What is Your Delilah?

One thing becoming glaringly clear to me over the past 20+ years is that I have more than one Delilah. What is a Delilah? It is the thing we run to for comfort and escape, the things that “own” our emotions until we feel better.

Since I was a kid, my escape was day dreaming wonderful stories. When I wasn’t day dreaming, I was watching I Dream of Jeannie or That Girl. Ok, I just dated myself; but you get my point, right? Now, I have discovered the beauty of Netflix. It is always there for me. It always has the right thing to say and makes me feel better. My other escape is sugar and carbs. The combination of Netflix, potato chips and ice cream is a virtual comfort coma.

During the decades of stale grief and painful seasons, I managed to back myself into a cocoon of comfort that brought physical, mental and creative lethargy with fluffy puffiness (that would be the sugar and carbs). It was easy to see what my sugar/carb addiction was doing to me, but it wasn’t as obvious what was happening to my soul.

One day I stopped writing. Another day I stopped day dreaming. Then I stopped challenging myself mentally to read quality books. I stopped living and started surviving.

Eventually, I stopped praying.

Netflix, sugar and carbs became my worship, prayer, and Bible reading. Binge-watching shows became my go-to for problem solving. Sugar became my dopamine. Chips became a vegetable. (I’m still holding on to the last one…potatoes ARE a vegetable. Baby steps, Dana. Baby steps.)

Basically, I’d given my wounds over to my Delilah and I was suffocating. My creative voice was silenced and my back-side was growing.

As I climb out of the stale grief and allow the Lord to replace Delilah, my gifts are yawning and stretching like a cat unfurling from an afternoon nap in the sun. The suffocation of merely surviving left me gasping in my soul crying out “I want to live!” It has taken seasons of fasting and prayer to climb out of this dark hole. It didn’t just happen. So be encouraged, dear one. And be ignited. The enemy wants nothing more than for us to be unhealthy, distracted, and resting our head in Delilah’s lap.

It’s time to lift the head off Delilah’s lap and walk in our gifting. Living is worth the sacrifice!

I still stay potato chips are a vegetable. 

Whose Eyes do You Use?

There are so many things we grieve without realizing we are grieving. Maybe that is why my grief went undetected for so long. The next cavern the Lord brought to light took me by surprise, yet it really was at the core of so much self-perception. It was time to flush out the stale grieving of my self-worth.

Truth be told, this has taken me months to work through and the Lord and I just recently finished this “therapy session.”

As with all good co-dependents, self-worth is intrinsically knitted to how others see and treat us. It is connected to how we feel honored/dishonored or valued/devalued by others. True to my own humanity, I superimposed these things onto how I thought God saw me.

No wonder I was so messed up!

Humans make conscious decisions every day to honor or dishonor through word or action and when we superimpose other’s actions onto our very loving Heavenly Father, it grieves His heart. In reality, all of us start as broken pieces trying to find where we fit. Broken pieces cannot give complete, accurate composites of anything! Even in the light of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, my myopic view of my self-worth was just as fractured and broken as the people whose eyes I was looking through.

This was not going to heal until I got my eyes off man and my eyes focused on HIS view of me. During all the years I’ve spent in prayer and worship, I always pictured myself leaning on Jesus’ chest for a hug or crawling onto my Abba’s lap. I never, NEVER looked into the eyes of my Jesus within my heart-imagination. 

Perhaps I was afraid because I thought I would see my mother’s perfectionism, or my dad’s alcohol-laden stare. Yet, how could I know how Jesus sees me…really SEES me, unless I look into His eyes and see His love for me reflected there. It took courage, why, I still am not sure. Perhaps it is because you truly share heart-intimacy when you look upon your love’s countenance when they gaze into your eyes.

But I chose that day to look upon His face. And it changed my life forever.

Shame

I will never forget the news footage and pictures of victims running through the streets like phantoms from a horror movie when the twin towers fell in 2001. White ash and debris clung to their anguished faces, their clothes devoid of any color but that of the soot and dust.

Spiritually, I could identify with these precious souls. For over a decade it felt I was climbing out of the ruins of a life with ash and soot clinging to me like wet garments; or wet grave cloths as it were.

I couldn’t shake this caked-on feeling in my soul, so I asked the Holy Spirit to show me what was clinging to me after all these years. I’d forgiven. I’d let go. I’d even gone through deliverance (now that takes commitment!). Yet in my soul I felt sticky residue. After a time of listening, I sensed the phrase, “stale shame.”

So I guess this means that stale grief has a cousin!

There are two kinds of shame:

·    Well-placed shame (or conviction). This is due to one’s sin or wrong doing; an appropriate response followed by correcting the wrong.

·    Mis-placed shame. This happens when we take upon ourselves shame that has nothing to do with our own actions or sin; a dishonoring of God that we did not have a hand in. This is self-centered shame.

Apparently, while in the rubble of my life, I’d donned grave cloths of shame and they became stale. I read somewhere that much of what makes us feel shame is not that we dishonor God by our actions, but that we failed to give the appearance that other people admire.

Ouch.

Misplaced shame happened to Jesus and to Paul. The crowd called Jesus a temple-destroyer. They called Paul mad when he defended himself in court and even called him an enemy. In other words, I was in good company.

The Lord gave me a prescription for this shame – but you will have to read on in the next post for it. (Marketing 101, make them come back for more).

”O Lord you brought my soul up from the grave;

You have kept me alive that I should not go down to the pit.”

Psalms 30:3

The Problem with Locusts

During these cavernous months, it seemed like I was climbing out of a life-time of darkness. When the Lord shined His light of Truth in the shadowy recesses, I didn’t recognize myself! This is what stale grief and keeping parts of your soul in darkness can do. It steals part of who we are. Kind of like the locusts in the Bible. 

“So I will restore to you the years the swarming locust has eaten,

the crawling locust, consuming locust, the chewing locust… .” Joel 2:25.

The Arabs call locusts the “darkeners of the sun.” I found some interesting correlations with these buzzing darkeners:

Biblical Truth	Correlation
They occur in great number and literally obscure the sun (Exodus 10:15, Judges 6:5).	They block Truth (Son).
They make a fearful noise in flight (Joel 2:5).	They distract.
They enter dwellings and devour woodwork (Joel 2:9-10).	Consume destiny and gifts.
Water and sea destroys them. (Exodus 10:19)	Anointing breaks the yoke.

Did you know locusts cannot guide their own flight? They are literally at the mercy of the wind. So I proclaim this day that these locusts that have obscured the Light of Truth in my life are at the mercy of the Wind of the Holy Spirit.

When the locust is blown by His Wind, we are promised new grain (provision), new wine (joy), and new oil (a new anointing), and we will be satisfied (Joel 2:19). I am so grateful that God’s truth and glory brings life where there is death.

For more information on the Biblical meaning of the locust: http://www.biblemeanings.info/Words/Animal/Locust.htm