OUTSIDE THE SAFE ZONE

One of my least favorite activities is moving. For some odd reason, going to a place that I have never been before does not sound exciting. In fact, for a control freak such as myself who thrives off of consistency, predictability and structure, it is terrifying.

I remember when my mother first decided to move my sisters and me to Oklahoma the summer before my senior year of high school. For a bunch of city folk from Chicago, moving to Oklahoma brought on culture shock.. I thought my mother had lost her mind.

In Chicago, I felt safe. I lived in an area where gunshots and drugs were not uncommon. Profanity, premarital sex, and other various compulsions were normal but in my mind that was my normal. After living there for 17 years, it was another part of the modern day culture that I expected to remain a part of my life.

After the move, I felt like a fish out of water and I soon began to realize that my idea of normal was not really normal. I learned that the hurts that I felt, the habits that I had developed, and my hang ups were not originally what God wanted for me. Obviously with the decision to move, my mom had not lost her mind, but in fact was being used by God to try and renew my mind.

I truly believe that God moved my family to help me become the person that I am today. I didn’t realize how hurt and broken I was, because in my previous environment, I felt as though that was all that I knew. Now I see that God purposely moved me from one environment to another to save and protect me.

At the time I could not see it, but the move brought me closer to Christ and introduced me to Celebrate Recovery. With God’s help through CR I was able to overcome a destructive habit and finally walk away from addictive and abusive relationships. By being pulled out of my safe zone, I was able I was able to step out into the unknown and become the person that I am today: happy, healed, and made whole.

Have been pulled out of a situation in which you felt comfortable? Is God pulling on your heart strings, trying to help you grow into the person he would like for you to be by changing your current environment? My advice is simple, seek God.

Give it up to Him and he will guide you exactly where he wants you to go. Jeremiah 29:11 reads,  ‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’

Grateful Believer,

Gabby

Breathe Easy

For the past three months, on my morning commute to work, I have been hitting the same wall over and over again. Do not worry, my car has survived the trip every day with ease. However, my poor nose has taken a beating day after day.
     
Every morning Monday through Friday I travel on I-40 East towards Midwest City and every morning my poor car hits a “wall” of a very fragrant aroma. The first couple of trips I assumed my car had somehow come across the carcass of a skunk or some other small animal and the smell would soon dissipate. And the smell would go away for a while, but every morning it would come back again.
       
After the first couple of weeks of these smelly episodes, I was starting to become annoyed because I thought someone needed to do something about the decaying body that was causing this potent tang. The next couple of months I figured there had to be a nearby landfill or factory of some sort because the stench only penetrated my car after the first seven to ten minutes of my drive. The weird thing is that the smell always seemed to be around the same part of the city near the Agnew exit.
       
Finally I called my husband one morning after cruising with my windows down and I began to waft in the all too familiar stench. I asked him what it could possibly be. “Stockyard City,” he told me.
All along I had been driving right next to a very large cattle-trading arena and did not realize it until someone else brought it to my attention. My “denial” of the issue, trying to ignore it and make excuses as to what could be causing, prevented me from reaching out sooner to discover the root cause.
       
I will be honest: it was almost a year after my first visit to Celebrate Recovery before I decided to truly face my denial and seek help for my addictions. The constant rationalization of behaviors and inability to acknowledge faults prevented me to seek help when the “stench” of my compulsions continued to hit me in the face.. It wasn’t until I fully committed myself to God and to my recovery that I was able to reach out and ask for help.
     
With the help of my sponsor and accountability partners, I was able to acknowledge my own denial and accept that if I continued to take that same path of denial then I would continue to drive into the same wall of cologne. Instead of aimlessly driving into the fragrant aroma of denial, with God and my forever family, I can roll up the windows in the car, turn on the A/C, and breathe easy.

Grateful Believer,

Gabby