I tell myself lies....

Okay so I have so much time to think when I walk. I am just going to get some stuff out of my head. This blog post is going to be messy. It may not be for everybody, I’m not even sure if I will post it.

Sometimes I get stuck on myself. I stop focusing on the my mission and selfishly turn all of my energy to my own problems. I analyze my “daddy issues”. I justify my bad choices by blaming them on my father dying when I was 12 or my step-father who was a [insert bad language]. I even hate the words “daddy issues”. Literally, when people say those words, or I say them it puts a bitter taste in my mouth. It makes me feel uncomfortable and I am comfortable in almost every situation.   

At what point does the grieving process become you being a whiney little kid? When do you become a man? Daddy issues at 20 is understandable, at 30 it’s starting to get weird, at 40 it’s pathetic. I will always miss my dad and wish he was alive, but to live the rest of my life based on that one event is just juvenile. It is embarrassing to me that I have allowed it to go on for so long like that. You know?

There is a song by this metal Christian band, Living Sacrifice. The song is called “Reject” and the opening three lines absolutely describe my feelings:

I set myself up
I've no one to blame but my… self pity is useless

I¹ll not entertain your sickness…sickness
Half truths, deceit, forced in
Not God, reject, reject all lies
Rebuke take hold
Intrepid Spirit of God
Rebuke take hold
Authority of God
Reject all lies

 

The lie that I tell myself is that my bad decisions are not my fault. I put the blame on daddy issues or how I was raised. There is obviously a grieving process that you go through for the things that have happened to you, but at some point you have to get over it. Put away your“daddy issues”. I am reminded of the idea of picking up your cross and carrying it. Carrying a cross is not easy. It is sweat, it is toil. It is hard. It hurts your back. But you keep walking. You do it anyways. You don’t give up. You don’t sit on the side of the road and say, “Oh, this cross is too heavy. My problems, they are too heavy. They are too much to bear”. You pick them up. You load them on your back.

When I think of walking with a cross it is always on my back. It is behind me. I am not staring at it. Sometimes you have to just put these things behind you. I don’t like to be tough talked, I don’t like to be man-handled or for someone to say to me, “It’s time to grow up, be a man”. But I understand the concept of dying to yourself; putting away selfishness. I’ve been in counseling on and off since elementary school. They always tried to get me to go inward. Look inside myself, focus on my past, talk all this stuff out. While I found that it is interesting and enlightening, it never solved my problems. The answers aren’t in the past. Without sounding tooChristiany and sounding too cliché, the answer has been and always will be dying to self and living for Jesus.

 

To be continued….