november 2012 celloutlines
celloutlines | overview
Introduction This time last year (November cell notes 2011) we read five amazing testimonies from young people in The Salvation Army. We read how these young people had found hope, healing and, above all, freedom in their relationship with Jesus: freedom from past hurts, freedom from anger, freedom from wrong habits, freedom from rejection, to name a few. These young people also told us how Jesus had freed them to be themselves, to explore their gifts and talents, to embrace their weaknesses and face their fears, and to love and help others. They shared their determination to continue to live as the person that God had created them to be, and encouraged us all to accept that living for and with Jesus is the only way to experience real life! Read one of these stories again now:
Sarah’s Story ‘I am one of those people who, when bad things happen to them, always seem to manage to push through. Even though I have a fairly laidback personality, I am very determined at times. One of my ways of coping with things in the past was to keep going and push through, but also I would put the emotion or the damage that the painful situation caused in a box – and put it on a shelf – to be processed another day. So on the surface I always looked like I coped well, but inside things were probably not so good. But three years ago I reached a point in my life where I realised that I actually wasn’t coping with things all that well. I had gone through a number of changes in my personal situation and these had managed to erode my confidence and my self-worth. In fact, inside I felt completely worthless. And it didn’t matter what anyone said to me, it really didn’t change how I felt. I was a Christian and believed very much in the love of God and had known God working in my life in some amazing ways. But at this point in my life I couldn’t really understand why he loved me, and in fact I started to think that God perhaps didn’t love me – he loved other people, but I didn’t feel worthy of his love. Fortunately at that time I had some really good friends in my life, who gently started to challenge me and encouraged me to seek some help. So with the help of a very trusted friend, I started to process all this painful emotion that was going on in my life. I also started to take the boxes off the shelf of all the bad things that had happened. And for me this was a very hard thing to do – because those boxes contained some very painful memories. In my early teens I was sexually abused. At other times I had had some very significant people in my life tell me I was no good and would never amount to anything. I had some very painful times of rejection, significant bereavements, and so the list could go on. You can perhaps understand why it seemed simpler to just keep all that rubbish in the boxes – with the lids firmly in place. I’ve been told that in reality it was quite a miracle that I turned out how I had. But as I began this process of looking at all these things, in many ways life got even harder. It felt dark for me – in fact it was so very dark. I didn’t want to get out of bed in the morning – I just seemed to function, and there were many times when I wondered where God was in it all. But my faith was strong enough for me to believe that God had put me on this journey, and even though he didn’t feel very close I had the confidence to believe that God would be sovereign in this situation, and so I just clung on. And so I continued on this journey for many, many months. In that time I faced up to many things. I learned again what it was to be of value and worth, what it meant to be a child of God and that he loved me unconditionally, and I accepted that as truth in my life. I learned that I did not need to live in fear of what others said. I also learned about true forgiveness and the freedom that it brings, and I made the conscious decision to forgive those who had abused me and rejected me. When I reached the point of making the conscious decision to forgive and then doing so, I remember at the time writing in my journal: ‘I felt beautiful – not too sure I have ever thought myself beautiful – but I had this amazing sense of beauty inside of me.’ continued over >>>
www.salvationarmy.org.uk/alove