One Year and Counting...

My life changed on June 24, 2007 at 4 pm. I took today to mark the anniversary and reflect over the past year to see if time had softened the impact of what transpired between me and Jesus during my time of prayer that day.

It hasn't.

I'm happy to provide details to anyone that wants to hear them, but the bottom line is that I came to realize that my experience with Jesus wasn't lining up with what I said I believed. And when I took a quiet moment to let a few key truths sink in--and place my full weight and hope on them as reliably true--I experienced healing, and I began to be freed from a Perfectionist Mindset that was controlling my life and emotions. There's much too much to explain here; simply know that a truth you can't experience does you no good at all....

In my review of the past year's journal entries, I came across a passage from Psalm 73 that I think describes what I experienced:

When my heart was grieved
and my spirit embittered,
I was senseless and ignorant;
I was a brute beast before you.

Yet I am always with You;
You hold me by my right hand.
You guide me with your counsel,
and afterward you take me into glory.
Whom have I in heaven but you?
And earth has nothing I desire besides you.
My flesh and my heart may fail,
but God is the strength of my heart and my
portion forever.

While it's painful to re-live the raw emotion and despair while re-reading these pages of my journal, I hope to return to them every year on this day as a reminder of how I want to live out the rest of my life--free from the self-condemnation of perfectionism and a performance-oriented value system.

Old habits die hard, and it's not as if my old ways of needing to do all things well to feel acceptable and valuable changed overnight, but I can say that I am not the same person I was a short year ago, and that brings great hope.