I am both amazed and startled at the clarity in which I can still feel things and remember things that happened over 3 decades ago. I cannot help to compare that to the way I sometimes struggle to recall the major details of a conversation I had just an hour ago. I think the difference is that there is an emotional connection to the first incidents that doesn't exist in the second.
I can't kid myself about this stuff, those memories are literally seared into my conscienceness by violent, traumatic action never to diminish or be forgotten. Then they are incorporated almost physically into my being because they have been relived and dreamed of over and over again.
There is hardly a moment in over more then three decades where I haven't been confronted in one way or another with some memory or fleeting glimpse of that horrific event. It was never far from my reach, almost as if it was hovering, just out of physical sight, yet I always knew it was there and was never going to leave me.
That is the most frightening aspect of this whole living nightmare...I know in my heart that it is always going to be part of me until the very end of time. I can't out-live it, out-run it...I couldn't kill it, drown it in a sea of alcohol or drug-it away...nothing came even remotely close to diminishing it's impact on me, even temporarily...it was to a degree...always there, haunting me.
I think that was the most powerful and awe-inspiring aspect of my finding GOD...from that moment on that experience, though still a powerful, painful memory never again completely controlled me. There has been a peace...far beyond my ability to explain or understand..that settled down over me and has never since diminished or gone away.
People use the term "saved" to describe becoming a Christian...well that is exactly how I felt and still feel: SAVED...I am saved! Saved from destruction, saved from damnation, from fear, heart-break, chaos and the knowledge that I am always going to be alone. I discovered that was a myth...a terrible lie that I had been telling myself all those years.
I didn't need to DIE ALONE and I wasn't going to have to either...all because I had been SAVED...eternally SAVED. And I haven't FELT alone, not for one single second since the moment I asked JESUS to be my Lord and Savior. I can't explain it and funny thing...I don't feel compelled to even try to explain it today...I just know.
(Painting by Claude Monet)
