Freedom Awaits...

This week we invited the ladies at our REFIT® class to drop their baggage at the door.  Baggage can be anything weighing you down right now. Stress, worries, negative thinking, comparison, jealousy, regret, guilt, shame...I could go on and on. After we danced we told them that Jesus took all their bags when He died on the cross and He's willing to hold on to them for us, indefinitely.  We just have to let him.

As I drove home that night I though "But what about our carry on bags?"  You know the ones you want to keep close to you, full of stuff you don't want to be without.  Sometimes we can fill up our carry-on bags with the same heavy junk that weighs us down. Then it dawned on me that I've dealt with this before.  Here is an excerpt from a blog I wrote 5 years ago, entitled "Leave Your Carry-On":

When I met my husband five and a half years ago I was a new Christian and I came with a lot of baggage.  I had just walked away from a bad marriage and was going through a divorce that made me feel lower than low.   I was living back at home with my parents working part time, at a minimum wage job that did zero for my self –esteem.  But as I grew closer to the Lord  I began to leave those bags at the foot of the cross.  Even though I tend to pick some of those bags up from time to time, I’ve learned to put them back down.  However, there is one issue lately I just can’t seem to give to Christ, we’ll call it my carry-on bag and it’s called envy.

            I seem to have (again) fallen into this pit of envying everyone around me.  When my husband and I first got married we both held well-paying positions and money was never an issue.  When I became pregnant with our daughter I quit my job to be a stay at home mom and soon after that my husband was laid off.  Since that time money has become quite an issue and from this stems my spite.  See while I lug my carry-on around it would appear that no one around me has it quite as bad as I do.  Even as I write this I think “Wow. I’ve become so self-centered.”  So how do I crawl out of this pit?  How do I leave my carry-on with Jesus? 

Fast forward 5 years and I've emptied most of the envy from my carry-on. Do I still have other junk in there, weighing me down? Absolutely. But here's how we work on getting rid of it:

1. Saturate yourself in truth.  Get in the word. Everyday. Replace the junk in your carry-on with truth. Replace the lies with facts about who God says you are and how much you mean to HIM.

2. Find your truth speaker.  Who is the person who you can bear your soul to? Who is the one who can pull you out of your dark place? Who is the one who can speak truth to you (even if the it's hard)? You were not meant to walk through this alone.