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Summer is always a hard time for me,.....spiritually. I had been passing through a spell of careless indifference, where I quickly found myself overcome by a multitude of weaknesses, sins actually. But foremost of these were lust, laziness, egoism......
I soon found myself going through troubled times. Inexplicably, I was experiencing incident after incident, involving various people, which left me in a turbulent mood. Apparently, everything seemed to be suddenly working against me. Everybody appeared constantly determined to contradict me. I could almost feel in the air that some hidden force was determined to upset my whole life....
I was deeply troubled. I had lost my peace. I was angry most of the time with almost everybody........I couldn't take much more of this.........
So I prayed........I prayed as I had seldom done before, because I felt I needed relief.......I felt as if I needed to be set free of something that was restricting me.
And, sure enough, I got my answer. I could sense a strong light shining into my life.......what had gone wrong ?
In my careless ways, in my sin, my lust, laziness, egoism, there is an underlying state of mind......that implies a belief that everything exists for me, for my own use,.....for my own and exclusive satisfaction......Now this is serious.....!
In this frame of mind, I am self-centered....everything has to revolve around my being, everything belongs to....ME.....
I am everything, I am king,...the centre of the whole universe........I AM GOD...!
In this condition, I realised, I was soon coming across situations, persons, who contradicted this profound idolatry. These seemed to be stating vociferously that I WAS NOT God.....
So I reacted. I rebelled, I could not tolerate any contradictions. I would not allow any upsets to my plans,...to my vision........I would not allow anyone to break this image of this god that I had made of myself.......
I was in Hell....
I realise how important it is to pray,...and to hope,....even when you are in hell.! For God heard my pleas and answered my prayers. And all I needed was His Light to shine in my darkness.......so that I could see.
What I saw was .....that those seemingly harmless sins often committed without being allowed to show through an innocuous, perhaps pious, façade.....were in actual fact taking their toll.....for, in reality, they were serious sins deeply anchored in Pride,....in wanting to usurp God's rightful place in my life...as the One and only Lord......
And the light that God sent forth into the dark, putrid dungeon of my heart, brought about the healing that I desperately needed. All I required was enough light to realise what was causing everything to go seemingly berserk in my life.
So now, I can thank God and praise Him for allowing all those mishaps to come my way. For allowing all those persons to contradict me. For allowing everything to work in my favour, so that I could come to realise that everything was not quite so well with me, that, in fact, something was profoundly wrong with my life, and so I could be led to pray for mercy, for help, ........to be saved.
Any God does save........
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