What have you learned about yourself since March whenever when you were scared to death by being told to wash your hands, don’t touch your face?

I’ve learned I can’t blame lack of time for my lack of effort. I’ve learned to understand my resistance to taking chances is for fear of something not happening.

If you’ve read my blog, you may be thinking well, that’s no secret.

I learned that God made me to be merciful and that I have what is called a mercy gift, that this is my redemptive gift. The day after a very wise person told me this, thinking surely I already knew, I received this In Touch publication, their final issue. The issue’s focus?

Mercy.

I’ve learned there is a reader for stories born of trauma. There are authors who are honest and long for their readers to be changed by our stories.

One such author is Jake Owensby, the author of “A Resurrection Shaped Life, Dying and Rising on Planet Earth”.

Jake is a blogger and a minister. He also grew up exposed to violence. He developed a fear reaction. He cowered when he felt that was the only way to feel safe. He grew up being told he was worthless in so many ways. His book is written to convince the reader, God made you for different. You can believe you are valued.

I haven’t even finished the book and I’ve not been asked to review or mention it. It’s just a part of my learning during pandemic.

I admitted a big hard and better understood truth about myself.

I am a blamer. I look for places to lay blame for the trauma of my past, the way it has and continues to stymie my living.

Jake Owensby defines it this way, a way I am embracing,

You see, I’m a blamer. Or, more accurately, I’m a recovering blamer given to occasional relapses.

Jake Owensby

On the bottom page of this chapter’s second page are almost unreadable notes left by me, the truth of them so true, I had to hurry and leave it recorded.

If you can blame someone or someones for the hurt you felt, the fear unresolved and the physical harm that went unprevented…you won’t have to feel the deep heartache of not wanting to have to blame God.

Me

Mr. Owensby led me to this, it is valuable like a revelation long needed.

I’m only half through the book. The chapter after blame and shame has other underlined and margin notes. One more that lingers is the retelling of an English teacher who believed in him and convinced him to write competitively. His fear and comparison of himself led to failure. However, he writes of the redemptive value of the instructor seeing that in him, seeing him measuring his lack against another’s arrogance.

She yearned for me to see things, to see the world and myself in a different light. In retrospect, I realize that it was my dread of failure that undid me that day. Failure, even perceived failure, would set loose in me an avalanche of shame.

Jake Owensby

I’m remembering now how Jake Owensby and I connected through writing. I remember the time he offered me prayer. I believe he prayed.

Prayer is yet another thing I’m learning more deeply.

Last weekend, I sat with my mama’s sister on her patio. She told a sweet story about how my mama was a teenager when she first heard my daddy singing in a tiny little country bar. She was a high schooler and he had come home from Korea.

I asked her to retell the story. How had I never known it? Then we turned the discussion from life to death. My uncle and my aunt asking me to remind them how old my parents were when they met death. The perspective changed along with the mood when I compared my upcoming 60th birthday with the corresponding too soon years of their dying.

I thought about the scribbles in my Bible, a book I gave my ailing mama entitled “What God Can Do”. I thought about how I believed she would live, that God would do what the Book of Luke records, she would live if I would believe. I thought of how I never prayed that way for my daddy, felt I was not eligible to pray, not equipped back then.

Now, on this Tuesday morning I’m listing answers to prayer because I am still praying and I will pray, continue unrelentingly.

So, why pray when people die anyway, when abuse continues for some and if it ends at last, the deep pain often comes back to visit?

I pray because I know God is far too big for me to know why and why not.

I pray because I know His love and power and knowledge in increments when I continue.

Lost keys found, an old car that started, a baby protected in a storm, a heart condition healed, a softer tone from the heart of one that used to be harder, an opportunity to write about redemption from trauma for others, waking up well, tiny twins a little early yet, healthy, little answers to questions and requests not really life altering but good offering ups of yes”, the bravery to send photos of paintings to a gallery.

Knowing God so much more than before, so much that it’s unimportant the reactions of others when you say you still believe in miracles.

God is not logical. We can’t use a chart like a logic model to list our prayers and our acts of mercy and kindness and line them up in a flow chart kind of way towards a corresponding list of outcomes.

God’s ways are not ours to fully understand.

Only fully believe.

So, what have you learned during this time called unprecedented?

Maybe it’s just that, all of our times are in the hands of a God who promises unprecedented miracles, unprecedented new mercies, unimaginable grace.

Fix your mind on that, not your missteps, the prayers you prayed that left you questioning, or the long held fear of failure and shame that holds you back.

Learn of God in tiny grasps; but, keep longing for steady learning. There is more than enough time to get closer to grasping the truth of Him, the truth not made for us to wrap our minds around completely, simple to be drawn closer every moment to the possibility of it.

The immeasurably confounding and generous love of God.

“from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”
‭‭Ephesians‬ ‭3:15-19‬ ‭ESV‬‬

Like the prayers God answers, I’m enlightened by the possibility of them, not the end result. The book about a Resurrection Shaped Life, written from the perspective of someone hampered by shame was not written specifically for me and its author had no preconceived takeaway for me. I’m simply a reader as I am simply one who is praying. The revelation, redemption and peace in response are God’s answers.

I encourage you to follow the writing of Jake Owensby and to order this book if you’re stuck in your past or if you are prone to shame as a handicap. You can learn more here: Jake Owensby

Continue and believe.

Order the redemptive book here:

A Resurrection Shaped Life https://www.amazon.com/dp/1501870815/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_J1aXEbAKSYSBC