Jehovah Rohi - The Lord My Shepherd
Jehovah Rohi - The Lord My Shepherd Episode 3
In this episode Diana dives a little deeper into her personal story and shares a portion from an early journal. Meet the Superhero of all superheroes! We will discuss that people cannot give what they do not have and sometimes we can have expectations on people that they are not capable of meeting. What is the answer? For all you old school listeners I will give you a hint. Don Henley had a song about this.
Diana’s Notes
A funny story from Church Humor entitled:
Not Afraid
A few minutes before the church services started, the townspeople were sitting in their pews and talking. Suddenly, Satan appeared at the front of the church. Everyone started screaming and running for the front entrance, trampling over each other in a frantic effort to get away from evil. Soon everyone had exited the church except for one elderly gentleman who sat calmly in his pew without moving, seeming oblivious to the fact that God’s ultimate enemy was in his presence. So Satan walked up to the old man and said, “don’t you know who I am ?”
The man replied, “yep, sure do.”
“Aren’t you afraid of me?” Asked Satan.
“Nope, sure ain’t” said the man.
“Don’t you realize I could kill you with a word?” asked Satan.
“Don’t doubt it for a minute” returned the old man in an even tone.
“Did you know that I could cause you profound, horrifying physical agony for all eternity?” persisted Satan.
“Yep” was the calm reply.
“And you’re still not afraid of me?”
“Nope.”
More than a little perturbed, Satan asked, “well, why aren’t you afraid of me?”
The man calmly replied,
“Been married to your sister for over 48 years.”
This humorous story made me laugh because it brought up memories of my parents. My dad would often tease my mom. He would get this mischievous twinkle in his eyes and he would have this amused boyish grin on his face.
Once he brought home a little figurine. I guess it was about 4 inches tall or so, it was a figurine of an older woman in a blue dress with dark hair and dark eyes; much like my mom’s. Anyways, on one side of the woman, she had a painted face that was soft, happy and pleasant- on the other side she had a painted face that was , well, not so pleasant. Her face had a scowl and her dark eyes glared like she could take on the devil himself and whoop him pretty good while she was at it! LOL
If you knew my mom when she was angry, you would take one look at those eyes and say, “oh yes, I see the resemblance.”
My dad would tease and say that he kept that old woman in the kitchen window so he could turn her face to the mood my mom was in. That way he would always know who he was married to that day! LOL
So, when I read that funny story at the beginning of the podcast, that was the memory that came to me. As weird as it may seem, it was a good, warm and happy memory of my parents.
I’m sure when my dad first brought that figurine home, it may not have made my mom too pleased. But I think over time mom saw that old woman as a symbol (in my dad’s own humorous way) that no matter what, he loved her for her. Many years later after my dad passed away, mom would talk about that old woman and laugh. She talked about it with great affection.
My mom could be a real firecracker, and my dad loved her for it!
I am so grateful that I came to be in a good place with both of my parent’s before they went home to be with the Lord. But there were many years, many wasted, foolish years when that was not the case. I held on to bitterness and anger against my mom for all the injustice in my life that I thought she should have protected me from. I am so thankful that I learned one of the hardest lessons in life to obtain. Learn to forgive. Let go and forgive. It does not bring one single day of happiness when we hold on to unforgiveness, but it will bring angst to your soul. Do it for yourself. Trust me, if you can learn to quickly forgive, you will find a lot of stress and anxiety will lose its grip on you.
Ephesians 4:32 in God’s word says this: I’m reading from the Amplified Bible:
Be kind and helpful to one another, tender-hearted (compassionate, understanding), forgiving one another (readily and freely), just as God in Christ also forgave you.
We all mess up! None of us are blameless. We get ourselves into trouble when we get our noses out of joint and get an attitude and justify our own bad behavior. That is what I did. I didn’t know how to express my hurt so I held it in and used it as fuel to make really horrible choices.
The good news is that our Shepherd knows exactly the path to take that will lead us in the right direction, but we have to put our anger, pride, and fear aside.
Today, I would like to talk about Jehovah Rohi, The Lord Is My Shepherd.
Growing up the only thing I really wanted was to be wanted by my mom. To wake up one day and feel her gushing over me with tender love. To feel her love for me cover over me like a warm blanket. But that was never the case. Now that I am older and have lived longer and have made many, many mistakes myself as a parent, as a person - getting to know my mom better after my dad passed away, I am confident that my mom never intentionally set out to be distant from me. To have a bit of coldness about her and with not being comfortable to be affectionate with me as a young child.
In the Introduction Episode of Heartfelt Conversations with Diana, “My Story” I talked a little about being sexually abused by my uncle and again later when my cousins came to live with us and his son sexually abused me during the few years they lived with us. The last bit of innocence in my childhood was stolen during that time. I went from being a shy and timid child, to a very disturbed, angry and rebellious young teen. Failure to develop a trusting bond to a parent or caregiver as a young child can lead to devastating consequences. For me, it eventually leads to depression, low self esteem( No self esteem truthfully), drinking, drugs and a lot of emotional disorders.
I desperately wanted to be normal, but I wasn’t sure what normal was anymore. I needed help and I was too afraid and too ashamed to ask for it. I went from a young child seeking to earn my mother’s love by behaving and doing all the things that I thought would please her, to acting out in very bad ways, in a way, my bad behavior was my way of crying out for help; for someone to notice me. I felt invisible to the whole world and especially to my mom.
I had overwhelming feelings of being stupid, unwanted, embarrassed, ashamed, unloveable and unworthy to even be alive.
My mom was very dedicated to her church. She was a sunday school teacher and sat on the local board of the church, so you would think that my story would be a lot different than this, but the sad thing is, what now breaks my heart and steals from the true joy and reason Jesus came to earth - to teach us the Good News of the Kingdom of God - the lie I was taught is that God’s wrath seeks to destroy us, to break us if we don’t live up to perfection. To religious laws and customs. I was taught if you love God there will be no sin in your life, no wrongdoing, and that is simply impossible for any person to live up to. I believe that for many years my mom struggled with this herself. Trying to be perfect without flaws which only frustrates our souls and our spirit and puts a huge wedge between us and God. If we could be flawless, then what was the purpose of Jesus paying for our sins, our flaws when He went to the cross? His death for our sins is the very free gift of salvation of God’s grace and love that He desperately desires for all of us. God created us to be His family, but still today, many churches fail to teach the true word of God. We will fail every day. We are not perfect. But we have a perfect Savior and He wants to be our Good Shepherd. He wanted to be my Good Shepherd, but unfortunately I only knew of God’s wrath. Every mistake I made, every bad feeling I had about myself, every wrong choice was evidence that I could and would never be acceptable to Him.
I wanted to be good. I wanted to be a good girl, but I didn’t know how to get rid of all the bad that seemed to chase after me. I thought I was a magnet for bad things because I was just a bad kid, unacceptable to God and rejected by Him as well. I was taught religion not grace. Grace, not our works, is what sets us free when we believe in Jesus. That’s our part, just to believe and receive.
I gave my heart to Jesus when I was 12 years old and I was baptized in a pond not far from my home, but I had no idea what any of that really meant, other than I was bad and I knew I was bad and I didn’t want to go to hell.
I was never taught about the Holy Spirit. Jesus gave us His Spirit to be our Helper and to empower us to live life the way God originally intended; but we will discuss the Holy Spirit in future episodes.
As small children we need help navigating life. There are circumstances in life, that as a child, we have not yet matured enough to understand or comprehend. Understanding life and having wisdom and knowledge comes with time and experience, as we grow and mature. Life is a building block , one building block set up on top of another. Without a good foundation those blocks will not be able to withstand all the storms in life that will come. As a child, we are taught not to touch a hot stove because we will get burned. As a child, we are taught not to put our finger in a light socket because we may get a painful shock. As a child, we are taught not to run out into the street because we may get hit by a car. But if we are not taught other healthy boundaries in life, such as it is not okay for adults to touch us in certain ways, that is is not okay for someone to hurt you because they are angry, or that it is not okay for you as a child to hurt someone because you are angry, and many other boundaries that help us to have a good, solid foundation; then the blocks of our lives will become unstable and shift. Eventually, they will come tumbling down and crash, leaving a disaster that will have to be dealt with before we can rebuild a healthy stable life. Without boundaries, the process will repeat over and over and each time we try to rebuild we are a little less sturdier than the time before.
Proverbs 22:6 says:
Train up a child in the way they should go and when he is old, he will not depart from it.
We need our parents to train us up so that we are secure, stable and able to make good choices, helping a young child learn to differentiate between right and wrong. Good, useful instructive boundaries help us form better decisions as we grow up and as we develop other relationships and we wean off from our dependence on our parents.
Unfortunately many emotionally broken parents, sexually abused parents, parents who themselves have not received loving direction in their upbringing do not have the understanding or knowledge of how to bring course direction for the life in their own child(s) life.
My mom was raised in a hard, harsh, work-not love- environment. She could not give me or my siblings what we needed because she never received it for herself.
We cannot give what we do not have possession of ourselves.
I swore as a young person that I would never treat my kids the way that I was treated. I would be the perfect parent. Of course that was dreaming and not reality!
We can be trained up positively, but also negatively. Negative training through verbal abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse; neglect of any kind can and most likely will lead to negative results in our teenage and adult lives. We might walk around pretending like everything on the outside is all good, but when boundaries have been crossed and trust has been broken the course of our lives will become blurred and disturbed, and before we know it; we are lost in a wilderness of self - destruction.
I wanted my mom to have a perfect love for me. I wanted my mom to rescue me, to swoop in like a superhero and save me from the dark gloom that seemed to be overtaking my life, but she didn’t. I wanted her to be perfect without flaws. We all need to know that no person is perfect.
There is no one in the world with enough super powers to rescue us when our hearts are broken or our souls ( our will and emotions) have suffered such tremendous blows that we feel the life within us has been shattered to the core.
By the time I was fifteen, I had so much anger and bitterness built up inside of me towards my mom. I hated her. Of course, the reality is, I didn’t really hate her, but because I felt unloved and rejected and emotionally abandoned by her, the undealt with pain became a bitter root inside of me which came out as hate, anger, deep anger.
While working at a Campus Crusade event for Halloween, I met a young man who was five to six years older than me. He had already graduated high school, had a job, a truck, all the dreamy things that a troubled teen thought would be the answer to her own miserable life. After spending time together and sharing how muchI hated my mom and how little she cared about me, we came up with a plan. Much like the dysfunctional plan we discussed in the last episode; El Roi - The God Who Sees Me, like Sari, Hagar and Abram, had followed through on a really, bad idea; we came up with a very similar horrible, bad plan and it took on a life of its own. We decided that if I got pregnant then we could get married and all my problems would be over.
Come on now! Who out there is listening, and thinking that is just a really stupid, bad plan???
Well, you are right! It was a really bad idea. But when you are desperate for attention you do really, really stupid things.
You see his idea, his plan was for me to get pregnant and get married; but in my heart, I was convinced that this extreme act of rebellion would suddenly snap my mom out of her detachment of me and in a cry of desperation she would be overwhelmed with such a deep love for me, she would snatch me out of this reckless decision and her motherly love would pull me back to safety. She would realize how much she loved me and our relationship would come to this epic love story of a mother and her child I had always dreamed of.
I got pregnant alright, but her response was not at all what I had gambled on. She was embarrassed and the thought of the ridicule she would receive from her peers at church and at work, out-weighed her concern for me, and what in the world I might have been thinking. There was no reaching out, no mother- daughter healing or restoration. Instead, it was made very clear to me that I would be expected to get married unless I secretly wanted to have an abortion. Shocked! Destroyed! Broken! Would not even begin to describe how I felt. Once and for all, I knew my mom never cared at all about me. My fears of being unloved and unwanted by her were now confirmed. She was not the superhero I needed to rescue me from the pit of hell.
Below is a portion out of a journal I was keeping in the beginning of me seeking to be rescued from God. I had not yet learned how to follow my Shepherd, my Rescuer, But I was awakening to the fact that I knew I needed His help:
“Sometimes I get so lost and confused and I hear the voices of everyone around me telling me what I should do or feel or think. I feel like I am a wounded animal laying on the ground and everyone is like a vulture swooping down, taking little bites out of me, slowly killing me.
I must make myself get up and run for shelter until I can heal and be strong enough to continue my journey. But I will never be strong enough or heal, until I know who I am.
Help me Father so that I do not allow my past to define me or destroy me,but that through Your Word and Your love for me, I can fully understand Your love is sufficient.
My grace is sufficient for you, My grace is made perfect in weakness. 2 Corinthians 12:9
In the midst of my trials and the feelings of suffering Lord, help me to see that through my pain I will see You work a better plan for me. That You will sustain me and Your power can work through me if I am willing to submit to You and Your perfect plan for my life. For You will accomplish even greater thighs then I could ever imagine. “
In the next episode, we will pick back up on the rest of this chapter in my life, but I would like to conclude today’s episode with this -
If you were not provided for, or loved, or protected as a young child. If you have been harmed, injured, or wounded deep in your soul; the greatest gift of recovery and healing that you can give to yourself is to let go. Forgive whomever it might be that hurt you so terribly - not for them- but for yourself!! To free you from the bondage of anger and destruction from all the bitterness, and begin the healing process of a hemorrhaging heart.
It will by no means be easy, but I promise you!! I do, I promise you, one day you will look back and you will be a new person!
Jesus - Jehovah Rohi - The Lord My Shepherd, is our ultimate superhero. He defeated mortality, death for your eternal life, yes; but He also wants you to be alive in this life. In the land of the living!
Jesus is the Death Avenger !! And He wants to be your Shepherd in life.
Before King David was a king, he was a shepherd boy for his fathers sheep and he wrote the 23rd Psalms. If anyone knew the love and devotion of a “Good Shepherd” it was David. Sheep are very defenseless. Have you ever seen a sheep warn you off with a growl or bark?
Sheep can’t get themselves up, once they fall over. Sometimes sheep “cast down” which means they turn over onto their backside and if they are not put back on their feet, they will die.
Sometimes our souls feel cast down as if we will die - Jesus wants to help you get back on your feet and on solid good ground.
David had to fight off a bear, and a lion, and many dangers tending to his fathers flock and in the 23rd Psalms he describes how Jesus - Our Shepherd - Jehovah Rohi looks after us.
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. Let Him, allow Him to be personal to you when you feel “wanting”. Call out to Him and share your burden with Him.
As a child I wanted my mom, and later in life as I grew older, I wanted other people to give me what I needed - LOVE. Unconditional Love, but only our Shepherd Jehovah Rohi has that super power.
Let him take you from dry, barren hopes and dreams to new visions of green pastures; pastures supplied by the vast love He has for you, and His desire to give you good things.
Learn to let Him guide your paths and lead you from choppy, stormy, unstable waters to peaceful,l quiet waters, where He will tend to your hurts and restore your soul.
Come to know your Savior’s voice like sheep who come to find security in knowing the voice of their shepherd.
He wants to lead you and guide you to peaceful, still waters so be willing to learn how to trust Him. It is not going to be an easy journey to learn how to trust Him and not turn to your own defenses, but what brings the most peace within me, is knowing that no matter what is going on in this unpredictable world, is I can always trust and know in full confidence that my superhero - my Shepherd Jesus - Jehovah Rohi, is always looking out for me.
Psalms 23
1The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing.
2 He makes me lie down in green pastures,
he leads me beside quiet waters,
3 He refreshes my soul.
He guides me along the right paths
for his name’s sake.
4 Even though I walk
through the darkest valley,
I will fear no evil,
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff,
they comfort me.
5 You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
6 Surely your goodness and love will follow me
all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord
forever.
Songs to inspire you:
Honey In The Rock - Brooke Ligertwood
Brooke Ligertwood - Honey in the Rock (with Brandon Lake) [Lyric Video]
Help Is On The Way - Toby Mac
TobyMac - Help Is On The Way (Maybe Midnight)
Stand In Your Love- Josh Baldwin
Stand In Your Love - Josh Baldwin | Heaven Come 2018
Scriptures from this week's Podcast
Ephesians 4:32 Amplified Bible:
Be kind and helpful to one another, tender-hearted (compassionate, understanding), forgiving one another (readily and freely), just as God in Christ also forgave you.
Proverbs 22:6
Train up a child in the way they should go and when he is old, he will not depart from it.
2 Corinthians 12:9 My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness.
Psalms 23
1The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing.
2 He makes me lie down in green pastures,
he leads me beside quiet waters,
3 He refreshes my soul.
He guides me along the right paths
for his name’s sake.
4 Even though I walk
through the darkest valley,
I will fear no evil,
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff,
they comfort me.
5 You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
6 Surely your goodness and love will follow me
all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord
forever.
Jeremiah 29:11 - “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”
Peace for the mind - Get out in nature
This week get outside and take a walk for at least 30 minutes. Find a pretty park or a neighborhood with nice landscape with pretty trees, flowers, whatever or sit by a quiet lake! Just get outside and enjoy nature. Breathe in the air. Take in some good deep breaths and just forget about the stress of the day or week. Life is short, so enjoy it!
A little humor
Something I read that made me laugh, because at one time that would be me!
“I’m going to let GOD Fix It because if I fix it, I’m going to jail! LOL