When Your Mess Becomes Your Message

I should have never let him in, but once he was in, it wasn’t long before I had realized I had made a mistake by opening the door to him.  This happens very often in our lives.  We let people or things into our space that have no business there.  When this happens, we then want God to put out the stuff we invited in.  Some things we let in will only leave when we put them out.  We may have let things in because we felt we could handle them or felt we could back out of it when we were ready.  Unfortunately, this is not as easily done as said.  “Why” we open ourselves up to situations can be just as detrimental to our psyche as “what” we open ourselves up to.  The messages we are taught about ourselves quite often dictate the kinds of behaviors we tolerate in relationships.  There may be situations where we have been called to a level of sacrifice to help save others, but this is usually an event designed to build our character, not to send us to a breaking point. 

Why do we repeatedly let people into our lives that have not earned the right to be in our lives?  We make this mistake over and over again.  People who continually open the door to takers will find themselves depleted of self-esteem and self worth with each person that comes in and goes out.  They will soon experience burn out and find themselves unable to respond in healthy wholesome ways to healthy wholesome people.  When we find ourselves consistently getting into situations with people who rob us of our internal values, remember the constant in all those relationships is “we,” “me,” “I.”  We must realize change starts with having enough courage to tell people who are destroying us to leave our lives and having the boldness to shut the door so they cannot come back in.  The decision to close the door to the trespassers is the first step to being liberated.  These invaders are trying to draw its victims into a trap that will enslave us for a lifetime.  What if I had not been insistent about that young man leaving that evening?  The outcome would have definitely been that I would spend a good part of the remainder of my life regretting having let him into the house in the first place.  How often do we look back in retrospect at the decisions we have made and realize we invited the trouble into our lives by opening a door to these dramatic experiences?  We are gripped with the reality of accepting a great deal of the blame for why things turned out the way they did.  We are not as cautious as we should be when we make decisions involving ourselves.  We give everyone else so much advice about what they should and should not do.  All the while, we make one poor judgment after another when it comes to our own lives and we end up having pop-up reminders of the decisions we made that landed us in our present reality.  Always remember there is no mistake or poor decision that is final.  As long as we have life and strength, we can speak to those issues and tell them to go and not allow them to regain access into our lives.

Sarah was a beautiful woman who had a rich husband, servants at her disposal, and favor from God.  She had been promised to be the womb through which God would make Abraham a great nation.  Perhaps it was her haste to see this come to pass, or her doubts that God was able to keep His word that drove Sarah to come up with a plan to have her husband sleep with her slave girl to see this promise come to pass.  Even though Sarah’s idea sounded like a good one, it was Sarah’s idea of a blessing, not God’s.  Sarah lived to see the day when she would regret having given the invitation for Hagar to be a surrogate mother.  This privilege of surrogate motherhood had opened a door of opportunity for Hagar to receive a status she was not sent into that home to have.  She might have been carrying the baby of a very wealthy man of God, but she was still a bondservant.  When Sarah began treating her like a slave, Hagar felt she was being mistreated and ran away feeling betrayed and unappreciated in her pregnant state.  After all, she had only done what her mistress had told her to do.  The relationship between the two women was now a complicated one.  A rivalry now existed between these two women that had not been there before the pregnancy.  Sarah had begun to feel her place in the home was being compromised because of the attention Hagar now needed due to her pregnant state.  Sarah’s brutality toward Hagar caused her to run away from the home and God told Hagar to go back to the house.  When Sarah did conceive and birth the promised seed, there was a war in that home between the half brothers.  When Sarah saw this abuse of her son going on, she told Abraham, to put this woman out of the house.  God confirmed to Abraham that it was time for Hagar to leave.  This time, it was not that Hagar wanted to leave but that Sarah had put this woman out of the house.