comingjoy
Member
- Joined
- Apr 10, 2008
- Messages
- 102
Hello everyone. I have been putting off sharing my personal testimony but our Father says it is time. TO many women are seeking love and so desiring it in such a way mistakes are made and hearts and yes some lives are being destroyed. Women please let Christ love us first and make a man search for you in Christ. When a women gives of herself in an intimate way it can scar us for life. I know and am still on the mend from years of hurt and poor choices. No one will be able to love us the way Christ wants too. Men do not make us complete nor do we complete a man. Only Christ can make each of us complete. ( please note when this was written. Since then I have been divorced again. On the mends from the hurt Christ is my great physician. I could not of made it this far with out HIM!!!)
I am the Woman at the Well
Comingjoy 2001
He told her, "Go, call your husband and come back."
"I have no husband," she replied.
Jesus said to her, "You are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true."
John 4: 16-18
I was once the woman at the well. I did not realize this until our youth were asked to pick someone from the bible that they are most like. I had picked Mary Martha’s sister as I would be more apt to sit and listen to Jesus or about HIM than to clean my house. If you have ever been in my home you would know this to be true. That night the adults shared first who they are most like. I was the last to GO. As I listened to the others share someone mentioned Paul that they were like Saul then and now Paul. It was then that I realized that before I accepted Jesus as Lord over life that I was the woman at the well.
How does one become a woman at the well? With me it was a low self-esteem with little confidence in who I was. I am 38 years old. I weigh roughly 112 pounds and am 5 feet tall. I share this with you to show that I am a small woman. I have always been very small in all areas of my body, I have been teased since early on in my life. If I wasn’t teased I was being overly protected. I never saw myself as pretty. I was a plain Jane. The one thing I did have going for me was my long blond hair. Yet this also caused grief, as the blond jokes would be something I had to contend with. I would be picked on for being so short. I was under 5 feet tall till my sophomore year in high school. I was told that I would grow up to be a midget. No one wanted to go out with me because I was so short. I would even be teased about having no chest. Oh the jokes I heard because of my chest size or should I say lack of one.
Growing up I would play sports become a junior high cheerleader for girls’ volleyball, as well as a member of my high school dance team. You would think I felt good about myself but I didn’t. No matter what I tried I never felt I was accepted or approved of. I knew my parents loved me because they were supposed to. Yet I never felt that I had their approval or cared for what I did. I can recall whenever I would get excited about trying something I would always hear the negative. After a while I just quit sharing things of interest and wouldn’t even try things. I wanted so desperately to be accepted and to feel that what I did was important.
I was closer to my dad than I was my mum. Yet at one point during my high school years that could change. Even to this day I am unsure exactly what happened between us that caused us to drift apart from each other. This only added to my need to feel accepted and now loved. I would meet the first of several men I would sleep with for all the wrong reasons. This first of several was a high school boy that went to a different school. He treated me like I was someone special. I would learn that he would go out with other girls because of my standards. The rumors upset me and angered me. I felt that if I was to keep this boy in my life I would have to change my standards and sleep with him. I never even thought that I should dump this guy and move on. He had made me feel good and I wanted that back. It wouldn’t be long after we started to sleep together that I would become pregnant. That ended out real relationship. He quickly moved onto other girls as I went through the nine months of pregnancy. Through the support of my family I would keep the baby and finish school. Through this whole ordeal I was lost more than ever and wanted ever so much to be loved and appreciated. My relationship with my parents became more and more tense and I would find myself needing acceptance. I would start dating an older man in the military that my family really liked. It was in the beginning of my senior year when I had my son and started dating this man late that senior year. We got married and moved away. I thought that this would be a way out from my parents’ household and somebody that would be there for me, or so I thought.
In this marriage I would realize that sex was something you did after a fight to make up. Nothing would get resolved and I found myself feeling worse than I have ever been so far. Though this man truly loved me and I did love him so I thought. I would only years later, realize that until I could love myself I could not truly love anyone else. Our 7-8 year marriage would be a rocky one. With both of these relationships I would become disillusioned about what sex was to be like. Sex was now something you did for someone else but gave me little pleasure. Sex was a tool you used to get something you thought you wanted only to realize you liked yourself even less afterwards. I hated sex and began hating myself.
I would find myself searching to be loved for all the wrong reason repeatedly hooking up with the wrong guys. After my marriage ended with a divorce started by myself I would learn to drink my problems away. This would be easily done as I worked in a small restaurant/bar in the town I grew up in. My sister was the bar tender and I could get the drinks for free. I would start to dress in a way that accented my petite frame to draw attention to myself. My family would find it kind of funny when I would become drunk as I was the only who hardly got into trouble but boy! When I did it was in a big way. While working as a waitress / cook I would be set up with men and be pressured into sleeping with them. Not by just the men themselves but by pressure from others. Those around me at the time kept asking if I had slept with the guy I would be seeing at the time. I would be repeatedly asked why I haven’t slept with him. It became so frustrating that I would sleep with them just to get others to leave me alone. I would sleep with guys because I thought that‘s what you had to do. I feel that if I didn’t sleep with them that something was wrong with me. This would cause me to try a one-night stand kind of dating with a couple of guys. This only led me to want to drink my sorrows away even more. You might wonder what kind of time frame this took place in. Believe it or not after my divorce it all happened in a one year time frame. I was heading down the wrong path and at a very fast pace. I would end up dating a man I worked with that had a drinking problem. He wasn’t abusive but never dependable and out for himself which left me even more lonely and hurting so deep within that I didn’t like myself at all. You might think it was what helped me start to snap out of it. The truth is I had several more hard lessons to learn over the next several years before I would be realize what I needed.
I stopped drinking after only 4 to 6 months. It wasn’t that I drank all the time but when I was at work or went out the amount I did drink was more than enough to get me drunk and too dull the pain and void I felt. My choice of friends was just about as bad as my choice of men. I started to clean up my act. I changed friends and stopped going out. While at work one Saturday morning a couple came in for a cup of coffee. We started talking as there wasn’t anybody else there. I had been reading a book and had been wondering if God truly tested us. I had called a local Baptist church and asked the pastor if God tests us. If he did, what if you failed? He told me yes, I then asked him what do you do if you feel you have failed him. He stated that you ask to be forgiven and move on. That was the extent of the conversation. He never asked for my name nor did I offer it to him before I hang up. I wasn’t even saved. I grew up going to a Catholic Church or Lutheran Church and only went once in a while. I found myself wondering what the differences between the churches were. While this couple had their coffee I found out that they were on their way to the local prison to preach. I knew I had the opportunity to ask them about the differences among the churches. They briefly shared what the different churches believed in and they went on their way. The very next day they returned. They stated that they hadn’t planned on coming back Sunday but felt lead to talk with me some more. We talked some more but what bothered me was that every time I stood near them I had chills, goose bumps; no where else in the restaurant did I have this feeling. I can not remember exactly how we got on the subject of being saved but we did. I was the only one working at the time and there was only one other customer there. I did not care. They led me into the prayer of salvation. Right there at the counter of a small local restaurant I accepted the Lord.
This would not be the end of the poor choices I would make in men. I started to go to the local Baptist church was baptized and met a man in church. This relationship would cause me to question my entire walk with God to the extent of being one step away form throwing my bible in a ditch on the way home from church. I still had not learnt that it wasn’t having a man in my life that made me who I was. I became so depressed that suicide crossed my mind more often than I cared to admit. I remember sleeping one morning after all my kids went to school. There were four at the time with the youngest having a severe disability but that is another story. As I was sleeping, wishing I was dead I heard someone shout my name. I bolted straight up and looked around my room to see who was there. I saw no one and looked out of my window to see if anyone was there. I found no one yet I knew someone had shouted my name which woke me up from a deep sleep. I called a friend to come over to talk as I was concerned about my thoughts.
It was then that God spoke to me in such a way that I knew it was God telling me that he loved me and that I was going to be strong and hold fast to him.
I started to pray to God and prayed that God would take away my need to have a man in my life. I prayed that I would like to share my life with someone but if it wasn’t what God had in mind for me that I would be OK with that. I vowed off men and focused on my relationship with the Lord. After a while I met a man at church. One may think I should have run the other way with how my last relationship with a guy I met at church failed. He was just a man looking for a friend who had invited him to church. He would end up being in the same Sunday class as I was in. We began talking and shortly after we began to challenge each other with our memory verses. I would invite him to dinner to try our Wednesday night services. We started seeing each other and started studying our Sunday school lessons together. We fell in love and married shortly afterwards. I was truly blessed to have a man in my life one that loved me and all of my four children. Finally, you would like to believe I found true happiness, yet there was something still amiss. Because of my history I felt that sex was something we had to be doing all the time. My husband did not have the same feelings nor could he fully understand what I was feeling. I started to feel ugly and undesirable. My husband didn’t know what was going on, only that his wife was unhappy. I was trying to destroy my marriage and I didn’t even realize it at the time.
We would be married two very rocky years before I would come to realize that sex was to be something special. Just because we didn’t have sex all the time didn’t mean he didn’t love me or find me attractive. I would later learn that it wasn’t my husband’s job to make me happy. True happiness and joy comes from God not sex. I praise God that HE loved me enough to die for me. I felt so unlovable and not needed that I ended up at the well looking at the living water that only GOD can give. It is hard to know and believe that someone could know everything about you and still love you anyway, I wish I could have learnt this earlier on in my life, but I didn’t. I praise God for giving me a kind of love that no one else can give. We need to stop planning things in our life our way. Only when we step back and see where God is at work and know what HIS plan is and yield ourselves to HIM can we join HIM and truly be happy and filled with joy even through the difficult times.
I am the Woman at the Well
Comingjoy 2001
He told her, "Go, call your husband and come back."
"I have no husband," she replied.
Jesus said to her, "You are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true."
John 4: 16-18
I was once the woman at the well. I did not realize this until our youth were asked to pick someone from the bible that they are most like. I had picked Mary Martha’s sister as I would be more apt to sit and listen to Jesus or about HIM than to clean my house. If you have ever been in my home you would know this to be true. That night the adults shared first who they are most like. I was the last to GO. As I listened to the others share someone mentioned Paul that they were like Saul then and now Paul. It was then that I realized that before I accepted Jesus as Lord over life that I was the woman at the well.
How does one become a woman at the well? With me it was a low self-esteem with little confidence in who I was. I am 38 years old. I weigh roughly 112 pounds and am 5 feet tall. I share this with you to show that I am a small woman. I have always been very small in all areas of my body, I have been teased since early on in my life. If I wasn’t teased I was being overly protected. I never saw myself as pretty. I was a plain Jane. The one thing I did have going for me was my long blond hair. Yet this also caused grief, as the blond jokes would be something I had to contend with. I would be picked on for being so short. I was under 5 feet tall till my sophomore year in high school. I was told that I would grow up to be a midget. No one wanted to go out with me because I was so short. I would even be teased about having no chest. Oh the jokes I heard because of my chest size or should I say lack of one.
Growing up I would play sports become a junior high cheerleader for girls’ volleyball, as well as a member of my high school dance team. You would think I felt good about myself but I didn’t. No matter what I tried I never felt I was accepted or approved of. I knew my parents loved me because they were supposed to. Yet I never felt that I had their approval or cared for what I did. I can recall whenever I would get excited about trying something I would always hear the negative. After a while I just quit sharing things of interest and wouldn’t even try things. I wanted so desperately to be accepted and to feel that what I did was important.
I was closer to my dad than I was my mum. Yet at one point during my high school years that could change. Even to this day I am unsure exactly what happened between us that caused us to drift apart from each other. This only added to my need to feel accepted and now loved. I would meet the first of several men I would sleep with for all the wrong reasons. This first of several was a high school boy that went to a different school. He treated me like I was someone special. I would learn that he would go out with other girls because of my standards. The rumors upset me and angered me. I felt that if I was to keep this boy in my life I would have to change my standards and sleep with him. I never even thought that I should dump this guy and move on. He had made me feel good and I wanted that back. It wouldn’t be long after we started to sleep together that I would become pregnant. That ended out real relationship. He quickly moved onto other girls as I went through the nine months of pregnancy. Through the support of my family I would keep the baby and finish school. Through this whole ordeal I was lost more than ever and wanted ever so much to be loved and appreciated. My relationship with my parents became more and more tense and I would find myself needing acceptance. I would start dating an older man in the military that my family really liked. It was in the beginning of my senior year when I had my son and started dating this man late that senior year. We got married and moved away. I thought that this would be a way out from my parents’ household and somebody that would be there for me, or so I thought.
In this marriage I would realize that sex was something you did after a fight to make up. Nothing would get resolved and I found myself feeling worse than I have ever been so far. Though this man truly loved me and I did love him so I thought. I would only years later, realize that until I could love myself I could not truly love anyone else. Our 7-8 year marriage would be a rocky one. With both of these relationships I would become disillusioned about what sex was to be like. Sex was now something you did for someone else but gave me little pleasure. Sex was a tool you used to get something you thought you wanted only to realize you liked yourself even less afterwards. I hated sex and began hating myself.
I would find myself searching to be loved for all the wrong reason repeatedly hooking up with the wrong guys. After my marriage ended with a divorce started by myself I would learn to drink my problems away. This would be easily done as I worked in a small restaurant/bar in the town I grew up in. My sister was the bar tender and I could get the drinks for free. I would start to dress in a way that accented my petite frame to draw attention to myself. My family would find it kind of funny when I would become drunk as I was the only who hardly got into trouble but boy! When I did it was in a big way. While working as a waitress / cook I would be set up with men and be pressured into sleeping with them. Not by just the men themselves but by pressure from others. Those around me at the time kept asking if I had slept with the guy I would be seeing at the time. I would be repeatedly asked why I haven’t slept with him. It became so frustrating that I would sleep with them just to get others to leave me alone. I would sleep with guys because I thought that‘s what you had to do. I feel that if I didn’t sleep with them that something was wrong with me. This would cause me to try a one-night stand kind of dating with a couple of guys. This only led me to want to drink my sorrows away even more. You might wonder what kind of time frame this took place in. Believe it or not after my divorce it all happened in a one year time frame. I was heading down the wrong path and at a very fast pace. I would end up dating a man I worked with that had a drinking problem. He wasn’t abusive but never dependable and out for himself which left me even more lonely and hurting so deep within that I didn’t like myself at all. You might think it was what helped me start to snap out of it. The truth is I had several more hard lessons to learn over the next several years before I would be realize what I needed.
I stopped drinking after only 4 to 6 months. It wasn’t that I drank all the time but when I was at work or went out the amount I did drink was more than enough to get me drunk and too dull the pain and void I felt. My choice of friends was just about as bad as my choice of men. I started to clean up my act. I changed friends and stopped going out. While at work one Saturday morning a couple came in for a cup of coffee. We started talking as there wasn’t anybody else there. I had been reading a book and had been wondering if God truly tested us. I had called a local Baptist church and asked the pastor if God tests us. If he did, what if you failed? He told me yes, I then asked him what do you do if you feel you have failed him. He stated that you ask to be forgiven and move on. That was the extent of the conversation. He never asked for my name nor did I offer it to him before I hang up. I wasn’t even saved. I grew up going to a Catholic Church or Lutheran Church and only went once in a while. I found myself wondering what the differences between the churches were. While this couple had their coffee I found out that they were on their way to the local prison to preach. I knew I had the opportunity to ask them about the differences among the churches. They briefly shared what the different churches believed in and they went on their way. The very next day they returned. They stated that they hadn’t planned on coming back Sunday but felt lead to talk with me some more. We talked some more but what bothered me was that every time I stood near them I had chills, goose bumps; no where else in the restaurant did I have this feeling. I can not remember exactly how we got on the subject of being saved but we did. I was the only one working at the time and there was only one other customer there. I did not care. They led me into the prayer of salvation. Right there at the counter of a small local restaurant I accepted the Lord.
This would not be the end of the poor choices I would make in men. I started to go to the local Baptist church was baptized and met a man in church. This relationship would cause me to question my entire walk with God to the extent of being one step away form throwing my bible in a ditch on the way home from church. I still had not learnt that it wasn’t having a man in my life that made me who I was. I became so depressed that suicide crossed my mind more often than I cared to admit. I remember sleeping one morning after all my kids went to school. There were four at the time with the youngest having a severe disability but that is another story. As I was sleeping, wishing I was dead I heard someone shout my name. I bolted straight up and looked around my room to see who was there. I saw no one and looked out of my window to see if anyone was there. I found no one yet I knew someone had shouted my name which woke me up from a deep sleep. I called a friend to come over to talk as I was concerned about my thoughts.
It was then that God spoke to me in such a way that I knew it was God telling me that he loved me and that I was going to be strong and hold fast to him.
I started to pray to God and prayed that God would take away my need to have a man in my life. I prayed that I would like to share my life with someone but if it wasn’t what God had in mind for me that I would be OK with that. I vowed off men and focused on my relationship with the Lord. After a while I met a man at church. One may think I should have run the other way with how my last relationship with a guy I met at church failed. He was just a man looking for a friend who had invited him to church. He would end up being in the same Sunday class as I was in. We began talking and shortly after we began to challenge each other with our memory verses. I would invite him to dinner to try our Wednesday night services. We started seeing each other and started studying our Sunday school lessons together. We fell in love and married shortly afterwards. I was truly blessed to have a man in my life one that loved me and all of my four children. Finally, you would like to believe I found true happiness, yet there was something still amiss. Because of my history I felt that sex was something we had to be doing all the time. My husband did not have the same feelings nor could he fully understand what I was feeling. I started to feel ugly and undesirable. My husband didn’t know what was going on, only that his wife was unhappy. I was trying to destroy my marriage and I didn’t even realize it at the time.
We would be married two very rocky years before I would come to realize that sex was to be something special. Just because we didn’t have sex all the time didn’t mean he didn’t love me or find me attractive. I would later learn that it wasn’t my husband’s job to make me happy. True happiness and joy comes from God not sex. I praise God that HE loved me enough to die for me. I felt so unlovable and not needed that I ended up at the well looking at the living water that only GOD can give. It is hard to know and believe that someone could know everything about you and still love you anyway, I wish I could have learnt this earlier on in my life, but I didn’t. I praise God for giving me a kind of love that no one else can give. We need to stop planning things in our life our way. Only when we step back and see where God is at work and know what HIS plan is and yield ourselves to HIM can we join HIM and truly be happy and filled with joy even through the difficult times.
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