Who I am

I just realized today a lesson in life that God has been trying to teach me for at least a year. It has been on of the hardest lessons I have had to learn because of the pain that I have begun to realize that this has caused in other people and the difficulties it has placed on every relationship in my life. I, like most people I think, had an image of who I was and also that of what I was not. I have built this image up over my life by the choices I have made and observing the people around me. We each have this perception of who we are and what we want to become, but for me I God has finally taken me to a place where I was ready to see the truth and not the fiction that I had constructed in my own mind of who I was. I am not a good, honest, faithful man of God as I had lead myself to believe that I was. I have come to realize that many of the things that I had convinced myself that I believed and held as truths had in fact only been part of this costume I had been stitching together over my life to convince myself I was more than I was. It has taken God 33 years and especially the last one to finally tear down, or to begin to rip the stitches loose from this facade that I can see inside and glimpse the real me. I am in fact a very selfish, arrogant, manipulative person. Three things that I had been trying to tell myself most of my life that I never was going to become, but in fact already am. I have used many cloaks of deception for myself and others to try and hide this truth excusing these realities through things like duty, honor, faith and even God. Trying to explain them away by shifting the focus away from who I actually am and trying to justify them through whatever was handy at the time. I have had to come to realize that I have been running and hiding from myself for much of my life and do not know now what to do with myself. I do not know who I am anymore, not that I ever really did because I was always hiding who I was and trying to pretend to be something I never could be as long as I was unwilling to open my eyes and really take a look in the mirror of reality. The constructed fantasy of who I was, was better than having to face the reality of what I wasn't. I have lived a life hidden and in fear of the truth, but if the Bible is true it is only in the truth that you can be set free. While it seems odd that the process of letting go of the chains that bind me to a false reality should be painful to let go of they are extremely so. The last two days have been a harsh and painful time of seeing the truth, and only a very small piece of it at that. It is that moment when you walk out of a pitch dark room that you have been sitting in trying to see for so long that the light of a single small candle flame is enough to make you wince in pain at the brightness of the light. god is so gracious in the fact that He only uses a small flicker of candle light to awaken our eyes to the truth and not the full glory of who He is that would burn us to ash at first glimpse because of the darkness that has been our world. I want to seek the forgiveness of all those that I have wronged and treated unkind over the years. Those that I have pressured and pushed, talked down to, tried to make you feel stupid or insignificant because I did not agree with you. I want those that feel I have treated them less than honorably to write to me so that I can seek your forgiveness and understand how my actions have been a curse upon those that I have treated unfairly. It took the courage of a few people in my life to help me understand some of the depths of my own sin in this area and my iron will that I have cast so harshly against other people and the damage that it may have caused. I want to thank those of you who have been willing to talk with me over the past couple days helping me see the truth of who I am and helping me understand better the depths of my own self disillusion and deception. It is a hard thing to take a look at your life and realize that you have not even been honest with yourself about who you are and the motivations for your own actions. I really believed that I was so different than who I was and that my desires were honest and sincere at least that is what I had convinced myself of. Thank you God for being patient and merciful in all things for those things that we do not deserve that you provide us with because you are compassionate. I hope that someday I can begin to better portray God in my own life than I have been able to do thus far and truly live an example of His son to the world I live in.