#mercy4march

May is the month for pursuing your creativity. Over the next 20 days, we’re encouraging you to take active steps in discovering +/- nurturing +/- releasing your voice through whichever vein, whatever art, God has placed within you. We all have the ability to create. And not only that, but we have a propensity to fashion beauty or pain out of the chaos of our minds and of our lives. Out of emptiness, out of desire, and out of longing. It is our inheritance as children of a magnificent, colourful, powerful and transcending Creator. Art is one of many ways through which we can discover more of God, and eventually more of ourselves through Him.

Do you believe that you have a gift of creativity? If not, now’s the time to. In May, you are free to continue journaling along the theme of discovering God but what we really want you to do is this: commit time every day/night for the rest of this month to work on your art. Photography, drawing/painting, songwriting, singing, playing an instrument, writing, sewing, production, enterprise. All these are outlets for art, and examples of what you could explore for yourself a bit more this month. 

1. Put all you think you know of yourself aside, and create. Ask God to reveal what He has given you specifically if you are unsure or in doubt, and be prepared to listen and to learn.

2. Take some risks. Enrol on that extra course to enhance your God-given talent, take up busking on the streets, perform your poetry at an open mic, get back on playing that instrument you’ve been neglecting, or just pick up a pen and paper to do some songwriting for the first time.

3. There will be no weekly themes this month. But we encourage you to share (some of) your work with us as you go along. Hashtag #MADEINMAY so we can like or reblog your posts as the month goes on. Videos, photos, links to see more of your work, poems, short stories, compositions...anything. Aim to make 1 or 2 pieces of your work public per week. We’ll keep checking and will be sharing our own stuff with you (as usual) as well as our personal sources of inspiration and stories of embracing our creativity.

4. Share this post with any and everyone!

Here’s to May!

Love,

-S.

____________________________________________________________

USEFUL LINKS: #FREEINFEB, #MERCY4MARCH, #ASPIREINAPRIL

____________________________________________________________

CONNECT. We would love to hear about how you’re getting on/try to answer your questions:

Elo --> theforgetterseye.tumblr.com | @EloOsunde | [email protected]

If you’ve joined all or one of #FREEINFEB , #MERCY4MARCH & #ASPIREINAPRIL , stick around for what’s to come in May!

Give us until the end of this week for the big reveal, and thank you loves for your patience.

Brokenness is much. Some days are harder than others, I know that and I know it well. But this I also know: Jesus is our freedom. We may face attack, we may face hardship, we may face rejection, we may face betrayal, but the freedom found in God is transcendent. It can never be overwhelmed or overcome by our circumstance. This is my encouragement. I might still be fighting, but I fight as one who is freed. 

Makes the battle and the odds far more interesting.

Fight, darling.

I received this email a couple hours ago, another beautiful soul keeping it transparent and sharing her brokenness and triumph. She has given me permission to share it here. All names have been changed to preserve anonymity. You can read my post, ‘Water’, here.

To the writer of Water…

I just wanted to say thank you, thank you andone last time: thank you. I found such freedom through your story and God is on the move. I attend a Christian society at my University and just last week we had an altar call for those who had experienced any kind of abuse or violation in their life time. I never ever thought I would get up in a room full of the “enemy” – that is men – and acknowledge that I had allowed one of them, their kind, to do mortifying heart breaking things to me when I was on the cusp of womanhood aged 17. But I did it! And five other women joined me which was one of the greatest moments of my life – we stood in a circle in front of the whole room and wept and wept some more as the room stretched its hands towards us and prayed fervently for us. Someone stood up and gave a testimony that they could see Crowns on our heads as a sign of our being overcomers – as are you!!

My story begins with a move back home to my home country in 6th form in order to attend a boarding school which offered A’Levels instead of the customary IB in my parent’s country of residence. I was angry and disillusioned about the move as I felt like my parents had dumped my sister and I in the middle of nowhere and I was not a happy camper. One weekend, my new friends and I went out to a barbeque being hosted by one of the rugby team members at our brother school. A guy approached me and asked me to come outside for a moment. Feeling somewhat confused, I rather naively followed him out to the back garden. He told me his and name and barely before I knew what was happening, he reached down and kissed me. I stood mildly stunned at this unexpected exchange but then thought “well if this is my first kiss, I might as well get it over with!”. It was, unbeknownst to me, the start of a passive attitude towards what men did to me – a feeling I had learned I believe as a child where my Dad’s raging temper was something you just had to live with until the storm temporarily ceased.

I then returned to the lounge where everyone had been sitting and found the room abuzz with news “That new Marie* chick just hooked up with Sam* and they met like five minutes ago!”Even my new girlfriends were shocked and told me that they had not expected me to be that type! The rumours continued all throughout the week at school but I tried to convince myself that the guy really must have liked me to move so fast. He made plans to see me in town the next Friday when boarders were allowed to go and do their shopping for tuck. I went in expectant and tried to look as cute as you can in an unflattering school uniform. But disappointment came in the form of his friends taking one look at me and deciding from a distance that I was not “fly” enough. “What was Sam thinking?” were the exact words used I later found out and my self-esteem plummeted to new lows as I tried to let this incident slide off my back. Soon, my friends and I began clubbing and partying over weekends as was the norm at the school we attended – it was surprisingly easy to book ourselves out over the weekend under the guise of staying with family as Seniors could sign themselves out. 

One weekend in November, my friend Ella* and I went to stay at a random stranger’s house with a group of other girls form school. That was another risk we exposed ourselves too- boarders who wanted to club on the weekend would stay with guys who were deemed “safe and cool” to chill with but who we actually knew very little about! I thank God for what he protected us from although there were a few dangerous times when we stayed with men who were untrustworthy and plain shady! On that fateful November weekend, my friend and I were in particularly high spirits as we had just completed our AS level exams. We were dressed to the nines and there was a guy also staying at the house we were in who happened to be dating a fellow boarder called Tina* at the time. When Ella wasn’t looking, he slipped me his phone and asked for my number. I am not proud to say but I handed it over even though I also was in an intense long-distance relationship at the time. We got back to school the next day after a weekend of partying and I waited eagerly for the guy’s message which eventually came. We began to talk all throughout the Christmas holidays and I just couldn’t believe my good fortune – a hot popular guy seemed interested in talking to me! I returned to school in January and we were unofficially “seeing each other”. One weekend, we had a school dance and went clubbing after. We got back to where we would be sleeping and my friends soon crashed in exhaustion in the room we were all sharing. Meanwhile, my boyfriend took me into the lounge and poured me a huge glass of vodka and lemonade. He told me to drink it which I obediently did. He then led me to a green minibus parked outside and we began to make out. I dutifully allowed him to remove item by item of clothing but as usual when he tried to go all the way I didn’t let him. My mum had raised us as Christian as she knew how to and had always asked my sisters and I not to have pre-marital sex. But my boyfriend was insistent and said “Why are you doing this to me” repeatedly when I tried to say no. Suddenly he shifted all of his weight on top of me and forced my legs open. I became very still because the threat of violence in my alcohol – numbed mind suddenly became very near. Before I knew it, he had gone all the way and I was just numb and freezing cold as he took advantage of my body. The sun eventually began to rise on the horizon and he got off me and even helped me out of the car. I couldn’t look him in the face and just went to the room and tried to sleep, ignoring the blood which now stained my inner thigh. I went back to school the next day and confessed to my friend what happened. She was sympathetic but really, there was little anyone could say to make it better. My conscience screamed at me that I was used goods now but what made the entire incident more confusing was the guys text the next day :“Hey was thinking about last night and I am sorry about what happened.” I didn’t know what to say and didn’t talk to him for three weeks – a lifetime for a teenage girl “In love”. I did not in all that painful time realise I had been raped – I honestly thought I had somehow consented by getting myself into that situation and that I was simply an immoral girl who had given up her virginity before marriage. 

I eventually asked him for a break from us but found my self-esteem couldn’t cope without a guy by my side. We got back together – only after I seduced him by going to his house and tempting him in every way I knew to do. He claimed I had hurt him and implied I should sleep with him to make up for asking for a break. Which I did. A few weeks later I was back to my old ways and my friends and I went out with him and his boys. We went to a lodge deep in the city and there was little light outside. My boyfriend was pouring shots of gin out and I noticed a green flash of light in the bottle of gin. Something warned me that he had slipped something in the drink but I ignored it. I drank a shot and my body instantly went limp. The same thing happened to my friend and she then began screaming and running around in a fit. Meanwhile, my boyfriend led me to the bushes and tried to violate me again in a very degrading way. To this day I believe he had planned to all along as punishment for my breaking up with him after he first raped me. I was sick after he was done from the gin and his friend also took advantage of me. We eventually had to go back to school and never really dealt with the events of that fateful night as we nearly got expelled for returning to school drunk as prefects. (I know right, to imagine we were prefects at the time!)

A few weeks later, I began to really question my so-called relationship and wonder if it was worth the price I was seemingly always have to pay. At that exact time, a friend in art class began talking to me about her encounters with Jesus and I was extremely intrigued. If God could visit her in such a powerful way, why not me! We also had an unexpected visitor: a lady from America came to talk to us girls at school and told us about her own promiscuous past. She told us how she contracted HPV and God healed her and how he had an awesome plan for our lives and even for our husbands in the future. At a school where inappropriate relationships and promiscuity were rampant, her words rang so true that day. I sat transfixed as all my life I had never known that Jesus could be as relevant and interested in something like my love-life! A few weeks later, I gave my life to Christ in my hostel bedroom and I have not turned back since. 

I blocked out a lot of what happened with my ex and it came back to me in flashes in my second year of uni. The memories and stress of being an international student led to my having a nervous breakdown. I had to take two semesters out of uni to recover but I thank God that I eventually graduated! I then took another year out as I was still severely depressed and was fortunate to have understanding parents who paid for my therapy. In that season, I encountered a therapist who was the first to lay it down like it was. I had always carried an extreme sense of guilt over my past and wholly believed based on my exposure to incorrect Purity Doctrine that I had engaged in pre-marital sex. My lovely therapist instead showed me gently that I had not – I had been raped because silence is not agreement in a sexual context. Furthermore, she showed me that although I had always guiltily believed I was responsible for returning to my boyfriend and sleeping with him on “my terms”, I had actually engaged in what is called psychological rape. This is where you return to intimacy with a past abuser but you do not and psychologically cannot truly desire or enjoy it – it is not unlike an abused woman returning to her abuser. You may think you have a choice but you are actually in bondage to that person’s manipulative actions. This set me free in countless ways –so much that the very same week you posted “Water”, I publicly acknowledged my past abuse by going up in Christian student fellowship at my Uni and receiving prayer with fiver other girls who had been abused as children. I never ever thought the day would come when I would acknowledge to a group – of men especially, forget the other women there – that I had been through such trauma. God is doing something – can you see those golden overcomer’s crowns which await his victorious daughters? I hear those chains falling sister and I pray you can too!

forgive the ones who should have known better than you.

The command to forgive has been a persistent song this month. Persistent, but gentle. In my heart, I can accept the need to forgive those who have been blatantly wrong but are also outside of my life. What I am more hesitant upon, is the other forgiveness. The forgiveness of the ones who gave me a chance to live, who nurtured me, who had multiple opportunities to ruin me and did not, those who I cannot and do not want to sever from my life. But who have hurt me most deeply.

Family. 

How do you pray to accept that they too, were and still are human? And how do you let that knowledge fight your bitterness? 

Well, you focus on their humanity. You focus on the fact that you could have made their mistakes. You focus on the fact that there is still hope for severed or strained relationships, still room for healing. And honey, you listen to the music. That:

God knows this struggle. 

God gives me mercy. 

God still says:

forgive the ones who should have known better than you.

They should have known better. And that is why you must forgive.

I have never been one to journal or even write. I have always tried to avoid papers and made up an excuse every time i was asked to put thoughts to paper. For these past series i journaled but did not really journal, lol let me explain. I did not pour out my thoughts on paper [except for my usual bible study notes and a few prayers] which to me still counts as journalling, but i journaled in my heart. I took note of every detail and lesson God was teaching me in my heart and mind. When i was introduced to #M4M i was held back a little. Mercy? Did i even know the slightest idea what it meant? Was it the same as grace? or was it different. Is it love? What is mercy ?!! But then i realized you cant explain one term without introducing or explaining the other. One allows for another to take place. So God has shown me two distinct things that Mercy is in my own life and i will start with the first one today!

Mercy is__ Joy 

About two weeks ago, the Wednesday before my Spring break, my friend had received awesome news. I was overwhelmed and so happy for her. This is what i have been praying for myself but it was happening in my Sisters’ life. I was claiming it by all means lol (As an African: I claim it !) And then i was walking to my Psychology Lab for research and i started thinking about my life. I was thanking God. At the same time i was listening to this song & i was really loving it. It was not talking about God per se, but i directed each lyric to God by myself. 

Where i am coming from who would have thought that this would be me today? That this would be my friends? I was full of joy. Great joy. But the joy was not showing on the outside... it was stuck ! Stuck in my chest, banging to come out. Then I walked into my lab, shut the door behind me dancing, & then i began to cry .

Mercy allowed me to do that. To not be prideful or hold back, to be vulnerable to God. I was on my knees crying because i could not fathom how a God so great could be mindful or even think about me, my family and friends. The joy that cooked up and was stuck in my chest was finally out. Now it was showing. Each tear delivered an ounce of Joy, each praise that shot out my mouth fired with an ounce of joy. God had mercy on my soul. His mercy made ways when there seemed to be no way. Everything i was worrying about, his mercy told me “I will take care of it”. He took me from dust to life, from self-reliance to trusting in him, From i can do it all by myself to ask-the-one-who-can-do-it-all. I am forever grateful. No more indebted to fear but fully aware that God is the same yesterday, today and forevermore. This Joy is permanent ! 

His Love for me, the inseparable love that not even my dirtiest sin could push away permitted him to show me mercy. Mercy in return made way for Grace to be showered upon me. This is why you cannot explain Mercy without the other terms.

Mercy is___ Joy

What is Mercy to you ?

If you are just like me and have not found out yet ask God to show you in your quiet time with him as you journal this week. Reflect back on your life and look for the cracks that Mercy sealed.

Jesus is something else. And i’ve been thinking (as usual). Do I really appreciate who He was as a Man? 

Perhaps I must consider this: that to focus on the Jesus is (God), one must first zoom in on the Jesus was (Man). By this, I mean paying deep attention to the life Jesus lived before He was crucified. 

The self-sacrifice, the wandering. The teaching, the taking of risks, the empathy...these all, are things less focused on in general. Personally, I come from a culture focused precipitously on His miracles and the bit after Jesus’ crucifixion to the Jesus is. On the power that comes with that, the significance of ‘the blood’, the fighting in spiritual warfare, the rewarding of prosperity over our enemies. Anyone who is Ghanaian/(west) African might be able to relate to this. 

But Jesus was human too, like me. Like you. He experienced pain, He experienced hunger, He needed the toilet, He probably also had the flu on occasion (if it existed then). But He hung out with people I would have probably shunned. 

He was completely different. 

He was completely good. 

He was radical beyond belief. He might have even been considered disrespectful of some of the traditions that were in place at the time. He was rebellious in His peace. Far too advanced in His thinking. Far too dangerous in His power.

As i’ve journaled this month for #Mercy4March, i’ve begun to explore my understanding of God’s mercy in this life. The result is that I find myself intrigued by Jesus in a way I haven’t before. Find myself asking, were Jesus still on earth, what would I think of Him? Would I be like the Pharisees? Would I want Him dead because of His difference? 

I probably would. And these thoughts have humbled me these past few weeks...

I suppose the bigger questions this month has raised are:

Can I bear to think that God made Himself more human than I had ever imagined?

Can I bear that God would lower Himself so much for me?

My own answer remains pending.

This was so wonderful to receive : ) Thank you for sharing, anon. I myself have been challenged on my perceptions of who God is through His mercy. It really is a different place, like you’ve said. Where #FREEINFEB was loud, Ihave found #Mercy4March to be still and resonant. It’s been a month of heavylearning, that’s for sure. As you continue to journal, bear this passage in mind:

“For we ourselves wereonce foolish, disobedient, ledastray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in maliceand envy, hated by others and hating one another. But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Saviourappeared, he saved us, not because ofworks done by us in righteousness, but according to His own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of theHoly Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Saviour,so that being justified by His grace we might become heirs according to thehope of eternal life.”

To acknowledge that we arefound on the shores of God’s mercy is one thing. To understand what it means isquite another. Here is what i’m learning:

1.  Hismercy means that we are justified – we are no longer who we were before, nolonger unclean, no longer ragged, no longer hopeless.

2.    His mercy means that we areheirs. The Sons and Daughters of a King. When we realize this same King is theone who created the universe and knows every thing, both living and dead, byname, we start to live in accordance with our identity as children of One whois royal, One who is powerful, One who is merciful. Our lives begin to changewhen we embrace our true identity.

3.    His mercy is limitless. WhenJesus breathed His last on the cross He had been nailed to for you and I, Hesaid “It is finished!” (John 19:30) And He meant it. 

Therefore, I really want to encourage you to hold on to the despite, cling to the but, don’t lose remembrance of your redemption. Self-imposedguilt, the hardening of the heart…these all are things we do toourselves. These all are illogical. 

Here’s a practical thing to do in your journalling: write on apage all that you feel is wrong with/about you, all that you are ashamed of, all that you feelguilty about, all that you know separates you from God. Then, at the bottom of the page writeBUT in capital letters. Now, turn over the page and write out the promises ofGod that you know of. Write out who Jesus is.

Now read both pages (always together), as often as you need to. 

There is nothing in your past that is outside of God’s mercy, and there is nothing you could ever do to hide from Him. His goodness is your despite. His faithfulness is your but. And redemption is a glorious transformation that takes place from our former selves. Without a former self, there is no redemption. Let’s rejoice in that! That He is so merciful and so full of love! That we have hope. Be encouraged.

Who has He shown you He is in your life thus far? 

In what personal instances has He come through for you in an undeniable way?

Those are good places to start to recognise His promises. If you are a bit stuck on promises you could write down, check this answerI gave to an anon last month. In it are just a few promises of God. Fundamentally, God’s Word is a demonstration of and a series of lessons in and reminders of His promises, ones that He has made and fulfilled time and time again, promises which elaborate on His perfect nature as a Father who remains constant, as much as we do not. That should encourage us. 

Let it encourage you. 

& Well done for journalling thus far, as difficult as it got.

Grateful for you. :)