So where did my brokenness lead me? I will tell you. My hurts, they brought me to a place where I doubted God and His love for me. At least the God I thought I knew, the God of religion. The one who was contained within the walls of a well-dressed and richly clad structure. After all, isn’t this where He belonged? Why would the God of the universe live anywhere else other than a mansion built by the hands of man for His glory? Would a living God and all His greatness want to associate himself with a loser like me? At least that is what my deceptive and disillusioned thoughts led me to believe.
As the years went on and I became a young teenager, I only found myself falling deeper into depression. I moved to a new town and quickly found myself being bullied yet again. When did it start? Right after I started school. First, I stood out as wimp, I had little to no athletic ability and I was scrawny. That made me an easy target for those ahead of me on the puberty journey of raging testosterone and bulging muscles. There were kids that I am certain could have beat up my dad. However, when it really started was right after a music class. Well, actually, during that music class. For one, I was extremely shy and beyond timid. Any time I had to be a public spectacle even in the confines of a small group I became terrified. My heart would race and pound out of my chest, my chest could not expand to breathe, my mind would spin and make me dizzy, and then that stupid bladder problem. Yep you guessed it, I would pee my pants. Like I said, music class is where the bullies really got their fuel. I had to play a song on my recorder in front of the entire class. This wasn’t a small group of close peers; to me I was standing before a crowd at Carnegie Hall in my underwear at best. Ok, I wasn’t just wearing underwear, I did have on a pair of light gray corduroy pants and some kind of t-shirt. By the way, light gray is a really bad color for people who wet their pants. The performance went something like this: palpitations in my chest, shortness of breath, dizziness in the head and then the flood. Yes I pee'd my pants right in front of the entire class before I ever hit the second note of Mary had a little lamb.
The intentional shoves and petty name-callings in the locker room, hallways, and gym floors became a game of cat and mouse for me. Shoves became punches and words became swords. Embarrassment and shame became my norm. At our school, we had an area of portable buildings for classrooms. This created an area, perfect for games like hide-and-seek and tag. I would hide and they would seek. The enemy would not tag, they would chunk rocks.
Again the message: "nobody likes you", "nobody wants you", "nobody cares", and" you will never amount to anything". Why I never said anything to my parents I still don't know.
Before I close this post, I want to make a couple things clear. For one, God, the creator of this entire universe and all life that it contains, He does not dwell in temples built by the hands of man. Acts 17:24 "The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. Secondly, the true loving God, the one we can call Abba Father (Daddy), He does want to be your friend and walk with you and reside in your heart. John 15:13 Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. These two very important facts I did not get at this time of my life.
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