Here is my sworn testimony to the righteousness, the goodness, the glory and the reality of the Holy Father, The Holy Spirit and the works of the Son in my life.
I was born to a mother who soon fell ill to schizophrenia.
My father accused her of adultery and claimed that I was not his legitimate heir and left before I was two years old.
Battling against madness and affliction she raised me with a heart of Love.
I never knew that she was diagnosed with schizophrenia when I was a child, and the memories I have are scant but I do remember that she filled me with a deep love that a mother does to her child.
When i was around 5-6 years old my mother became so unwell and tortured that she eventually committed suicide in our family home, and to this day I remember waking up and finding her dead body.
I was handed over to the guardianship of my grandmother and grandfather who were bitterly unhappily married and for good reason. Although the did their best to maintain a visage of a marriage it really was not.
There was no spirit of honor their. My grandfather was living a lie, going through the motions of a dead marriage whilst conducting secret affairs that lasted many decades and I feel that my nan, whilst she was certain of some of the first, had horrible suspicions about the latter.
Later to my agony, after he died from a languishing death due to leaukeamia.
I had always looked up to him and respected him, he seemed to be a strong, proud, solid man that had time to tell me the simple truths and acted as a protector and guide for me and all of this discovery along with his recent death anguished me terribly.
At university I often smoked, snorted or swallowed recreational drugs and had a heart open to ideas of sexual promiscuity.
All my life I have believed in Love, and I believed in justice and redemption but I never believed in the need for God, or his existence, or that of the reality of Jesus Christ and in all my growing life my parental figures said that God couldn't exist or the terrible things that had happened to them in their life would not have befallen them.
In my second year at university the drugs, the stress, my early childhood traumas, my recent experiences with the loss of my grandfather, both his spiritual and bodily identity to me, started to take their toll.
I started to fall prey to paranoia myself and spent several long months slowly falling into the pit of madness, tormented by voices and delusions I was striving every day for [as i thought] my life and my survival. My delusions abounded and multiplied. At one time i was the one from the matrix, another i was in mental communication with a sect of buddhists, another that I had telepathic powers to alter my reality. In a ploy to render myself impotent against my adversaries I went to the doctor and "pretended" to be insane so that I could be diagnosed and hospitalised: {who could fear the words of a madman}.
I was successfully diagnosed and responded well to medication. I remember being very happy when I realised for the first time that I really was insane.
However, I have not always been successful in adhering to the medication and have drawn close to the edge again or fallen straight back into delusion and hospital once more.
In my last sojourn into the unmedicated state I found myself alone in my room one night, agonised, brought low by my hallucinations, i realised i was doomed, there was only one force left that I could imagine in the universe I had never turned to that could possibly save me.
In my utter despair and through teeth clenched shut with sobs I cried and I begged into the night.
"Lord God, if you are out there, I beg you, please help me, please save me, I need you now more than ever".
The answer was immediate, all of a sudden I knew he was there. All of a sudden I was convinced, utterly convinced and I had a powerful desire to jump out of my bed and seek him and it was immediately evident to me how I would find him. I would look in all the places that He knew I would look.
I typed random words that were in my heart into search engines on the internet, things that sounded like stupidity to everyone else in the world, but tickled some theoretical corner of my mind or just humored me, and I scrolled through the results until I found something that I didn't know that I would look at before I saw it, but was immediately obvious to me that I would look at as soon as I saw it. Within it, I would find generally nothing but a hint at where to go next [I guess he watched me following chalk arrows on the pavements in my childhood games and he knew how to get me to follow] and I went there. He knew my broken logics, my smashed symbolism, he knew every alphabet of every system of thought I had ever employed in my learning, my play, my survival tactics. He knew how I like to rip images apart and repaste them together or move them, one over the other to make new images appear in the melting of the two and he used my every secret language and metaphor, and many other tools he has available to Him in his utter Genious, to yell at me and with no uncertainty.
HERE I AM, FOLLOW ME.
I stumbled across some "random" internet page and on it was written an instruction to read the words in the box out loud. I scanned them and I was stunned, it was exactly how I saw myself. To the naked eye it was just another statement in a box on an internet page that could've been about any generic person. But I knew this wasn't random, it was the perfect statement of how I saw myself at that moment in time and what I desired to say to my persecutors, imagined or not, and clearly written above it was the line, "Say these words out loud".
I was stunned, utterly gobsmacked. Instantly eddified and uplifted I said the words out loud and I knew, I followed the vectors of symbolism, as has been my hearts way of solving my problems, and there i was. I was looking the Knowledge in the face that the Lord knew me, He knew me so deeply. so personally and utterly with the chalk stick in His hand that I instantly exploded with love. Pure love for His genious, pure love for Him. I desired him.
I hungered for Him and I instantly said to him, I will follow you wherever you may lead. He began to test me, right there and then. He started to show me images of skulls, images of mortality and death and my instant response was of love, i said to him, The skulls don't scare me, life holds no fear for me. Show me whatever you like, test me in any way you see fit, I see it for what it is. I am immortal with you and I love you. I didn't just say the words, my heart was exploding with a passionate love, I asked for the father and here he was telling me that he could see me for exactly who I am, like none other could, and I knew it to be true.
In the days following that I went dancing through all my secret places, I looked at my old games, the books I had read, pictures, images. I ran to the bible, utterly filled with passion I became manic with joy but I was also boastful, i was convinced that I already understood him far deeper than I actually did. I danced and I laughed, I lost all self control and proclaimed his existence to all that would hear me and I tried to prove to all around me that God was right here. I even started ripping verses out of the bible that didn't agree with my image of him, describing him as terrible and to be feared for I saw and felt only love for him in those days and had no fear of him.
I showed them the secret places and i pointed to the images and the symbolism and what it meant. However, they didn't get it. They couldn't see his face, they couldn't understand His work, They were blind to it, and through no fault of their own. No other mortal being will ever see into the secret places of my heart and mind. No-one else will ever be convinced by anything that he shows me in this way, because only I can understand when he speaks to me like this. He knows this too. Its called a secret place for a reason, because the language used therein is only shared between you and God. Their is a sacred intimacy to it, to the father that watched every footfall of my junior steps, the father that heard my every whim and desire, felt my every heartbeat, saw the effect of every drug, every line of every book. every laugh. He knows the alphabet of all my laughs, the real one, the defensive ones, the blatantly fake and sarcastic ones. He knows every minute spec and moment of me, my experiences, my feelings my heart and my mind, every truth and lie I told and exactly how I pronounced it and when he speaks to me, he speaks in this language, this place that only I can access for with me, that is my communion with my God.
It only convinced them that I was going utterly insane for before the end of many days a counsel of psychiatrists came to me with a few police men and strong armed ambulance men to lay the question on me:
"Do you want to come peacefully to the asylum, or shall we do it the hard way?". My response?: "I'd better go get my coat then".
Again, I won't lie to you, I was fraught with the attacks of auditory hallucinations and I was also becoming rapidly more delusional and I still have a hard time deciphering what was the imaginings of my own mind and what was not.
In those weeks at the asylum I battled with my fears, I took the meds and as many as I could get. I felt like I was under attack from demonic influences in my hallucinations and I heard many dark voices and had some pretty odd beliefs about the staff members and other patients, but I held strong to my faith, I held tightly to my God and I did my best to clothe him well and continue to testify to his existence and I obeyed his every direction whenever I felt him communicate with me. Wherever I looked around I saw images of love hearts, imprints of love hearts, of smiling stick man faces and odd disjoint, but happy faces carved in the leaves and shapes of bushes and trees and it gave me the strength to fight on. it gave me the will to recover. I had lost the fervor to prove it to people, I had realised that it was impossible, but I became so suddenly aware of the effect of my every action and appearance and thus began a new malady for me. I learned many a hard lesson in hospital but I was also healed through faith and medication. And I helped to heal others by showing love and tenderness and care I helped a woman to beat her eating disorder and I'd like to think that I had some small effect on a woman suffering extreme depression and loneliness after the loss of her dearly beloved husband.
It hasn't all been roses though. I didn't keep my every promise I made immediately and not long after I left hospital the Lord told me that he would let me walk alone for a while. I realise he never went anywhere, but he did fall silent for a while. and I think I know why...
In the days after leaving hospital and being secure on my meds, I started taking Him for granted, and I started standing on my own knowledge and not that of his Divine word.
Yes, I loved and trusted him, but somewhere along the line, I lost the passion, the consuming passion for him and I started to have the mind set that it was ok to go my own way and figure it out in my own time under my own understandings and counsel because I knew he would forgive me.
Please, don't do it ><
After falling back into some of my old habits I started to call out to him. Lord, where are you when I need you, why don't i see your messages to me anymore? Lord? Where did you go? What have I done wrong?
In that loneliness that ensued I endured for a little bit falling back into some of my old ways, wondering why he wouldn't just forgive me and be as present as I wanted him to be. I started to wonder wether it was all just hallucination, I started to despair that it was just another process in my madness.
After a long period of silence I started thinking more and more to myself, is it because I am acting impure? What is this need for purity? is there a need for purity? what is going on?
So I prayed, honestly and the longing of my heart was truthful and I asked him to teach me and guide me and answer this question about purity and its necessity. The answer wasn't instantaneous, but it came within a few days and he showed me something and I knew it was his work, somehow when I need to know if it really is Him, I know, but it wasn't what I was expecting.
It was a powerful rebuke that shamed me to the core, it wasn't grievous, but it really did smart. It made me cry in my shame and the answer was loud and clear, there is no whimsy in the letter of His law. There is only one way to understand what he requires, it is written clearly in the Holy Bible and he doesn't sweeten it or sugar coat it. He showed me that just because He had come to me in my hour of need it didn't make me free of any single part of anyone of his commandments or his laws or his guidance.
This and other events have taught me to utterly respect him and fear him aswell as rejoice in him and love him with a continuous and deep passion in the spirit of honor and gratitude and the fire in my heart has reawakened.
My love and respect for him through everything has only deepened and my desire to be pure in his vision and that of my kith and kin has become whole.
Again, I pray to be His most humble servant and I have returned to the statement I made before to Him that I would always follow his guidance and be obedient.
Little did I know just how well He will hold me to that statement, and that knowledge makes me rejoice since the more I follow him and am obedient to his law, the greater in Love I fall with him, such a blissful love.
So let me cut this ever so long post short by proclaiming the Glory and existence of God. There are no doubts left in my mind about whether He is real or imagined.
I testify, He is real. He is pure, He is Honest, He never speaks a word of a lie.
He is glorious, there is none other more high than He. None other greater.
He is wise, His knowledge infinite, His Grace and His mercy he pours down upon us. He loves us, each and everyone one, with equal measure.
To prove this to us, he gave us his only Son, to be the light and the way unto Him, to carry our sins and pay our price for them with His Blood on the cross. Because of this, the spirit of Jesus Christ dwells within us all so that we may know with sureity the truth of our Fathers Words and the truth of our salvation. Worthy is Jesus Christ, my saviour, I exalt thee.
He hides not from us but gives us The Holy Bible so that we may know Him and Hiis divine word.
On a personal note, I trust in Him, he fills me up with Joy. He displays every quality that I hold dear to my heart and I want to grow in His presence, He is my greatest role model.
Holy Holy Holy is my Father in Heaven and I want to be just like him.
I was born to a mother who soon fell ill to schizophrenia.
My father accused her of adultery and claimed that I was not his legitimate heir and left before I was two years old.
Battling against madness and affliction she raised me with a heart of Love.
I never knew that she was diagnosed with schizophrenia when I was a child, and the memories I have are scant but I do remember that she filled me with a deep love that a mother does to her child.
When i was around 5-6 years old my mother became so unwell and tortured that she eventually committed suicide in our family home, and to this day I remember waking up and finding her dead body.
I was handed over to the guardianship of my grandmother and grandfather who were bitterly unhappily married and for good reason. Although the did their best to maintain a visage of a marriage it really was not.
There was no spirit of honor their. My grandfather was living a lie, going through the motions of a dead marriage whilst conducting secret affairs that lasted many decades and I feel that my nan, whilst she was certain of some of the first, had horrible suspicions about the latter.
Later to my agony, after he died from a languishing death due to leaukeamia.
I had always looked up to him and respected him, he seemed to be a strong, proud, solid man that had time to tell me the simple truths and acted as a protector and guide for me and all of this discovery along with his recent death anguished me terribly.
At university I often smoked, snorted or swallowed recreational drugs and had a heart open to ideas of sexual promiscuity.
All my life I have believed in Love, and I believed in justice and redemption but I never believed in the need for God, or his existence, or that of the reality of Jesus Christ and in all my growing life my parental figures said that God couldn't exist or the terrible things that had happened to them in their life would not have befallen them.
In my second year at university the drugs, the stress, my early childhood traumas, my recent experiences with the loss of my grandfather, both his spiritual and bodily identity to me, started to take their toll.
I started to fall prey to paranoia myself and spent several long months slowly falling into the pit of madness, tormented by voices and delusions I was striving every day for [as i thought] my life and my survival. My delusions abounded and multiplied. At one time i was the one from the matrix, another i was in mental communication with a sect of buddhists, another that I had telepathic powers to alter my reality. In a ploy to render myself impotent against my adversaries I went to the doctor and "pretended" to be insane so that I could be diagnosed and hospitalised: {who could fear the words of a madman}.
I was successfully diagnosed and responded well to medication. I remember being very happy when I realised for the first time that I really was insane.
However, I have not always been successful in adhering to the medication and have drawn close to the edge again or fallen straight back into delusion and hospital once more.
In my last sojourn into the unmedicated state I found myself alone in my room one night, agonised, brought low by my hallucinations, i realised i was doomed, there was only one force left that I could imagine in the universe I had never turned to that could possibly save me.
In my utter despair and through teeth clenched shut with sobs I cried and I begged into the night.
"Lord God, if you are out there, I beg you, please help me, please save me, I need you now more than ever".
The answer was immediate, all of a sudden I knew he was there. All of a sudden I was convinced, utterly convinced and I had a powerful desire to jump out of my bed and seek him and it was immediately evident to me how I would find him. I would look in all the places that He knew I would look.
I typed random words that were in my heart into search engines on the internet, things that sounded like stupidity to everyone else in the world, but tickled some theoretical corner of my mind or just humored me, and I scrolled through the results until I found something that I didn't know that I would look at before I saw it, but was immediately obvious to me that I would look at as soon as I saw it. Within it, I would find generally nothing but a hint at where to go next [I guess he watched me following chalk arrows on the pavements in my childhood games and he knew how to get me to follow] and I went there. He knew my broken logics, my smashed symbolism, he knew every alphabet of every system of thought I had ever employed in my learning, my play, my survival tactics. He knew how I like to rip images apart and repaste them together or move them, one over the other to make new images appear in the melting of the two and he used my every secret language and metaphor, and many other tools he has available to Him in his utter Genious, to yell at me and with no uncertainty.
HERE I AM, FOLLOW ME.
I stumbled across some "random" internet page and on it was written an instruction to read the words in the box out loud. I scanned them and I was stunned, it was exactly how I saw myself. To the naked eye it was just another statement in a box on an internet page that could've been about any generic person. But I knew this wasn't random, it was the perfect statement of how I saw myself at that moment in time and what I desired to say to my persecutors, imagined or not, and clearly written above it was the line, "Say these words out loud".
I was stunned, utterly gobsmacked. Instantly eddified and uplifted I said the words out loud and I knew, I followed the vectors of symbolism, as has been my hearts way of solving my problems, and there i was. I was looking the Knowledge in the face that the Lord knew me, He knew me so deeply. so personally and utterly with the chalk stick in His hand that I instantly exploded with love. Pure love for His genious, pure love for Him. I desired him.
I hungered for Him and I instantly said to him, I will follow you wherever you may lead. He began to test me, right there and then. He started to show me images of skulls, images of mortality and death and my instant response was of love, i said to him, The skulls don't scare me, life holds no fear for me. Show me whatever you like, test me in any way you see fit, I see it for what it is. I am immortal with you and I love you. I didn't just say the words, my heart was exploding with a passionate love, I asked for the father and here he was telling me that he could see me for exactly who I am, like none other could, and I knew it to be true.
In the days following that I went dancing through all my secret places, I looked at my old games, the books I had read, pictures, images. I ran to the bible, utterly filled with passion I became manic with joy but I was also boastful, i was convinced that I already understood him far deeper than I actually did. I danced and I laughed, I lost all self control and proclaimed his existence to all that would hear me and I tried to prove to all around me that God was right here. I even started ripping verses out of the bible that didn't agree with my image of him, describing him as terrible and to be feared for I saw and felt only love for him in those days and had no fear of him.
I showed them the secret places and i pointed to the images and the symbolism and what it meant. However, they didn't get it. They couldn't see his face, they couldn't understand His work, They were blind to it, and through no fault of their own. No other mortal being will ever see into the secret places of my heart and mind. No-one else will ever be convinced by anything that he shows me in this way, because only I can understand when he speaks to me like this. He knows this too. Its called a secret place for a reason, because the language used therein is only shared between you and God. Their is a sacred intimacy to it, to the father that watched every footfall of my junior steps, the father that heard my every whim and desire, felt my every heartbeat, saw the effect of every drug, every line of every book. every laugh. He knows the alphabet of all my laughs, the real one, the defensive ones, the blatantly fake and sarcastic ones. He knows every minute spec and moment of me, my experiences, my feelings my heart and my mind, every truth and lie I told and exactly how I pronounced it and when he speaks to me, he speaks in this language, this place that only I can access for with me, that is my communion with my God.
It only convinced them that I was going utterly insane for before the end of many days a counsel of psychiatrists came to me with a few police men and strong armed ambulance men to lay the question on me:
"Do you want to come peacefully to the asylum, or shall we do it the hard way?". My response?: "I'd better go get my coat then".
Again, I won't lie to you, I was fraught with the attacks of auditory hallucinations and I was also becoming rapidly more delusional and I still have a hard time deciphering what was the imaginings of my own mind and what was not.
In those weeks at the asylum I battled with my fears, I took the meds and as many as I could get. I felt like I was under attack from demonic influences in my hallucinations and I heard many dark voices and had some pretty odd beliefs about the staff members and other patients, but I held strong to my faith, I held tightly to my God and I did my best to clothe him well and continue to testify to his existence and I obeyed his every direction whenever I felt him communicate with me. Wherever I looked around I saw images of love hearts, imprints of love hearts, of smiling stick man faces and odd disjoint, but happy faces carved in the leaves and shapes of bushes and trees and it gave me the strength to fight on. it gave me the will to recover. I had lost the fervor to prove it to people, I had realised that it was impossible, but I became so suddenly aware of the effect of my every action and appearance and thus began a new malady for me. I learned many a hard lesson in hospital but I was also healed through faith and medication. And I helped to heal others by showing love and tenderness and care I helped a woman to beat her eating disorder and I'd like to think that I had some small effect on a woman suffering extreme depression and loneliness after the loss of her dearly beloved husband.
It hasn't all been roses though. I didn't keep my every promise I made immediately and not long after I left hospital the Lord told me that he would let me walk alone for a while. I realise he never went anywhere, but he did fall silent for a while. and I think I know why...
In the days after leaving hospital and being secure on my meds, I started taking Him for granted, and I started standing on my own knowledge and not that of his Divine word.
Yes, I loved and trusted him, but somewhere along the line, I lost the passion, the consuming passion for him and I started to have the mind set that it was ok to go my own way and figure it out in my own time under my own understandings and counsel because I knew he would forgive me.
Please, don't do it ><
After falling back into some of my old habits I started to call out to him. Lord, where are you when I need you, why don't i see your messages to me anymore? Lord? Where did you go? What have I done wrong?
In that loneliness that ensued I endured for a little bit falling back into some of my old ways, wondering why he wouldn't just forgive me and be as present as I wanted him to be. I started to wonder wether it was all just hallucination, I started to despair that it was just another process in my madness.
After a long period of silence I started thinking more and more to myself, is it because I am acting impure? What is this need for purity? is there a need for purity? what is going on?
So I prayed, honestly and the longing of my heart was truthful and I asked him to teach me and guide me and answer this question about purity and its necessity. The answer wasn't instantaneous, but it came within a few days and he showed me something and I knew it was his work, somehow when I need to know if it really is Him, I know, but it wasn't what I was expecting.
It was a powerful rebuke that shamed me to the core, it wasn't grievous, but it really did smart. It made me cry in my shame and the answer was loud and clear, there is no whimsy in the letter of His law. There is only one way to understand what he requires, it is written clearly in the Holy Bible and he doesn't sweeten it or sugar coat it. He showed me that just because He had come to me in my hour of need it didn't make me free of any single part of anyone of his commandments or his laws or his guidance.
This and other events have taught me to utterly respect him and fear him aswell as rejoice in him and love him with a continuous and deep passion in the spirit of honor and gratitude and the fire in my heart has reawakened.
My love and respect for him through everything has only deepened and my desire to be pure in his vision and that of my kith and kin has become whole.
Again, I pray to be His most humble servant and I have returned to the statement I made before to Him that I would always follow his guidance and be obedient.
Little did I know just how well He will hold me to that statement, and that knowledge makes me rejoice since the more I follow him and am obedient to his law, the greater in Love I fall with him, such a blissful love.
So let me cut this ever so long post short by proclaiming the Glory and existence of God. There are no doubts left in my mind about whether He is real or imagined.
I testify, He is real. He is pure, He is Honest, He never speaks a word of a lie.
He is glorious, there is none other more high than He. None other greater.
He is wise, His knowledge infinite, His Grace and His mercy he pours down upon us. He loves us, each and everyone one, with equal measure.
To prove this to us, he gave us his only Son, to be the light and the way unto Him, to carry our sins and pay our price for them with His Blood on the cross. Because of this, the spirit of Jesus Christ dwells within us all so that we may know with sureity the truth of our Fathers Words and the truth of our salvation. Worthy is Jesus Christ, my saviour, I exalt thee.
He hides not from us but gives us The Holy Bible so that we may know Him and Hiis divine word.
On a personal note, I trust in Him, he fills me up with Joy. He displays every quality that I hold dear to my heart and I want to grow in His presence, He is my greatest role model.
Holy Holy Holy is my Father in Heaven and I want to be just like him.
