I’m starting a short series today of excerpts from a project that I’ve been working on for about 3 years, a devotional that I started writing based on the Bible passages that got me through the most intense period of trauma and recovery from narcissistic discard. To be honest I’m nervous about sharing this project for a couple of reasons. First, I know it’s not going to appeal to a lot of readers of this blog. But I’m only going to share 3 posts from the devotional over the next 3 weeks; by then (hopefully) I’ll have the full e-book formatted and ready to share so that anyone who’s interested can purchase it (all proceeds are going to Awaken, a great organization I work with that helps women recover from sex trafficking). Second, I don’t know that I have any business writing a devotional, which is usually done by people with theology degrees. But, we’re all God’s children, and I’m just talking about my experience. And honestly, I would have given my eye teeth for something, anything like this devotional during all those sleepless nights in the first 3 months after my husband abandoned me. I spent bleary hours combing through blogs and YouTube videos just to know that someone else was seeing what I was seeing, just to feel like I wasn’t going crazy. If this devotional can do that for just one woman on one night, it’ll be worth every bit of the discomfort I feel putting these raw and uneducated reflections out into the world.
This week we’re starting with an entry from the first Season of the devotional, Comfort:
Day 14–Ps. 34: 4-5,7, “I sought the Lord, and He answered me, and delivered me from all my fears. They looked to Him and were radiant, And their faces will never be ashamed…. The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear Him, and rescues them.”
The first two weeks are the worst, and God has brought you through. And he is going to continue to bring you through. You know how you’ll know that promise for the truth? In the midst of the very worst of it, when you feel like you’re being torn apart by a pack of feral dogs, you will suddenly and for no reason whatsoever experience a clear, perfect moment of peace. God is saying to you in that moment something like, “This is where you really are right now. You’re with me, and everything is OK. I know it doesn’t look like it to your earthly eyes right now, and it doesn’t feel like it to your broken heart. But trust me: you’re OK.”
For me, that moment came three days after my husband had abandoned me. I was out for a run, and God lifted my eyes up to the sun and the brilliant blue spring sky strewn with white petals of cloud, and a sense of His pride and joy in me as His daughter suddenly washed over me. I felt my infinite worth in spite of my husband behaving as if I were worthless. I felt utterly loved in spite of the fact my husband was behaving as if he despised me. I felt invincible in spite of the fact I hadn’t slept or eaten for three days. I felt calm and centered in spite of the fact that everything was in turmoil. I felt hopeful in spite of the fact that things looked hopeless. The feeling lasted for hours before it finally faded, and I wept for the joy of it.
God will give you a moment or an hour like that: watch for it and savor it when it comes. It will stay in your memory, bright and perfect as the frost on a tree branch in the morning sun, long after the rest of this nonsense is faded into the misty once-was, has-been–because that moment is truer and more real than anything else going on in your world right now.
The Rookery 