A letter for when you are hurting

Have you been under a lot of attacks lately? When the enemy throws his fiery darts your way, you hold your shield high! But sometimes, when the attacks, rejection, and judgments are coming from people who claim to be believers, it hurts more than his usual arrows.

What do you do when fellow Christians are the ones throwing those darts at you?
What do you do when people who are supposed to love you, don't?

You can curl up into a little ball and cry, (which is understandable)... 
but then it's time to ask the Lord to pick you back up again.

A couple lines from a Natalie Grant song come to mind, 
"Hiding my heartache, 
will this glass house break? 
How much will they take before I'm empty?"

When people tear you down, eventually you can feel empty.

The Lord is the ONLY ONE that can fill you back up again. When you release your hurt and pain to Him, He takes it from you, and still has room to hold you. He wants to embrace you. 
And the way you feel an embrace from the God Almighty in His unseen form is to open your Bible and absorb His promises.

I will never leave you nor forsake you.

Trust in me, lean on Me, and I will make your paths straight.

I will comfort the afflicted, and give rest to the weary.

(Promises pulled from Deuteronomy 31:8, Proverbs 3:5-6, Matthew 11:28)

 
Then turn your palms up, close your eyes and praise Him. When you do this you will feel His presence. As tears course down your cheeks You will feel His love filling your spirit up again. 

With His love comes strength. And with that strength comes the ability to pray for your enemies, which is what we are called to do. With palms up, pray that the Lord would draw your enemies to Himself. You can pray for their salvation, or that they would return to Him. 
Then, before you know it, the tears have ceased, peace takes place of the pain, and you are ready to face another day.

The longer we avoid giving this to the Lord and letting Him heal us, the longer we stay in our little cave. And it's in the cave with your armor down, where the enemy has free reign. Depression is the gateway for the enemy to do his best work. Don't let yourself get that far. Pull yourself up, open your Bible, and lift your hands to the Lord.

The end of that song I quoted earlier goes like this,

"Hiding in my skin, broken from within
Unveil me completely
I'm loosening my grasp
There's no need to mask my frailty
Cause you see the real me
and you love me just as I am
Wonderful, beautiful is what you see
When you look at me."

You are His beautiful and wonderful child that He wants to protect and carry through the storms. When you let Him do that, He can then use you to pray for His other beautiful and wonderful children that are hurting (a.k.a your enemies). 
Who is praying for them if you aren't?

So let's give our pain to Him today. Let Him fill us completely with His love and grace so that we can continue to run the race before us and be used for His purposes. 
"Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us," Hebrews 12:1 (ESV)

Your call is so much bigger than yourself. Don't let your pain keep you from it. Let the Lord use the enemy's attacks to draw you closer to Him so you can do what He is asking you to do.

Armor up believer! There's kingdom work to be done.