reason I never told them in the first place? I didn’t want to suffer through more humiliation than the crime that had already been assaulted on me.
If you’re struggling with pain, hurt, processing through the grief of disappointing acts that are keeping you in the burden of your transgressors please I beg you to forgive them. Take your power back. Do not let the burden of their rejection put you in a place of no value, of unwittingly giving up your power or your voice. You can be around them once again as soon as you give no power to the words they say. Don’t defend yourself or your actions, knowing that only YOU are the one who can make you feel in any manner. No one can force you to feel anything without your permission.
God sees all of us as treasured children of the Kingdom of the Most High God. Today instead of listening to the dialog you tell yourself, “I am not good enough, She makes more money than me, they’re doing better than I am, they’re not treating me right”–realize you are worth more than rubies and gold. God desires for you to be thankful, to change your perspective to see His blessings. He wants to give all that has ever been promised to you, but it takes you to lay down the burden the deceiver has placed upon your heart. Ask the Holy Spirit to come into your life and refresh your soul, to make you new again, to seek those like minded who can fill that soul so much that it embraces all the good in store for you.
Take care,
Rebecca Nietert
Reba Nietert 