Living hell

Dec. 5th, 2021

I try to be real and not just “look right”. So this is for me more than anything… but read if you wish.

This feels incredibly risky to post and super vulnerable, please tread gently, I’m feeling the broken.

I had a dream last night that when I woke up I felt so much warmth and love that I tried so hard to go back into the dream but I couldn’t.
I was with a group ladies that I knew in the dream but not in real life. We were having like a spiritual retreat of some sort. There was deep closeness and kindred spirit within our relationships. During our time together the Holy Spirit (God) began to move and we were all sharing such beautiful truths from the Lord to and for each other. Our hearts were so touched and I felt my grief and longings being so fulfilled. I felt something that in real life I haven’t felt in quite some time.
The longing and reality of seeing and feeling Jesus, it was so real there.
I woke up and felt grieved that it wasn’t “real”, and that I could only think, dream, pray for these things in my real life right now.
I don’t think I feel that because God isn’t doing something He should, or because He doesn’t love me. I think I feel it because I have hurt and in some ways that hurt has separated me from others and God.
Marc and I haven’t been to church in over a year. We spent 2020 in living hell because well, life was hell for us that year. We were beyond broken and we needed the body of Christ to reach out and they didn’t. They probably couldn’t. We needed to reach out to the body of Christ but we couldn’t. We wanted it, but our broken state wouldn’t allow us anything but surviving.
So we’ve been living in a desert, both in our hearts and in the community. We feel dead in places and we feel jaded towards people. Church people. We know this is mostly an us issue and not a them issue, but we haven’t yet found ways to move on from it all.
We still long for community again and I pray for the ability to trust again but we haven’t known how to break free from our brokenness. It’s been a lot both with my mental health crisis last year, and in our broken church relationships that seemed to come to light because of it all. We know we are all broken vessels, we know it’s all we can expect from the church in a lot of ways and I think knowing that is part of what has hurt the most. We wished it was different and that we could have been embraced in our brokenness, isn’t that what the church is suppose to do/be? This isn’t our first experience with broken church experiences.
Maybe we put too much stake into the people and not just God Himself.
It does bring me to the question of what do I give to others in the church, as a broken vessel and lately it’s been nothing.
So there you have… the very broken state of my spiritual life. I love Jesus, I love Him so much. I’m finding it hard to love and trust the broken people He loves. I know I need more of His heart, and less of my own human flawed heart. I am praying for His help to allow healing and restoration both in my relationship with Him and also my relationship with others.
I am most definitely one of those broken people I myself find so hard to love.