Breaking Pride's Protective Shell

I've been in bad shape. Don't really know why. I've found a measure of healing laying here in the woods and crying. Reading back in my journal and asking You to show me what it was I wasn't getting, has helped.



-- I notice you don't ask Me to speak into your mind. --



I guess I haven't. I seem to want to feel blank in my brain, yet I get this queasy feeling like I should ask if You have anything to say to me like last Sunday.

So, please clear my mind. Protect me from anything myself and any other input that is not of You, in Jesus name... I place myself before You, and I am willing and desirous to hear You.



-- My child - I love you.

Do not let your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid -

for I am with you.

I am with your friend. I know you are worried about her, but she is in My hands, for I love her as I love you. --



(I see a "picture" of You holding her face in Your hands and kissing the top of her head, and Your love just "running down" all over her.)



-- Keep that picture before you

and know that I love her

and know that I love you.

You do "count" with Me.

You do matter to Me. --



(Lord? The tears start to choke me.)

(-- Keep writing, child. --)



-- You do matter to Me and I love you. --



(Lord? the next thing I hear seems like just a memory from Anne's prophecy over me at Haymarket, but I feel blocked if I don't write it... and I don't want to write it because I can't believe it is from You. It sounds too preposterous.)



-- I cannot "live" without you: you mean that much to Me.

Come. Lay your heart in My hands and know that I love you. Know that I do want you for My own,

My very own. --



(please, Lord: conflicting loves and loyalties?)



-- I'll resolve them, for you cannot resolve them in and of yourself. And this is how I will do it:

I will love you until you can love no more,

and then I will love through you.

There is much love I have to offer a dying world, and I offer/long to love through you --

but your love will not suffice.

Under its severity, you would "crack".

You cannot take it: the pain is too great.

But I can take it.

Let Me love through you

Let Me care through you

Let Me tend through you.

But to do this, you first must let Me do all three for you. You do count with Me. You must know this beyond a shadow of a doubt.

You think all growth must come through suffering

but you think wrongly.

Much growth doesn't;

rather it comes through love

through the experience of being loved.

This is what changes you

This is what brings growth

This is what brings true humility: the knowledge of being loved, being deeply loved, will break the hardest shell of pride.

Yes, I know -- you have read that knowledge of being deeply loved brings humility. I can and do draw on that which you have read. But notice: I take it beyond and tell you that humility means the hard shell of pride has been broken.

Don't you see what this means? Pride is used by all as a shell to protect the heart. You have long wanted Me to deal with your pride, but I need to deal with the hurt that underlies it. --

The Ancient Heart

I'm sick. Ill at heart. Another June, and another legal case where justice has not been served. Yet another case where we did all we could, heart and soul, and nothing worked.



I feel so hurt. All I want to do is cry. I kept wrestling with myself and my feelings from the past (that You didn't value me enough to let my mother live) last night. I guess You'll have to get me through this again. I partly know You will, but I feel shaky and lost. I don't want to close my feelings off in the way I did as a child, yet I don't want to get into free fall anger like I did over (my friend's) case last June. I feel caught between the two. The first is how I try to overcome the second.



Why are we called to try and bring justice and truth to bear if it doesn't work?

And I hear:



-- Fallen world. –



And I sense You say that this is a taste of how You feel.

Yet? How does that jive with Your sovereignty?

To say it is all in Your hands is not to say it all goes the way You want?



-- Kingdom come. Pray "Your will be done"

on earth... –



Oh. I guess it isn't.



-- No. No amount of "prayer" will "fix" it. –



...in total. only piece by piece. It will take a cataclysmic act of Yours to fix it.



-- Yes. –



but I'm so sick of it!



-- I know.

So am I..

It is repeated again and again the world over, in far worse cases. –



yet You've told me to put down my weapons, repeatedly. I don't understand how this fits.



-- Weapons of hate. –



oh. how do I do that? For hate is what I feel.



please help me. I feel so ugly and stained.

I had been trying so hard not to feel rebellious towards You over this because reacting the way I did the last time was horrible beyond words.



As I started to question why Tom's case came out like this, I was walking down the frozen food section of Safeway.



Suddenly, a song came on and hit me full in the face. It was as if You motioned to me to listen. I froze in my tracks in shock, thinking how could this ever apply to me, especially in the state I was in!



(I'm including the lyrics as best as I can remember them. Somehow, I feel they may also be for you. if not today, then tomorrow perhaps, or another day)



"Good night My angel, now it's time to go to sleep.

Put your questions away for another day

and know that I love you.

I have told you I would never leave you

and I will always be here right by you side

as close as your heart beat

as near as your next breath.

And My hope is that someday you will come to see

the depth of the river of love that flows towards you

out from this ancient heart of Mine."