When I kept it all inside,
Psalm 32 : 3 – 5 (The Message)
my bones turned to powder,
my words became daylong groans.
The pressure never let up;
all the juices of my life dried up.
Then I let it all out;
I said, “I’ll come clean about my failures to God.”
Suddenly the pressure was gone—
my guilt dissolved,
my sin disappeared
I am intimately familiar with keeping everything bottled up inside.
I grew up keeping my cards close to my chest at all times. My thinking was that no one will understand me. Worse than that, that no one was willing to listen.
And so I lived my life holding everyone at arm’s length. Everyone got a version of me that I was willing to let them see.
When you live like that for too long, you begin to think that you are sufficient unto yourself. No one else can get in. No one else is worth it. No one else can help.
It then turns into a perverse form of self confidence. Hubris. I was unknowingly sabotaging myself, and any chance I had of a fully realised, purpose-filled life.
Did it all suddenly turn into rainbows and sunshine when I became a Christian? Reader, it did not. Just scroll through the entries of January and February to see how very imperfect my life turned out to be.
Yet somehow, even in shaded, jaded, scratched, and shattered remnants, I can truly say that opening it all up to God is a revelation.
It takes a certain amount of strength to be vulnerable. You are breaking down walls, cutting through hardened plaster; cemented behaviours and attitudes formed after years of rigid self control.
And I’m not yet done. There are still habits I have yet to break, walls that I haven’t totally opened up.
But knowledge is power, especially wisdom that comes from God. And knowing that all it takes is a call for help, a cry of surrender – this makes all the difference.
