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Before I write this I feel like I must add a disclaimer before you read any further. 

Disclaimer:  I love my family I really do, but we don’t get each other.  This is not meant to be anything negative towards them and it is in no way is my intent to speak ill of them.  This is a post that has been lurking under the surface scratching to get out since I started this blog, but I have fought against writing it.  My family does not know about this blog, and even if they did I wouldn't tell them where to find it so they could read it.  Denial is the family crest, I would probably get a serious tongue lashing for embarrassing the family with some of the things I have written about, and then I would probably be disowned.  I have exposed the family secret, brought it to the surface, and my mother would never again be able to show her face in public.  But this is the family God chose for me, He knew what He was doing.

My family and I don’t get each other, we used to get each other but since becoming a Christian four years ago there has been an elephant in the room trying to stampede its way out.

I have often wondered from time to time in these last four years why I couldn’t have been born into a nice Christian home, a home where people “get me” with parents who would look at my current situation and build me up through their prayers and faith rather than tear me down in their doubts and fears, my family is the ultimate in warriors of worry and doubt.  I am not close with any of my extended family, in fact I haven’t spoken to many of them in years, my small circle includes me, my mom, my sister and my nephew. 

I don’t blame my mom for succumbing to her fears and often times becoming paralyzed in them, she has not had any easy life, in fact far from it, but that is a story for another time.  She has lived all sixty some years of her life in a pit of fear and worry, like I said I don't blame her for that, but there are times when it takes every bit of strength the Lord gives me to hold back my anger at her for not wanting to change it, for not wanting to be free of the bondage that so often ensnares her.  She lives by sight and not by faith, she sees the recent tragedies of the collapse of our economy,  9/11, the earthquake in Haiti, the Tsunami in Japan, the tornadoes and flooding in the south as God unleashing his anger on humanity, He is getting revenge on us. My mom has lived in anger, fear, worry and doubt for so long that it is her normal, what is not normal to her is me.

I have often been driven to my knees before God after a conversation with her.  My situation is dire at the moment, God cannot save me now, I need to put that nonsense away, get my head out of the clouds and start doing more than praying to a God who clearly has no interest in helping me.  I feel I must add here, I am doing something, I am sending out resumes and filling out applications, I am not sitting on the couch waiting for a job to come knocking at my door.  well, ok, I have had some serious couch potato days, but those days only make up about 1% maybe 2% of my time.

I can’t make my mom believe, I can only live my life as a testimony before her, which right now is not much of a testimony, at least not in her eyes.  She will believe when her brand of justice is dispensed on the pedophiles and drug dealers of the world, when God does things the way she thinks they should be done, she will believe when God makes sense according to her. She refuses to open her mind to the possibility that God’s ways are higher and better than hers, that He is control, that He knows what He is doing even when what He is doing doesn’t make sense.

Yes she has seen the change in me she has even commented on it but she is still living by the sight of my circumstances.  I feel her nervousness when she is around me the pacing back and forth and the way she wrings her hands in fear of what is going to become of me. My mother’s words often tear me down when there is very little left to tear down.  I know she doesn’t mean it, that is her normal she doesn’t know any different and has no interest in knowing any different, she has no interest in changing.  Her back has become so numb to the sack of stones she has strapped to it that she doesn’t feel it nestled in the grooves anymore, to take it off now would mean she would have to adjust to a new way of walking and the words change and new are not part of her vocabulary.

It is easier to live in her controlled world of mediocrity than put forth the effort to live in the amazing, that would require change.  She lives in the safety of what she can control and giving up control would be like death to her, she white knuckles it, has a firm grip on it and refuses to let go, if she can’t control it she wants nothing to do with it.

I have asked God to show up BIG, really BIG, to do something so beyond comprehension that there is no way that I had anything at all to do with it, so that perhaps maybe a tiny seed of belief will take root in my mother’s heart.  She believes in God, she believes Jesus died on the cross, but I also think she believes that it is something that happened 2000 years ago and has very little to do with her life now.

Perhaps it will be through me that He reaches them, it seems a little haughty and prideful to even say that, but it is not out of an exaggerated sense of self, I don’t think of myself as the “chosen one” I am simply the one who said yes that day on the bridge, when God spoke to me so clearly it were as if He were standing right before me, when He asked me if I would follow Him and when I said yes I put my life in His hands, I gave Him complete and controlling interest.

My mom and I have had many ups and downs over the years, and our relationship is good right now but it has been through a lot trial and error.  I have learned where the line in the sand is drawn with her, I don’t talk about God around her anymore, that is like taking a trip through the desert with the Israelites, going around the same mountain and getting no where, but rather trust that God is speaking unspoken words through me to her, maybe one day she will decide a forge a relationship with Him, but only He knows if that will ever happen.