Monday morning

It’s a chilly Monday morning here. The sun is shining but there is a definite chill in the air. There are man things on my mind this morning. Today is a week since the death of Wendy Ralph. Yesterday the church mourned with the Ralph family and then at tea celebrated the birthday of the indomitable Jaco Bester. It’s amazing how life moves on. How even in profound sadness we find things to rejoice about.

 

The previous week was church camp and out of that a lot of controversy arouse. The main speaker spoke about a number of things that some Christians think are wrong like smoking and tattoos. On Sunday our pastor rehashed out the issue with the church. He didn’t agree with everything the speaker at church camp and it amazed me to hear him repeat many things that my brother said to me in a conversation regarding some his habits on Friday night. So there are a lot of things that I am thinking about clearly and very deeply in my current drugged (flu meds) state.

 

The truth is that I come from a legalistic church background. Everything was bad. Make-up, jewellery, pants, movies, TV – everything. And while I had a great deal of freedom, I lived a very sheltered life. Today at 25, I feel cheated. I never got the chance to experience life as I wanted to. I never got the chance to do a great deal of things because I was and I guess still am afraid of what everybody will think of me. For a long time I lead a double life. One person at school or on campus and another at home or on weekends and how I wish I had the freedom to express myself as I was. Everything that I was interested was wrong. The legalistic church school that I went to succeeded in making me feel as though me as a person was wrong and bad and for many years I wanted to be something that I was not. I wanted to be what they thought was good which was the complete opposite of what God made me.

 

It has taken years and countless hours of prayer for me to break from that. Till this year I’ve never been comfortable wearing make-up or lipstick even and even now while I don’t wear it everyday, I do put it on when the occasion calls for it.

 

 

Two preaches helped me break out of my shell. They were almost a year apart

The one was one our pastor preached about having a future, cutting the chains that bind. He told the story of a tortoise that had somehow got a ring around the middle of its shell and how it had changed the shape of the shell, and he went on to say that if you cut the ring of, the shape may not change straight away but the tortoise now has a future and a chance to grow. More so than is the ring had not been cut off.

This was the first big thing.

 

The second was a sermon by his wife over a year later. She was preaching about raising little girls with the fruit of the spirit. It struck me that the opposite of gentleness was harshness and the opposite of kindness was cruelty and that I was neither or those things. And the personality I do have makes me neither harsh or cruel.

 

It’s not easy getting up after many years of feeling crushed and it’s taken a great deal of time for me to feel completely comfortable with myself all the time and I walked on many roads to get here.

 

So what am I trying to say?

At the end of the day as long as your heart is in the right place and you are not sinning against God - go and be free. Live the life you were meant to and have all the fun you want to. Just never loose sight of the goal.