My difficult and awesome journey with God!

Hi guys!

This my first of what I hope to be many stories of things I've been through in my walk with God, good and bad, and what he has done in my life through these situations.

Learning how to Forgive:  

I have been on a long journey over this past year in my walk with God. Last year he called me to Nicaragua with an amazing group of women from my church. While we were in Nicaragua we held a parenting conference and we all got to share our testimonies. While we were down there we did an activity one night after we were finished with conference we had all the people including us as a team fill out an index card with the name or names of someone we needed to forgive.

At that particular moment I wrote down nobody because I didn't feel like there was anyone that I hadn't forgiven. After we prayed a collective prayer for everyone there we tore up the cards and threw them in the trash. As I would come to realize since I got back last year I had not forgiven someone for what they had done to me. This is the journey I am on at this moment in my life, a journey of working through deep emotional wounds that I wasn't aware that I had until this year. There have been many days this year that I wish that God would just heal these wounds immediately so that I could move on.

One thing I have learned over this past year is that the closer God gets me to letting go of the anger and forgiveness I feel; It seems like Satan always attacks and brings back painful memories or new situations with the same person which lead me to want to keep not forgiving. I have learned this year that it is much easier to forgive someone for stepping on your foot or cutting you off in traffic than it is to forgive someone who has hurt you. The biggest thing I have learned this year is that I have a hard time letting God have my brokenness and anger and asking him to help me forgive. I have found that I often just want to take it into my own hands and try to forgive on my own.

It is honestly very hard, if not impossible to forgive someone without God's help because we as humans have a sinful nature that doesn't want to do what God says and let it go. We want justice for what has been done to us but the real healing comes when we truly ask God to help us forgive. Once we forgive then God comes in and begins to mend our brokenness.

Psalm 147:3 tells us that "God heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds". I believe this is impossible for God to do until we let go of anger and forgive so that he can heal those wounds. Ephesians 4:32 talks about forgiving others as God forgave us. It is very often hard forgive but the truth is God has forgiven us for just as bad if not worse stuff. I am going to continue on this journey of learning to forgive and asking God to heal my wounds.

Hope you enjoyed this, the first of many blogs!
Have a blessed day
Anna