dailydatewithgod

How long would it take you to list the gifts in your life?   How long would it take you to list the burdens in your life? I keep coming back to this idea that perhaps they are the same thing.  Two sides of the same coin.  The events in our lives which bring us pain and anguish are the same ones that cause us to redefine who we are and what we are capable of.  If this is the case then maybe the things we see ourselves as saddled with and simply gifts in disguise. The difficulties we find burdening end up being our unburdening.  I am reminded of a scene in one of my favorite movies, “Crash.”  The scene where the policeman who violated the wife of the man he pulled over by unnecessarily groping her when patting her down to check for weapons is the same one who is there to rescue her from a burning car.  In that moment the man who was had betrayed her is her hero.  I think of this often when it comes to my father.  I do not know just one experience of him.  It is part of what makes being an incest survivor so difficult.  He was a loving father who took care of me and taught me many things.  He was instrumental in initiating my perspective of seeing Jesus as a friend instead of some distant God in the clouds.  Yet, he is also the man who betrayed me by sexually violating me at a very young age.  It was the dark side of who he is.  I do not know what he was saddled with as a child, I can only imagine as one does not do these things out of the blue.  For whatever reason am the first to speak up and say something.  He is not able to speak of it or claim responsibility.  It saddens me as I always thought he was my hero.  We are saddled with the same burden but I have found a way to make use of it.  In my relationship with God I have found a way to be freed of it so I need not check out, forget, or most importantly not continue the cycle.  In trying to outrun my saddles, I dove into a food addiction and body obsession.  When I was in enough pain from that and searching for a way to break through it, I found myself at the path of the 12 steps which opened up my understanding of God.  The process of embracing the saddles of my life has granted me the freedom to open up to the truth of who I am and what love is.  It is on the saddle I would have picked but it was the one placed on  me. My daily dates with God which are the breadth and depth of my life force would not be happening on a daily basis to the depths they do had it not been for the burdens saddling me.