May 3, 2015:

Went golfing this morning. Didn’t play so well. I know why. I was swinging too hard. In any case, it was an amazing May day and I love the course we played. Eric played pretty well. He shot 93, with a whole bunch of pars. The greens were ferociously challenging. If you hit the ball in the wrong spot, the green would just take it for a ride and it would roll for twenty seconds. Very difficult to hole a putt up close too. It was a challenging course but a very, very enjoyable day. Eric gives me lifts from about halfway. On the way back, we stopped at a fresh maple syrup vendor. I picked up a bottle of syrup and raspberry jam. I’m thankful for that. This morning and after Eric picked me up/dropped me off I fed birds some bread at Tim Horton’s. My gosh, today I am just so incredibly grateful for everything in God’s glorious Creation. Everything seems to have a brilliant glow. But I will get to that. Right now as I am writing, birds are flying around outside my window. I put bird seed there last night. I have had probably the most important and incredible epiphany that I have ever had and most likely will ever have last night at church. It happened like something just clicked into place. I am almost certain that it has much to do with my small group and my most recent confession to them. Because all of the sudden and it happened out of thin air, I feel in my heart the awesome, beautiful and soul-filling love of God. Prior to sharing with my small group what I shared with them, I knew that God loved me. But it was very much on a conscious level. In the sense that it was more of a cognitive feeling than anything I felt intuitively in my heart. Wow, this feeling is deep man. It’s deep like it has penetrated my very soul. I feel literally like a new creation. Actually it didn’t come from out of thin air. I felt it a bit last night at church. And I noticed it just in my desire to worship and to connect to people. I could feel my facial expressions moving a lot more fluidly as though I had been released of a pain. But this. All of a sudden I felt in my heart. I felt this: this world is so cripplingly cruel. So much pain and suffering fill its corners and evil and darkness seem to rule most of the time. In the midst of this, God saw what the evil one had done to His Creation and saw the fact that His people kept being led astray. It’s because of the evil and suffering in the world that God had such incredible compassion for the world, yet not being able to truly interact with the world, that He sent His Son for us so that we could have a relationship with Him. So that we could have a relationship with light, even surrounded by much darkness. Praise the living and beautiful Father for loving this world so much. The time when I felt this was when I was contemplating death and the pit. Contemplating the fact that Satan’s biggest tool in shaming people into not trusting God is all of the bad things that are happening and have happened in this world. All of a sudden I realized that it is only in the knowledge that God’s love for us is so great for Him to send His own cherished one that even in the midst of such overwhelming, overpowering darkness and fear and shame and anger and terror, we are able to overcome. We’re able to overcome knowing the overwhelming, overpowering love, faith and grace and joy that are all in the LOVE that God offered us. This revelation helped me to focus on the Gospel. Praise God! I am speechless. I don’t want to hurt anyone. There are too many times that I feel I have disclosed Truth in which I have been cold in its conveyance. In that vein, I feel it is necessary to address my last couple of entries. I do not hate women. Women are beautiful creatures of God and I want more than anything to show them how much I respect them. As I wrote to you, journal, some time ago in response to the entry that I reposted, I am merely frightened of them. I am avoidant because I do not want to be hurt again in a sexual way. I can speak to women for a while and even relate to them if I feel that there is no sexual threat. I would stifle myself in past, either repress completely my sexuality or counter any advances in my mind as nothing. Whenever I had a friendship with a woman in the past, I would rule out the possibility of sex very early so that the friendship could exist. Even if I was attracted. Sexual experiences and most of the time, mannerisms that had the potential to lead to sex were too traumatic for me. There were a couple of times during which I became close enough to women so that I really started to feel like love for them. In any case, I will not give up. My heart deserves love. Being a victim does not mean having a victim mentality. How very complex, the human being. I am not a fool. Nor am I trying to be mean. The fact is that I very, very much want desperately to be intimate with another human being. I want so much to feel healthy, natural love that is mutual and tender. I just wish people would understand that when I recoil from their efforts, it rarely has anything to do with the other person. A lot of the time, I feel very broken. And there are so many factors that contribute to my very rational fears. Even many of the social conventions that go along with dating, I am clueless about because most of the time, these manners are learned traits. I am not trying to feel bad about myself. I just want to explain a bit so that the people who have expressed interest in me, at a point in the past, will someday know that I did not in any manner of ways intend to hurt them. When an animal is neglected and abused for most of its life, it would take a lot of patience for it to open up. But, a lot of the time, I need to remember that I am not the only one who life affects. We are all reacting in so many ways. I have so much love in my heart and soul to offer. We all do. It just manages on life’s course, to get buried deep beneath trauma and hurt. And there is a difference between suffering and being hurt and being hateful and angry. I realize that this is my own issue and that I have to overcome it by myself. Today, I am grateful that I have been able to work through enough painful experiences that I am able to accept myself as a loving being. And I do have absolute faith that Christ can heal me. In the sense that I will overcome, I don’t expect anything from anybody. I feel as if I am improving a lot. I am not limiting myself anymore and am open to the concept of love and intimacy. I am just very faithful that whatever has to happen will happen and I will continue to have faith. Because it’s not in the times of joy, the times of blessings that faith counts as much.