Chapter XIX

Chapter XIX

What Can I Offer God?

    I have nothing to offer God for acceptance. He doesn't need anything I have to offer.

    What can I offer God? I have everything that I am to offer if accepted. Everything He has given me, everything He has made me to be. Everything He is making me to be. Nothing to offer for acceptance is based on trying to receive acceptance. Everything that I am to offer is based on being accepted. Giving everything that I am is based on the receiver. I am freed to give all that I am, totally freed to be pleasing. God’s unconditional love will reject as filthy rags anything I have to offer to earn or receive His love as God accepts us unconditionally with unconditional love he frees us to change because we love Him, He does not put a yoke on us to control us. He joins Himself to us and we are pleased to be yoked together, Christ says, My yoke is easy.   In a marriage it needs to be the same. Not pushing, not pulling, not a 50-50. I'll give if you give. But giving 100% so your mate can give and receive 100%.

    What can I offer My Lady? Nothing. I have nothing to give to gain acceptance. What can I give My Lady? Everything I am, everything God has made me to be, and everything God is making me to be. Again, nothing to offer and everything that I am to offer is not based on the giver it is based on the receiver.

    I will change nothing to gain acceptance. I will not emulate anybody to gain acceptance, to do so would declare I am unacceptable.

    So what can I change for My Lady? Nothing! What can I change for My Lady through God? Everything that God has laid on my heart to change. Let me tell you God has been laying many things on my heart to change. I have through his enabling love and power already changed. God cut away the controlling cancer and sickness, but He left who I am.

    I would promise to never again turn my back to you. It is wrong. Never again go into the silent mood and hold internally hurts. I know hurts bring on feelings of rejection. I now know them as triggers and will not allow them to take hold. I deal with them the minute they come. The marriage bed is no place to fight.

    Never again will I bring problems from a former marriage to bed with us. Julie and I have reconciled our differences and the anger is gone.

     I would be coming to you with bills, as you have. But here’s the difference, I am no longer down because of them. I am no longer pressured because of them, feeling I’m a failure because of them. I am just working and paying them off.

    I would promise to try to shut the kitchen cabinet doors, put down both the toilet seat and the lid, and I promise real hard to try to turn my socks and underwear right side. I am now able to go to bed early since I no longer have to have room noise. BUT if I want to stay up to watch a history of the second world war or an old classic movie now and then I don’t want no garbage about you not liking them. I guess I'll just have to go into the living room to watch. I won’t be rejecting you if I stay up now and then. I now awake very early usually before the alarm clock goes off (a major miracle) so I promise to rise early whenever you need to work on putting things together between us in our personal lives.

    What do I have to offer? The same man with ideas. A man that is clean as new fallen snow. The cancer has been extracted by the Master Surgeon. It has been buried in the sea of God’s forgetfulness, a man that no longer wears a false face to hide behind, to impress. A man that can now sing without secret sins to hold him back. A man with a new God inspired story who is not afraid to share the truth with whomever will listen, to help others and to see lives changed. I am ashamed of what I did, but I am not ashamed to share what I have learned to help others.

    I will have to be accepted as I am with carousels and chalking on the street and hollering on the fishing pier and spending 50 to 75 cents on candy bars and with me singing loud with my sound system and staying up late and coming to bed early for rendezvoused for the little boy in me is alive again. One area of my life I will not accept or will I ask anybody else to accept, and that is the way I handled rejection when I had a need to please to be loved and accepted.

    What am I willing to do? I am willing to sit down with counseling to look at each other as both of us also look at ourselves. I am willing to go to financial work shops to learn how to manage money. I am even willing to have Momma and Poppa teach me. I am willing to go on marriage retreats that are set up across this nation to make marriages work better.

    I am willing to continue to sign up for self-improvement work shops at my church or any other church when I hear of one in the area. As doors are opening it looks like I will be facilitating classes myself on recovery.

    I promise to continue to search, just as I always have to change. I promise to continue to seek counsel just as I always have for understanding and to change. I promise to go for financial counseling as I have and am willing to continue so I can change. I am even willing to sit down with Momma and Poppa to teach me. I promise to allow the one who has the best financial mind to control the finances as I have already done. (I am not the strong one.) But I will not promise to not buy candy for kids when going through the check-out line.

    Since I love My Lady I do want to do things to please her. But I can and will not do anything ever again to earn love. It is over. When you are loved unconditionally as God loves, you will want to do all you can to please.

    The only way as I see it that reconciliation could ever take place is for everybody to change. That change would be, do not ever use the word or try to impose change on anyone every again.

    How many years have we heard Just As I Am Without One Plea ? How many years has the gospel been preached that God takes us just as we are. He does not ask us to change in order for Him to love us. If you try to change your mate and you succeed you will hate what you have created because you will be taking away what you loved and you may have created a monster. If you will allow God to bring change to your mate you will love what God will create. God don’t make no junk. What God creates will be beautiful in his eyes and yours.

    Allow God to do it. He’s a specialist. As God loves us unconditionally, His love empowers us to change. Love empowers change.

    I would like to be able to share a message of reconciliation in my own life with my wife, but my life is not based on that reconciliation. As much as I love my wife, I no longer need my wife. I have prayed and left it in God’s hands. It is not my decision.

    Whether or not I am acceptable to anyone other than God is not my problem, but theirs. The rejection I now receive is very well founded, it can be justified. As I stated before, when you’re the 7th planet form the sun you need a little kicking around. I have been kicked, I have kicked myself and I probably will be kicked quite a few more times. The pain I receive I deserve. All I can do is take that pain to my Lord.

    Psalm 103:9-10 NIV, He will not always accuse, nor will he harbor his anger forever; He does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities.   This is called unmerited mercy.