a time for healing after the war

“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” - Psalms 34:18

I’ve had complex PTSD for a long time. It started 2 years ago, when several acts of sin followed me and caused me to lose my job, my apartment, my dog, and my savings. The enemy attacked me, and it wasn’t until recently, that I’ve managed to defeat him.

The war with Satan lasted for more than 20 years. Incident after incident, attack after attack, Satan tried to take me from my Father. I was baptized when I was a baby and was cemented in my faith for years, having gone to Catholic church. But after high school, I fell from my faith and departed from God. It took me more than 10 years to go back to my faith.

Job lost everything because God allowed Satan to take everything he had. It brought Job closer to God, as God showed Himself to Job in Job 38.

Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the storm. He said: “Who is this that obscures my plans with words without knowledge? Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me.” - Job 38:1-3

In my darkest of times, when I was in the worst Hell of my life, and when all that surrounded me appeared to be darkness and despair and desperation, I clung onto God. I turned to the Word and immersed myself in the Holy Spirit. I came back to the Catholic Church, taking Communion every week for forgiveness of my sins.

And I will never go back. To those days of pain and darkness, to the void where I was empty of God.

God never gave up on me. Even when I gave up on Him and turned away from Him, giving into vanity, thinking that I was better than Him for all my accomplishments that were worth absolutely nothing without the grace and love of God. I accomplished a lot up until I lost God, because God favored me when I was devoted to Him. When I lost God, I lost my talents, my skills, my knowledge, my memory, and myself. It was because of God that I was exalted.

I became arrogant. And God allowed Satan to take away the gifts He had bestowed up on me. I couldn’t dance anymore, or sing, play piano, play tennis, draw, paint, write, code, or even study. I was so arrogant in thinking I was better than God because of the praise the world reaped on me due to my accomplishments.

It was all vanity. I was vain and arrogant and a sinner. Like Solomon said, “all of it was meaningless, a chasing after the wind.”

“To the person who pleases him, God gives wisdom, knowledge, and happiness, but to the sinner he gives the task of gathering and storing up wealth to hand it over to the one who pleases God.” - Ecclesiastes 2:26.

I betrayed God. And I fell from grace. I cannot remember the exact moment I betrayed Him, or was it an accumulation, a build up of experiences that led me to break away from God? To give in to the secular sin of the tainted world.

I taunted God. I had a complex so big, wanting to be better than the ones I judged as sinners in the world, thinking myself better, wanting to stand out and be exalted from the rest. And I taunted God, so immersed I was in sin.

I fell to the ground, from my faith.

Now, I am humbled. God is far superior than any man, any woman, any creature in this world. Jesus is Lord and King, and no one is Him or like Him on this earth.
”For the foolishness of God is wiser than man, and the weakness of God is stronger than man.” 1 Corinthians 1:25.

Sometimes, we humans are wrapped up in our egos that we forget that we’re all just human. We seek to be better than the rest, than others, because we judge others and ourselves, because we have to, in order to win. The gifts that have been bestowed on us were chosen by and selected by God. And we use these gifts to win contests and competitions and races conducted by the secular world, where Satan pits us against each other as if we were in Hunger Games, for Satan’s own sadistic pleasure. The ruler of this sadistic world, the prince of sadism and hedonism, Satan is the reason we even have egos. Satan wants so much to be better than God that he twists us, God’s creations, like puppets on a string, making us dance to his own rhyme and reason.

God sees us all in the acts we participate in, the games we play in. And Jesus weeps for mankind, as we wait for the day He will return to save us from the Enemy, to save the world and take it back.

Take me back, God. To where I belong, in your infinite embrace.