One thing that amazes me about the whole plan that He has for me... is that while God let me go through things and let me make mistakes and bad choices that will ultimately work for the good... He saw the times when I was just on the very edge of something truly life-altering and stopped it from happening.
I will probably write more on these someday, but right now, every day, I go through, "What if they knew..." and then eventually I tell someone some piece of the story and their reaction isn't nearly as bad as I expected... and I'm relieved.
I know that the person who did these things has been fading away for awhile. She tries to come back, but God is just too good to let that happen... and when she does He uses it to teach me a lesson. I am too determined to find my purpose in Him to let that happen anyway. So instead of adding these things to the story of my spiral downwards, I add them to the list of times where, in hindsight, I can clearly see God's protection... and often when I go into some of the details of the story... His call to come back to Him.
There is the time I was convinced to try cocaine... and saying that doesn't even begin to do the actual picture of what happened justice... I was in a seedy bar bathroom, snorting coke through a rolled up dollar bill. I did not care one bit about what could happen... just that this guy who told me he loved me wanted me to do this. He was just "a friend," not even a relationship... The drugs turned out to be fake.
One time I pulled out of a bar parking lot, way too intoxicated to drive the three blocks I needed to go... and was followed by a state cop for those three blocks... and he just kept going after I pulled into the driveway.
What about when I decided it wouldn't be such a bad idea to start selling myself? I figured I might as well get paid for what I was doing for free since it was all anyone wanted from me anyway. I already had some contacts and I was flat broke... Nobody except the contacts I had knew about any of this... but someone I barely knew just gave me money out of nowhere... $1000... for no reason except to help me... and with nothing expected in return.
Before I moved, a good friend confessed she had feelings for me and I just had to say no. I didn't want to say no... and I probably would have caved before long. I had secretly dated women before. But very soon after that, I met the guy who I moved away for... and she and I didn't have much contact for a long time... until God did some work on both of us.
There was a guy who wanted to take me to Vegas to check out the swingers clubs... and see whatever other kinds of trouble we could get into. His timing was bad... a week earlier I would have been able to make it work. But his vacation schedule was set.
Most of these things were more recent than I'd like to admit... but some stuff happened before I met J. I remember when I told him some of the things I did before I met him... and he cried because I wasn't the person he thought I was... and I felt awful. I hated myself for the things I couldn't change. Then, when he came back and said he wanted to be with me anyway, I thought I was lucky to have found someone so forgiving. It turns out, he was just saving it all up to throw back at me later...
That is part of my fear. I don't want people to use these things in the future to hurt me. Especially considering that these are the times I was protected... but I got into these situations because I was living a life that was so far from where I should have been.
I also know I can't continue to live in fear of who I was when WHO I AM is trying so hard to break free from all of it. I read today that you can't grow as a person if you live your life in fear of failure... that is the other part of my fear. I kept so much of my life a secret for a very long time... if I fail in some way... and people know who I used to be... it's going to be a lot harder to hide it.
Come to think of it, I'm not sure if that is good or bad...
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