What Keeps Us from our Ultimate Creative Potential?

The Lord wants us to be whole and joyful.  I'm convinced of it.  But sometimes negative life events happen to us that are anything but joyful, and that tend to break us rather than enhance any sense of being whole.  Our emotions can be damaged.  We might become angry, hurt, fearful, or anxious, and it seems like we have to struggle with those swirling emotions on a daily basis, and it’s traumatic.

Our usual thought patterns get skewed.  We might make a decision to do something in retaliation, only to discover later that we wish we hadn’t acted that way, because now we feel ashamed and embarrassed.  Perhaps a relationship that we valued has ruptured, and we don’t know how to make amends.  Maybe we don’t even want to make amends.

Life as we knew it is greatly disturbed because of those life events.  How do we make sense of it all?  Can we keep our eyes focused on wholeness in Christ, on our Ultimate Creative Potential in Christ, even when the proverbial “storm” is raging in our heart and mind? 

I want to be perfectly clear:  the kind of negative life event that I’m talking about is not our fault.  It’s not my fault when spiritual abuse happens to me, and it’s not your fault when it happens to you.  Jamie Marich, in her “Understanding & Treating Spiritual Abuse,” writes that spiritual abuse is traumatic.  It has an external cause – someone does it to you; you are violated by an unwelcome intrusion; and it is unexpected and beyond your control.”  This kind of life event is not your fault.

What I’m writing about is the after-effects of the abuse.  Being badly hurt can keep us from our wholeness, can knock us off the track.  We need healing, ideally the kind of healing that brings a wiser maturity that I wrote about in a previous blog.  Before we find that healing, our wholeness is damaged.

While in the despair of spiritual abuse, we might not ask for help.  We might not know where to go to ask for help.  It could be that the abusive situation is awkward, making us believe that we don’t want to or can’t ask our once trusted source, because they’re the perpetrator.  We don’t know the right people to go to anymore.  Who can we talk to?  Who can we ask for prayers?

While in the shock of spiritual abuse, we might believe that we can’t trust God anymore, and so we don’t even ask Him for help.  We “go it alone,” in effect licking our wounds in silence.  It’s quite a dilemma, being spiritually abused.  Any or all of these can keep us, at least temporarily from our Ultimate Creative Potential in Christ.

What keeps you from your Ultimate Creative Potential in Christ?  Leave me a comment. 

Leave me a comment.

And remember, you're awesome!  May God bless you and hold you in the palm of His hand.