Why you don't have to hide anymore

Welcome friend.

I'm so pleased you are here.

In this space I want to share coffee for your heart.

Drink in whatever troubles you.

Offer a listening ear and a hand to hold.

Share the things that bless and encourage me.

Be someone you can feel at home with.

So kick off your shoes, pick up your coffee (or tea if you prefer), make yourself comfy and get ready.

We'll share coffee, comfort and encouragement.

Today, I have a letter to write you...

Dear You,
I see the pain you try to hide behind words and smiles, because deep in the windows of your soul you carry a weight of woundedness.

Despite evidence to the contrary, you don't feel truly loved or validated.

Nothing really fills the gaping space where trust, safety and security should be.

It feels easier to erect walls around yourself than allow anyone close admittance to your inner core. Fortifications. Defences. Build them high enough and no mere mortal can scale them.

Until someone reaches out and breaches your defences, and you notice how hedged in you really are.

My friend, this was my life for many years. 

I lived scared. Hid the pain. Refused to recognise how I'd closed off my heart. 

On the surface we can seem fine, in control, content even. On the inside? When we're on our own? We curl away as foetal-curved commas withdrawing from ourselves and the world around.

There is help. There is hope. We don't have to hide anymore. 

God is here. He is ready, willing and able to enter into our pain, help us face the walls; and as we co-labour with Him in their removal..brick by tiny brick...they come down and we are set free.

His unconditional Love ~ is our security.

His sacrifice on the cross ~ the doorway to forgiveness and mercy.

His Spirit within ~ our shelter and safe place.

His grace ~ our enabling and equipping.

His Life ~ becomes as one~ with our life ~ as we open up to Him ~ like a flower to the sun.

These are the encouraging words and thoughts I want you to hear as we start a new year: {and believe me, I need to hear them too}

Absorb the truth of who you are ~ beautiful and beloved.

Know deep in your heart ~ you are safe always.

Hold on ~ to the reassurance that you can be set free.

Feel deeply within ~  you are special, precious to God and loved beyond measure.

Believe ~ you can do all things through Christ who strengthens you.

Fight on ~ whenever the going gets tough. Because God fights for you and will never give up on you. 

Listen to His voice. Hear the heartbeat of God soothing your own. Come close to the throne of grace and find mercy in your hour of need.

Healing and wholeness are there for the taking.

Are you ready? I hope so. It may take time. I'm still very much a 'work in progress' in this area as in many, but we all have to start somewhere. 

This could be the year you open up your heart to all that God has in store for you. 

God's arms of love are reaching out to you, just as we reach out to our own loved ones to hold them safe and close.

I close with today's #smallstone offering {part of the 31 day Mindful Writing Challenge} to bless your heart:

'Arms of love'

"Arms of love encircle me

holding secure and steady

as I finally exhale, release

breathe soft and calm

feeling prepared and ready

to accept and believe

hear and receive

that as beloved arms

encompass round

God's Spirit hovers

without a sound yet

speaking things He wants

to urgently impart

into the very depths

of my insecure heart

saying, "You are safe. You are loved. 

You are beautiful. You are enough.

You are free ~ just trust in Me"

©JoyLenton2014

Joining here with Holley and all the other lovely encouragers who want to share 'Coffee for Your Heart'. Do join us next Wednesday for more words of reassurance and encouragement.

Holley has written a lovely encouraging book:''If we could have coffee ~ 30 Days of Heart to Heart Encouragement' that will really help lift the January blues.

And here's a great resource that has aided me in the process of working on removing the walls around my heart and becoming free ~ 'The Wall Around Your Heart' by Mary de Muth.

Also linking with Emily and Jennifer as we seek to write out our #ImperfectProse to #TellHIsStory

When walls need to come down

Watching a light of recognition dawn in his eyes, I breathed easy for the first time in days, though I knew we still had a long way to go in our understanding of one another's perspectives.

Pictures from the past were drawn in varied shades and hues. Neither of us saw exactly the same image on the screens of our minds.

As streams emerging from the same Source, we had every expectation of converging together in a river of reflection; instead, we meandered tangentially into rivulets of our own making.

How had we arrived here? Barriers were breaking and walls crumbling before our very eyes.

Conversation crept into those private places where we feared to tread. And I heeded these words, "We tend to wall off our hearts in the aftermath of pain".

The prison we know can feel safer than freedom as its walls close round us with comforting familiarity.

After 38 years wedded and bedded, we were gradually becoming more emotionally intimate than ever before about our sexual intimacy.

While my beloved had viewed our courtship and surrender to one another through seemingly rosy-tinted lenses, I wore such dark glasses they had obscured all truth as he saw it.

Now, I had to refresh my vision and version of events as seen by one who had transferred much of the guilt from the childhood emotional and sexual abuse she received on to the very person she should have trusted most.

I was discovering more about how "we can live in reaction to a negative relational experience and eventually stagnate, or we can ask God to compel us forward to a kingdom goal".

Retreating into my own worldview wasn't helping me to see or accept my husband's. I had to dare risk being wrong, or misguided at least. "When we're hurt we tend to retreat, nurse wounds, or lash out" and I had done all three. 

How would it look to "turn to God in praise instead?" or is that too much to ask of a heart at war with itself? Maybe. Though "eventually we have to choose to move forward".

This marriage had been cluttered from the start. Perhaps now it was time to shift the luggage, send past thoughts and fears packing and begin with a lighter load?

For past relational baggage "should not define us, nor should the pain from it inform the way we interact with or withdraw from others" because it "strangles our ability to live freely today".

As I begin to embrace a fresh perspective, asking God to renew my mind by the light of His word, making a conscious choice to move forward rather than cling to familiar, He is giving me all the grace I need to see things as He sees them - and it is good.

I want to break free. I want to live an uncaged, open-hearted life. To live, love and give as God desires me to as wife and lover, mother (and grandma-to-be), friend and helper to others.

And in the process, "living without walls means becoming more proactive in the way we deal with hurt" which can only serve to aid with healing those broken places in our hearts and lives.

So what are we to do?

With all quotes given here coming from Mary de Muth's just released book, 'The Wall Around Your Heart', I will answer with her words of wisdom:

"If you have a wall firmly built around your heart, ask Jesus, the great gateway, to make a doorway through. He is the gate. He is the avenue leading toward a rich and satisfying life - not a stingy walled-off life".

I have been greatly helped in seeing walls beginning to crumble in my own life since I've read, digested and prayed over this book, asked God to come into the situations and make me willing to allow Him access to all areas.

I am still very much a work in progress, but some way on from where I used to be. My growing awareness of these walls can be found here.

And I long for you to be set free too, my friend. A walled-in life is one of misery and a walling-off from the liberty which Christ died to give us.

"If therefore the Son makes you free, you are free indeed" ~ John 8:36

Because I strongly believe in the reality of being set free in Christ, and the way Mary de Muth's message can aid in the process of becoming free and living a life without walls, I am giving away a free copy of 'The Wall Around Your Heart' here.

All you have to do to be in with a chance is to leave a comment below and your name will be put into a random draw, with the winner being announced here soon after.

To find out more about why Mary wrote 'The Wall Around Your Heart' (speaking from her own and the experiences of others) and why she desires us to live without walls, please click here.

**NOTE** - Having been privileged to read a pre-release copy of this book and be part of its launch team, I can wholeheartedly recommend it on a personal basis.

You can buy a copy here in the UK or if you live elsewhere you can buy it here. It is also available from Barnes & Noble.

Linking here with Laura at Missional Women Faith Filled Friday

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Maybe there are walls in your own life that need to come down? They could be walls of:guilt, shame, unforgiveness, anger, bitterness, resentment, or _____ (fill in the blank)

Could this be the time to co-operate with God and see those walls crumble brick by brick to release you into a more open-hearted way of life?