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Home > Grace Message > Real Stories! > Rejected but Never Forsaken
by Grace Bellingham
We are born with an incredible need for security and sense of belonging. Children have an in-born sense of needing to belong as a valuable part of a family unit. We grow up needing the approval and validity that parents have the power in our lives to give, especially our father’s approval. With this fact of life in mind let me share with you the struggle a successful, professional man in our church was involved in every day of his life.
This gentle and kind man came to me for counsel because he realized that he had an angry spirit trapped within him that took him and his family to task with hardly a moment’s notice. Trying to control it on his own had created in him a lethargy about almost everything in his life except his profession (of that he was totally in charge). As a result his wife planned and executed just about everything else. To meet him for the first time you would consider him extremely mild mannered and quite complacent, this would not be a true estimate however. Buried beneath the surface was an inferno of angry bitterness that could erupt at the most inconvenient times.
He truly had no idea where this was coming from and we began to seek God for answers together. During the ministry time with him and his wife, God opened the door of his heart and his life experiences began pouring out. We have the ability through the power of our minds to close lead door on our pasts so fully that we can live in response all of our lives to things we no longer have any recollection of every happening
One afternoon, while he was talking, God opened my eyes; in vision form I saw a small boy, well dressed and as eager as a child could be rushing to meet his dad as he arrived home from work. In his hands was something he had made and he was so excited to show it to his father. His father barely glanced at him or it and criticized something about it and shooed him away. The little boy walked away so disheartened that it rent my heart for him.
As I shared my momentary vision with him he began to weep – he wept so much I thought he may never stop. As the weeping subsided he explained to me that his father was a pilot and was gone for days at a time, during his father’s absences he would work endlessly on model airplanes to show his father upon his return how much he loved and needed him. In his little boy heart he thought that this was the way to show him how much he really loved him. His father never had a good word to say about it and most often would criticize his models which would send him back to his room to perfect them over and over and over.
Then one day he came home from school to find his mother devastated and his life torn completely apart. His father had killed himself and the hole that he had created in his son would remain a gaping sore filled with such a need of approval and a need to be valid to someone that anger took the place of eagerness.
He finished high school, went to college and then to graduate school, graduating top of his class and establishing himself and his future in his chosen profession. He married a woman in whose eyes he could do no wrong and as far as she was concerned he hung the moon. She was like a fresh fountain in the dry, parched landscape of his life and little by little he passed everything into her capable hands and zeroed in solely on his career. This seemed to work well for them and perhaps they would have lived this way for the rest of their lives trudging through the instances of anger and brutality as they came up. But, God had better for them, so much better. God had a plan to save them, to add them to a church where they could find the safety and security of belonging long enough to let down their guard and receive from God the cleansing, healing power that Jesus Christ purchased for them on the cross of Calvary when He died in their place.
God reached into the heart and soul of the eight year old little boy who was sitting in the chair as a forty year old man. He spoke to that child and assured him of His love for him, His approval of him and His need for him to be all that God planned for him to be. The healing of a man’s heart and the cleansing power of God that swept through that little office that day changed all of us forever. This broken, hurting and defeated man left there whole, rejoicing and victorious in his Savior. The healing that began that day continued through his whole family. His own children began to get from him the love and approval they so needed, his wife began to rely on him for a change and let down some of the heavy burdens she had been carrying alone. Their family was being healed and restored on a daily basis.
Praise to our Wonderful God Who can reach back through the years of rejection and prove to us that we may be cast down but we are never forsaken. |
