Childhood Hurts and Slights

Things happen with children growing up that are hard to forgive and sometimes impossible to forget completely. The Lord can help with them. They are a part of children's lives because they lived them. The best thing to do is to study the Bible, pray and talk with someone about it who genuinely cares about your happiness and joy in the Lord and not about finding out the latest gossip to spread around. Also, avoid those who are more like cheerleaders to encourage your anger and hurt, and who recommend behaviors and talk that are geared to revenge rather than cleansing and healing of your own self.

Please read 22:24 & 25. Then, have prayer together and make a covenant to pray together about it

Everyone has at some time had something remind them of some past injustice, slight or hurt. When it occurs in childhood, it grows and grows for there with it was also fear and the threat to one too little to know how to defend oneself. By the time the child is adult enough to realize it, the emotions and reactions are thoroughly engrained in the mind, heart and personality. Memories of that often bring flashbacks to old feelings and behaviors as quickly as a match to gasoline. By then it is too late to stop the reactions. So, in training oneself to new behaviors, one must decide before such occasions arise to think, and to be trite, to count to ten and make oneself remember all the new thoughts and actions one is trying to learn. As time goes on, before one knows it, one's reactions have changed and many times the volatile emotions bomb has been defused.

Now here is the good part. The Lord will always be there, present in an instant to help you gain control of the thoughts, actions and the whole situation. However, you must remember to ask, or Satan will jump right in. He will take his place in it and cause you to say and do things that can do damage that can never be undone, not to the other so much even, as to your own life and happiness.

Please read Ephesians 4:26 & 27. Do whatever you can to right the situation, then in prayer put the rest in the Lord's hands, so it will not burn and consume you inside like a heap of coals that will burn up any good you could enjoy. See James 1:19

You must not blame yourself for the situation with your parent, relative or friend when it happened when you were a little child. The only blame there can be is if you do not work it out in your own life with the Lord. There are many things each of us would like to change, but facts are facts. You have to just look at what the facts are with your relationship with that person. Much of the time the others will not change their attitudes, particularly when they are old. The first step is to take care of your own self, so you can see clearly how to deal with the situation. If you were a little child, you did not cause those attitudes in the person. It was and is the responsibility of the parent or other to deal with their part in the matter. That leaves for you prayer, getting your heart and mind straight in facing the facts, doing what you can do that is your place to do and releasing the rest into the hands of your Heavenly Father in prayer.

If you are an adult now, spiritually speaking, and you have been saved, you are a child of the King. You have more power than anyone around you or in the situation unless they, too, humble themselves before the Lord. The way you wield that power is to, in a prayerful manner, seek the Lord's help in making sure you are on the right track in your thinking and actions.

Often as parents grow old, these old wounds open up where they have been festering for years. Then the parent gets ill and needs assistance. They may be cantankerous and ill-tempered. They may be far away where you are not able to go. However, if you pray, stand by and assist with decisions the best you can, then you can get through it well and you will grow and rejoice in doing good. If you are dealing with siblings and things are not done the way you think they should be, then you must release that into the arms of your Heavenly Father. Remember this, too. If you want to do something and you are supposed to do it, then the Lord will provide a way. If you want to do something and try as you might everything you can and nothing works out, then you can be assured that the Lord has said it is not for you to do. He is a reasonable God. Why? He lived here in the person of His Only Son. He made us and He lived among us. He knows how humans live, think, act, work and how they either believe and serve, or reject Him and go their own way. He knows there are some things over which we have little or no control. We must relax in that fact, as a blessing to us, and not as a never-ending grief. All we have is the present in which to work and help anyone. God is the only one who can, all at once, see from the beginning to the end, so we must rely on Him to fill in for us where we cannot be. He is omnipresent. We are singly present wherever our bodies are except through prayer that moves the hand of God.

I will be praying that those of you who have similar burdens will feel them lifted from your shoulders. You cannot be all to everyone and you cannot change everyone. Just live your faith and love for the Lord before your family. The past is past, so throw off that old moth-eaten cloak full of holes where hurts and grief have eaten away at it. Ask the Lord to bury it and forever remind you that you have a cloak of righteousness given to you by the Lord Himself. Once you came to accept Him as your Lord and Saviour, you became a new creature - no longer bound by the ties of human parents, though you love them, or long to have had good parents. You are a child of the Heavenly Father on a great mission while on the way Home to live with Him forever.

Anger is described in the Bible as burning. Not only does it consume love and beauty in life, but it consumes massive amounts of time that could be used to produce a wonderful crop of good works to glorify the Lord and to serve Him. After you have worked on all that has wasted parts of your time and life and find God's way to handle it, please do not forget to thank Him for the experience. Through it you will be able to help others in like situations and serve Him by drawing people to Him and His ways.

See I Thessalonians 5:15-18

From the Old Testament: Numbers 6:24-26

"The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace."

This is my prayer for you. God bless you.

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