… and Love awoke.
El Señor es mi Pastor, nada me falta.
Let’s go further back, for my sake—and yours.
I have successfully recounted until today bits and pieces of my past here, sometimes in anger, trying to bring every other person whom I wanted to fight to their knees, at least with my words. Other times I have cried over my keypad, just trying to make sense of my broken heart, trying to call, hoping someone would listen.
I have written in fear, too.
Then I started writing to release everything I could, every other soul I would’ve wanted to see destroyed under my fist, just because I got to know theirs. I tried to stop fighting and began releasing.
Releasing, and learning. Then I began forgiving. I even tried to bless them, most recently.
And all of a sudden, I have found myself being able to breathe again; play, laugh, think, eat, and move. These are the things God creates when He heals… when we’ve accepted the dust up to such point as to know that—if by His word He was to end you—you would gladly die under His mighty hand.
He killed me, and brought me back to life.
Usually He does this when He wants to speak to—and through—us. He has spoken through many prophets and angels, kings, queens, and other people who have come to know Him. And He has spoken through me, to myself, even, many times. What I had never been able to see, was the nature of my existence.
For I know your manifold transgressions and your mighty sins: they afflict the just, they take a bribe, and they turn aside the poor in the gate from their right.
Amos 5:12
Porque sabido he vuestras muchas rebeliones, y vuestros grandes pecados: que afligen al justo, y reciben cohecho, y á los pobres en la puerta hacen perder su causa.
Amós 5:12
I’ve tried fighting. I’ll try Love this time.
I have spent a good three or four weeks cursing people inside my mind, just craving to utter the words of hatred out loud—to see them fall. I know I could. I’ve only stopped because I fear Christ and would never want to do something in His name I wasn’t meant to.
Doing things you were never meant to…
let ‘s begin.
Rain is falling now, so come.
Doing evil is never the right thing, but what can people do if they know themselves better than others?
I suppose they cannot help it.
It’s raining now.
How I’ve cried, and now I’ll mend. Even now.
Picture three sisters. 13, 12, and 6.
Picture their parents, taking one trip like others in their family got to do thousands of times—just one.
Picture this, the rest of their family comes back and they, thinking they had a chance to enjoy something… stay a little longer. When would they have another opportunity like that again? Their girls were fine. Mom just wanted to see London, or Spain, and she just wanted to feel something was hers. Hers and dad’s. We were fine.
And then, her youngest sister, a woman older than thirty by then… decided she couldn’t be fine. How dare she? Mom’s youngest sister had a personal chauffeur. She had everything by then—a home, a kid, a husband, and a thriving business. A personal business, by the way.
My mom even tried to ask her for a job once, it must have been around that time, a little before, I think. Hence the pulsing truth around my home whenever I tell you we’ve always struggled financially, it has always been God coming through for us in that department that we can live, eat, dress—and everything else. Why, no younger sister would help mom, you see, she answered to moms request that time, as follows: if she were to be robbed by anyone, it would not be by her sister (my mom)—so no, no. She’d let a stranger rob her, in her stead. Hence, the job would go to someone else.
Mom has never robbed anyone and I know for a fact her younger sister has, up to the point to being called out by her own attorney ‘Not to be a thief’, years back.
But, let’s return to my parents in Europe now. Here too wouldn’t said youngest sister let mom rob her. Not her time, not her patience, not her anything. I was just a kid, and supposedly an ill behaved one, and she, mom’s sister, was the one caring for us.
Caring.
She was staying at our house. Using our bathrooms, mom and dad’s bed, starting smokes in our kitchen, smelling mom’s perfumes and going through her every drawer, but we were the ill behaved ones. I was just six, and shouldn’t have cared.
But she scared away mom’s service lady, whom I loved. She was a good young woman who never returned after hearing the yelling woman that came to care for us during out parents trip.
Moms younger and only sister.
Her kid even taunted our dog until she fought back. At least she did, when we never could.
When her sister got bored of using mom’s things and having to still pretend at care, her lousy one, she called her own mom. My grandmother—and yelled some more, I would think now.
Mom got the memo soon after—they were separating her ill behaved kids.
And she did. 13 went to our eldest uncle’s house, and I don’t know where 12 and 6 (me) would have ended had it not been by The Spirit of our Lord awakening my mom who called and begged a distant aunt on my father’s side to take us in. She did.
I’ve always dreaded the memory because being an adult now I know that’s how kids get lost forever here in my country. My mom blames herself, and dad… well you already know he just left us seven years later.
We were kids and it turns out the one who stole in the end, was mom’s youngest sister, because she still inhabited our house even after she kicked us out. Because that’s what she did. Kick us our of our own home. Mere kids.
Jane Austen would have written a much better tale after my recount than I ever could.
I’ve always been grateful for my parents having been alive and just travelling, had they died… you can guess what would’ve happened, right? My middle sister and I were already out of the picture and that woman was living in our home.
Thank God He brought my parents back. Even when dad left shortly after.
I suppose there’s people who lose, when the devil speaks… there’s always people who lose.
Let’s fast forward to another day, one not so old.
I must have been twenty years old.
One of my cousins on that wretched mom’s side of the family—let’s call her Dom—was too sad because our Grandmother hated her too. She told me she pitied me, you know? Because she at least, had her family on her mother’s side. That grandma did love her, and me, and my sisters… we had no one else. Only the one side filled of hatred toward us. Supposedly, Dom had come to see this light, she said, by having spoken with her own mother.
I forgot the conversation shortly after. What good could it do me? So I just forgot—until the day before yesterday.
God brought it to me clear as day.
I just remembered, and something in me grieved. Now I see, I see as I couldn’t back then and it was clear. Dom must have spoken about me and my sisters with said pity more than once.
But Dom was very ill behaved too, just as her mother and the other woman from the first memory I wrote, mom’s younger sister.
Wretched lot always knew, better than ourselves, everything we lacked and they used it against us.
They took, they took, they took—until they couldn’t.
Dom laughed in my face one too many times, mistreated every opportunity she had, and she knew I had no one else to run toward. And she laughed even so.
Her mother was the one who brought—every time—the court process server to our house, not too far back, when her husband—mom’s middle brother—started the legal war for my Grandmother’s money. Well, it was Granddad’s but I wont speak of this here. Every time the court process server served us the legal papers I felt like I’d die of fear. Fear for my mom, because they all knew what Grandpa had wanted, but he was dead enough for them to bring desolation for some pennies extra in their accounts. Dom’s mother brought fear to the door of my house, then, every time. And she relished every time, I’d bet.
Even when my mom had served her as a crying shoulder whenever she wanted to speak about her husband’s mistress who lives nearby.
Ah yes, the nature of my existence. Has anyone considered that the poor the powerful break at the gate of the city could speak one day?
Maybe that’s been me so far.
They all knew, they all knew what we were.
They knew!
And they turned us aside, laughing and saying: love won at last.
See, when you look down on someone, you think you can break them and escape unscathed. And so you do. They did.
They always did.
Before dad left, and especially joyful when he left as well, stomping all over our heads and hearts—even minds—in the process.
And there was when my heart grieved, the day before yesterday and since. Because I got to see—them. Them, no filters, no disguise, I saw their rotten hearts. Just as the ones Amos wrote by our Lord’s command.
This is love, because I’m not writing to heal, nor to fight, but to bless.
I bless them, for they’ve been completely undressed before our eyes and we don’t keep doubts anymore, that what we see now, them—given over to the emptiness of their own ways—is their pay, even if there’s more to come.
But this isn’t about them—not this time.
The Lord knows I called myself one of those poor, not only poor in money, maybe not even, but poor:
Desolate.
Forsaken.
Lonely.
Broken.
Fatherless.
And mom, a widow. An isolated woman with three kids, women too. Women now, but we were once just kids.
A widow with her three girls.
They beat those—
until they stopped breathing.
They have, and awakened now, the One who saw and was disgusted by them.
He called us alive and pretty, desirable—His women, not alone nor desolate.
So no… out of love I sound the alarm as a watchman, and nothing more. They erred in their ways and in their hearts but I let them go, we all do. Into our God’s hands, come repentance or haughtiness—
but it’s not about them. The rest of our lives.
Not them, them, them—me.
Us.
“Thou hast thrust sore at me that I might fall: But the LORD helped me. The LORD is my strength and song, And is become my salvation. The voice of rejoicing and salvation is in the tabernacles of the righteous: The right hand of the LORD doeth valiantly. The right hand of the LORD is exalted: The right hand of the LORD doeth valiantly. I shall not die, but live, And declare the works of the LORD.”
Psalm 118:13-17 KJV
They didn’t break us further than He let, He bared His arm to protect, and we can be free now.
So, it is me I bless now. And my mom, and my sisters. And the rest of our family living here, inside our walls. As He’s always done.
I lack nothing, not even everything they know—I don’t. We lack nothing.
Because Jesus Christ, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever, became our all.
-SFTS
PD.
I know you’re reading, so I bless you once again. IN my heart first, because cursing in our hearts, it would seem, is cursing out loud, but I bless you with my lips also. And with these hands that write.
You should honor Him if you say He’s your God too, before it’s too late.
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