These ”Tough” Bikers Make A Huge Difference For Abused Children
Tag Archives: Understands
NEVERLAND
i is stuck in Neverland these days
a place where it feels safe to hide
safe from the big people
secure from problems to big
where one can fly away at whim
laugh and play with abandon
forget
Neverland
but i know it is not real
rather a trap
a secret room in a game of hide and seek
me searching for me as i hides me
Neverland is more confusing than it is worth
pretending doesn’t make it real
i don’t have pixie dust to fly away from here
to lift me from this trappedness i feel
i scared to fly into the storm that separates
at the swirl of the feelings that sent me here
i find i can’t hide from them no more
i want to go home to me
i want to be brave and tell them to people
leave behind this ghost town of what was
so i need a ride
i never had rides before that i knowed where there
i do now
so to stay is to live a lie
so goodbye Neverland
i am journeying home today
starting even if it takes me awhile
my fairy wings are the back of m guardian Angel
i can even lie there and rest while the storm rages
my angel fights my Captain Hooks for me
i just trust
and believe in my momma Mary and papa God
remember that they want me home
they never ever wanted me to leave
goodnight Neverland
the land i was never meant to live in
home is where i belong
home in Jesus is where i am going. 
CORE REACTOR
I realized something today about me.
It began with getting dressed this morning. As the weather changes and I find myself aware of the cold as part of my healing I want to dress warmer. Perhaps some long sleeves or maybe even a sweater, I will think. I have some, ones that have caught my eye because they are purple, some because they feel so soft and I imagine how comforting it would feel against me. I get them, but wearing them, that’s a whole nother story.
You see, I panic. Become all frantic and paranoid. Just have to rip them off or I can’t breathe. Then I stand there lost, fighting for control. striving to ground myself to here and now. For to be warm is just one of the many things I was denied for a period of my childhood, that now I struggle to accept. I can know I am cold while convincing my body I am not. Safer to not need and such.
Or so it can seem. But I am healing enough that I know when I am perceiving wrong sometimes, knowing needs to lead to changing. So, today, I spent time with Abba asking Him to help me understand this panic and apprehension. To understand that I may overcome.
He opened my heart to the truth of these feelings. Helped me to fathom that they are being fed of something. One doesn’t just panic unless they are panicking about something. I wondered, why am I apprehensive.?
What is the core reactor issue.
Then I knew. It is fear. Plain and simple. Fear.
This surprised me, I thought I had this fear thing under control. I mean, I don’t run away and hide like I used to. I share with people instead of keeping things bottled up. I trust my Lord, I feel safe in my home, safe in the life God has given me. “How can this be fear,” I thought.
But Abba always bring me to truth, so I needed to stop asking how and denying the fear. I need to turn to my Jesus and give the fear to Him.
I know this won’t be easy, I know I will need help and will have to push myself. Time to thank the Lord for my body and the way He created it, hear and feel what it is telling me. Treat it with love and respect. Dress it warm, even wear shoes more.
Allow my Abba to change my core, to one that learns to love me as my fear is yielded to Him.
His Peace the only kind of core reaction I desire.
A SHOE KIND OF DAY
“Be prepared. You’re up against far more than you can handle on your own. Take all the help you can get, every weapon God has issued, so that when it’s all over but the shouting you’ll still be on your feet. Truth, righteousness, peace, faith, and salvation are more than words. Learn how to apply them. You’ll need them throughout your life. God’s Word is an indispensable weapon. In the same way, prayer is essential in this ongoing warfare. Pray hard and long.” Ephesians 6:15-18a (MSG)
Anyone who knows me is well aware of my “shoe issue.” I smile as I type this. Smile because I know many of you are doing just that, thinking, “What shoes?”
Now I am chuckling a bit.
Shoes, they aren’t really my thing. I am more likely to be without than with when it comes to them. Oh, I have lots of them, tucked away in a magnificent antique box that I found, perfect with all its cubbies. Thing is, my shoes spend more time there than on my feet.
I do love some of them, how they are comfortable, I don’t buy them if they aren’t! No high heels for this girl!
I just don’t wear them at times.
How could I revel in the walking through the rain puddles if I did? Feel the texture of the earth beneath my feet? I feel so much with my feet!
Yet, I am learning that there are times for shoelessness and times for wearing them.
After all, going barefoot in the snow, as I have often, isn’t good for my health. Caring for my feet requires shodding them in the heat, guarding them from harm.
So, shoeless kind of days are less.
Today, Abba, woke me to this about wearing shoes.
But let me start at the beginning.
Yesterday I interacted with someone who put me on edge. The type of individual who raised a red flag for me as a sexual abuse survivor. He made me very uncomfortable as we rode the elevator, I found myself putting objects between us and guarding my answers to his questions.
Protecting myself, that’s what I was doing. 
Wearing my shoes.
Big Girl shoes.
Safe Girl shoes.
I wore these shoes with confidence.
I felt grounded in my present.
No more barefoot used and tossed away.
No
This is the pair of shoes I found myself wearing yesterday…
Fearless ones.
Beautiful to look upon as they were embellished in Christ like gemstones
Yet, well made that they not give.
I wasn’t afraid.
That’s big for me. I have had a lot of opportunities to fear these last few months, and I have found myself on the side of that fear way to often.
I have coward and shrunk back, cringed and claimed false blame…
Yesterday was a no more kind of day…
A shoe one.
I am allowed to guard my self,
I am secure in Christ and that means a world of difference, all the difference,
Yet, only if I shod myself in this truth,
I do.
With gratitude, in awe, and in praise.
Oh, I shall still enjoy strolling barefoot from time to time, splashing through the puddles..
Smiling as I do so, 
For these feet were made for walking and that’s just what they do!
Only, now they go with truth and love,
Now they walk with God.
Gotta go, it’s raining!
LOVES ME, LOVES ME NOT, LOVES ME
Love, what a conundrum…
Least it used to be, not as much these days.
Abba is maturing me to understanding love.
The what is and what isn’t of it, from the me part of giving it to the receiving end.
It is so much more than I fathomed even while it is far lesss than I perceived.
It isn’t about touch or words really, not how I thought it was
I don’t have to hear it to know it exists, it is greater than words
Finding it in touch does happen but isn’t the wearwithal for experiencing it
No it is more complex than that, found in the breadth of friendships and the existence of life
I am seeing that nature surrounds me of it, sunrise beckons me with it even as moonlight lulls me to sleep wrapped in it
Love is everywhere, in everything
All inclusive, for love is God and God is love
I was taught that love was a two-pronged fork, one to give wrong the other to deny
I sure came out twisted from this
I so positive that if someone isn’t giving me all of the attention I want, then they don’t love me
If I was starving for love, I would desire touch of any kind, hurt me even, because that was all I had known as a child.
Use or neglect, love being the term spoken when used of a father
Unknown to me safe and secure love, from a touch withheld of a mother.
love wasn’t what I lived, i was told so, but it wasn’t true
I like this love definition I am finding
It is comforting to know I am cared for in more than touch
I am valued for my mind, my emotions and my input
I am someone worth loving in the right way, loved by deed and action, cared for in providing, wanted around
Love is really all of these
Touch to stem from the relationship in a godly way
A kind look, a smile aimed at you, a question of, “How are you?”
Thinking of you and how can I help, that’s love too.
Genuine love
I like that simply being in someones presence suffices
The freedom it gives me to love back in the same way
To love right
To stem from giving rather than getting
That’s Abba love
That’s my Jesus love just like He gave me
Momma Mary, Papa Joseph and all of heaven-sent love
I couldn’t love my God more, I know how much He loves me
I feel it even though He isn’t visible to me,
I find it sitting in His presence, listening to His words, resting in His peace
He is love
Thus I have had love all along
Thank you to all of you who have loved me through this healing, still are too
Loved me in my need and want, my give me and hold me, given the lost child within what was missed
In the end it has been your love of Christ that has healed me
His love lived out that His love show me this truth
I, Tammy Anne of God, am loved
with an everlasting love
beyond form
in existence.
“My beloved friends, let us continue to love each other since love comes from God. Everyone who loves is born of God and experiences a relationship with God. The person who refuses to love doesn’t know the first thing about God, because God is love—so you can’t know him if you don’t love. This is how God showed his love for us: God sent his only Son into the world so we might live through him. This is the kind of love we are talking about—not that we once upon a time loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to clear away our sins and the damage they’ve done to our relationship with God.”
1 John 4:10 The Message
RIP, TEAR, SLASH
“And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
John 8:32King (KJV)
I had someone who is oh so special to me say something to me that I did not like.
I was so hurt by it, couldn’t believe they would think that of me, accuse me of the very opposite of all I felt I had spent my life doing.
I cried to find that I then became angry at them, “How dare they!” I thought.
I so tied up over this one question.
It was ripping me apart. Shredding my self-control as it slashed through my heart.
I just knew ti was eating me from the inside out. Consuming me as it stole my peace, causing me to question my heart, my perception of me, all I have done my whole life.
I wanted to call them back and dum my feelings on them, rant and rave in defense of myself. I wished I was there to shake them good and look them in the eye and say, “What? You don’t know anything! You weren’t there when I was strong and did it all, you didn’t see how much I sacrificed, I did this, I survived that, I sacrificed, I and I and I.”
This is where Papa stopped me. He woke me to hearing myself, noticing all the I’s rattling through my rant.
So I cried it out, poured it forth before the throne instead, while asking, pleading and imploring Abba to tear down my defenses and slash the I from my perspective.
One thing about Abba, He always hears, listens and delivers.
Ripped apart my defenses and let me bare.
Didn’t like this raw view o my heart then.
No, I, most certainly didn’t.
But staying there wasn’t why He woke me to it, isn’t what He wants me to focus on.
Christ went to Calvary to “stare all o sin in the face, held up to tear down. I needed to allow God to do the same with me, for me, in me to all my sin.
Eyes off of self.
I then understood.
I was applying this comment to me in relation to others. I wanted to point my finger, turn these words away from me so I didn’t really need to consider myself in relation to them.
It is oh so easy to look at another’s sins rather than ones own.
God showed me so much because of this
This person is growing in their walk and service with the Lord, so it was a very good call to have them ask me it. They are young and should have done so differently but God will mold them in understanding that.
Just because I fulfilled this very responsibility in the past doesn’t mean I am not failing in it now, so it was right of them to call my attention to it, to help me be aware of this responsibility.
I sat with this feeling, is what I did. Sat with it and ripped it apart, tore it down to its basics and slashed it apart from my heart.
I looked at it with perspective and thankfulness despite how my emotions reacted to it
It was just a statement,
The power o it to lie within me,
Or lack of the power
It is only words, ones that can only break me if I allow them to.
I won’t
Because Abba doesn’t want me to.
He would rather I turn them over to Him
So, I did
Such a load lifted.
He will tell me what I need to glean from them
if anything.
My job is simply to be thankful that this person cared enough to be honest and share truth
Truth isn’t always easy, but it is truth
and…
“Truth sets us free.”
THIEVING
But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. 2 Corinthians 12:9 ESV
This morning I woke up feeling lost and alone. Trickles to slowly track their way out of the corners of my eyes and pool in stains upon my pillow.
I don’t panic anymore, when I wake up with feelings, they are what they are but I am only what I allow them to make of me.
I laid here awhile with Abba, just letting the trickle flow, no more hiding allowed, holding in only creates pressure til I blow.
I am tired of blowing up.
Abba is showing me how these trickles are release, how they can flow from me, collected of Him and become this stream of healing waters. He shows me how I can lie within them and rest, not worry about their source as He purifies them. The frozen icecaps of emotions denied, bound up and locked away melting to be these crystal clear waters of now.
Now
This is where He has me, showing me and teaching me that I am His now girl.
The tears and running still now as I say this, for He is showing me this morning that I have been a thief.
Thieving to survive much like a child on the streets of Calcutta does
Mine to be an emotional thieving
You see I can be with folks in all the wrong ways, past ones.
I want family and I can pretend others is mine
I crave touch and I can watch someone getting a hug and draw from that to satisfy wishing it was mine
I steal smiles sent others way and pretend they passed me by on the way to them
I thieve to survive emotionally
In the end robbing myself
I have so much love in my life from not only my God, but people too
I am no longer hidden away or cast out
I am inside
So I must choose
I must break the bonds of these old habits of survival or they will rob me of now as then did so long ago
It is so hard to let go, to say I am me here I am and what you can give is sufficient
I am oh so childish in wanting so much more, all of people
Help me Abba to make You my all that I turn to you
For hugs and holding, a whisper to my heart, the twinkle of an eye upon me
I don’t want to live off of stealing anymore
Open my eyes and heart to the treasures surrounding me that are already mine
Take my eyes off of wants
Purge me of my selfish give mes
My childish perspective of need
Hold me tight
Teach me right
I yield, to You, this day…. my sin of thieving.
I WILL BE OK
It is amazing to feel pretty… to think maybe someday God will bring a 
man into my life that will enjoy my company. I am astounded to realize I want to be free to be me, no more defined by others, I was always alright with that, thought I wasn’t worthy to have an opinion or free to choose. Now I know and feel I am, I am someone just like everyone else, it is an amazing discovery. It feels like I am saying this wrong, I just like being me and embracing the gift of being female, make up and pretty dresses, all that stuff.
I have known and felt the love of Christ in my life, the hand of Him through so many of those who have and are journeying with me on this journey of healing. Abuse leaves such scars, especially when it is heaped on one after the other, now I am waking up to finding my body without those scars. To seeing myself as God does, pure and beautiful, unworthy but still loved, I can give yet am worthy to receive. Joy is mine to claim, hope for what God created me for as a women, more than to be used, pushed and thrown out. I am someone not only as a human being but as a woman. I can feel attractive and it isn’t haughty, I can enjoy a man’s company simply for that. I can learn to dance, laugh out loud and share my thoughts, some day I may even have my first kiss and I like that feeling. Guess I am saying I feel alive. Confused some, but oh so alive.
TammyAnneofGod
THE OTHER SIDE OF MY HEARTBEAT
My heart, a mystery unto me all these years I have lived.
Even more so it seemed as my healing progressed.
In the beginning of this journey it seemed to be missing, just a hole where it belonged. When I would stumble upon it I to have no idea what to do with it. To hold it in my hands left me full of sorrow as I looked upon its bruised and bloody pulp. If I strived to lovingly return to self it would shock me into past. jolt me awake to all endured as a child sending me fleeing and hiding as those memories, now alive, overwhelmed me.
My hearts very aliveness to seem my greatest enemy.
To claim my heart was to find me.
How scary this was.
Little me, toddler me, child me… all rejected
Growing me, teen me unto woman me void of touch, lost of heart.
Oh it was there, within my frame for such is our created being.
Yet, in my mind’s eye, it was gone… 
Endurance having replaced it, survival the flow through my veins…
How deeply I hid my heart, to save me, to save it.
Handed off from one abuse to another as it was secreted away with each.
Lies to self the oxygen needed that a fake existence emerge.
A child to cope by going away from even self.
This is the side of my heartbeat I have been traversing.
Finding bits and pieces of then as God led, pulling my heart from hiding that I feel it’s true beat. Accept the truth of its being mine as it was placed back within me. Such a painful journey as each beat coursed through me, each throb tied to an abuse, each memory a horror unto its self.
Wanting my heart back was not desired, allowing God to do so, simply because Abba always knows best, was hard and ugly work. Focusing on Calvary and the truth that Jesus experienced the same was where I stayed.
Here also is where I was healed, here is where I found me, here is where the end began.
The wrong side of my heartbeat.
Death while living, dark in the day, cold and lonely always. Heartbeat slowed that I not exist to me.
Bit by bit I have been waking up to me, to the fact that I am now not then.
Bit by bit learning to sit still as I simply feel, beyond the memory to my being there, experiencing what was my truth of then as it woke my heart to the other side.
Now.
The right side of my heart.
Life. Living while enduring possible for Christ is with me, His light going before me lighting even the darkest of days. Hispresence the warmth when cold blasts find my heart, His arms enough to show me I am never alone. Heartbeat to race that it seemed it would explode, He to sit with me even in this that I learn it won’t. My heart need not be hidden, it is safe to carry it within me, for He guards this as well. He desires to teach me how to do so as our hearts beat as one.
I still hear my heartbeat knocking from time to time these days. Gentle taps of my childhood hiding. Ones that are begging their turn to be seen and heard. At first this scared me to realize what I was “hearing.” I can feel so spent with soothing myself of the pain and using, the discarded times.
But I am learning that feelings don’t hold the power, God does. He gifted me with the ability to feel just as He did all of His creation, thus He is also teaching me what that means. How to be human and give Him the control, to turn the fear for self into compassion for others who are facing theirs. I am learning to look on others emotions gone haywire beyond the impact they have on me and feel for them instead. How great their own wrong side of their heartbeat pain must be.
Having my heart back is changing me, having Christs heart wrapped around mine transforming me, as only His power can.
I no longer panic when these heartbeats come knocking.
Rather, I invite them home.
Allow each memory its visit held in the arms of God, soothed of my Mother Mary, Christ’s Momma lovingly shared with me.
Then we say goodbye. Some to stay the side of Heaven to heal in light and love, others to come home to me that they be used of God.
Papa, God, tells us, “As a (Woman) thinketh in her heart, so she is.” Prov. 23:7 (KJV)
I am thinking now, thus my heart is too.
I am thinking whole is good, thus God is making me whole.
Whole of heart, body, soul, spirit and mind.
Whole in Christ alone
The right side of my heart,
His side.
FINAL PHOTO CREDIT
https://pilgrimcenter.wordpress.com/category/prayer/pilgrimages/
The church’s crypt marked the site of the fourth station where Jesus met His Mother as He carried the Cross to Calvary.
BULLS EYE TO PIN CUSHION
Sometimes visual is scary, sometimes it is more than I like. Sometimes it alone brings the tears, sometimes I drown in them.
Bulls-eye kind of drown, as they hit the very nerve of the happening, pierce the shell of me and drive themselves deep. I look upon my self to see them thee, wound upon wound upon wound. Arrow after arrow having hit its mark. If I move, each will only embed itself deeper, pain to emanate out and out and out as the hurt burrows and settles with the bone. to grab hold in an attempt to take them out awakens my voice, silent screams of agony. To sit with these arrows is pain, yes, yet to remove them is more than I know how.
This is my past vision of me, a child who was a target, always. Arrows of many kinds to fly at me, always tipped in poison, that they cause the most damage as possible. Arrows that where let fly at me purposely, aiming always for me heart.
My heart, me.
Arrowed me.
I feel lost this day in this vision, all of the pain of those fiery darts of anger, words hurled in hate, hands in grabbing and eyes upon eyes upon eyes piercing.
I find myself this day remembering darts of then, of my abuse. Arrows of now the bearers of these.
I think this is how my Jesus must have felt upon the Calvary Tree. How He too was a target, hands to literally drive the first ones home in the nails they heartlessly used to secure Him there. The laughter and jeers, the spitting and cruelest of all arrows. directed at Him. Hands upon His form, letters the feathers finely crafted that the words fly true, He hanging there, bloodied, beaten, wounded beyond endurance, His physical form used up.
Yes, He knows just how I feel, I feel how He felt.
Thus I cry more, here and now as well as then and past.
So many darts found their way into my Jesus too. I must focus on this, that He has been here as well, that He hung upon that cross, stayed the course of Calvary that I know He understands. He bore the darts so I can let them fall from me. He carried this pain I feel oh so piercingly when they the spear entered His side. He, He, He.
Who am I to look upon my suffering and self and allow it to lose me? His so much greater, yet… He stayed Himself, for me, with all of Heaven at His call. He endured unto death unto life.
I have endured, now it is time I die to that, time I embrace the life of now.
Come down off my cross, lay it at the foot of His.
Arrows still shall fly all around me, but my Lord is more, His sacrifice has freed me that I can move. My hands no longer bound that I can use them to defend self and my hearts words set free to command them to drop before they ever find their mark.
I look to my Savior just now, tears falling from a fresh wound, an arrow having somehow found its way deep just yesterday. I feel that I cannot move, But my Jesus is showing me otherwise…
“He is upon my cross, behind me. His arms spread wide too. I look down where my heart should be, so sure that I shall find naught but an empty hole to see a radiance glow. His Imacculate Heart sending arrows of love instead, they piercing lights of love instead. A balm of Gilead. I do not need to see behind me to know the expression upon His countenance, I feel the understanding His eyes carry as He brings His arms forward, mine freed now as well, wraps them with mine across my chest and holds me tight. We are no longer upon my cross, He stands with me and promises we can stay this way awhile. I can rest in this embrace as I bring home to Him all of the parts that need seeing.
His arms are strong and sure, safe and secure, they open, hold and love every lost and lonely, bruised, beaten, used up and forgotten me.
Nothing that has been is more than Him, no abuse greater than this my Great Physician knows how to heal. 
I see these arrows now for what they are.
Pinpoints of memories that Satan desires I feel as the arrows of then. They are not. I will not be Satan’s target anymore, I am not the helpless child I was then no matter haw many arrows he sends to convince me otherwise.
In Christ, I am more.
Yes, I will fail, yes some may find their target, but that doesn’t make me them or them me.
No.
I can pull them from me, nothing but a bothersome prick of a needle, and look up with the biggest smile as I drop them,
“Take that Satan! You tried, you even hit the target…
But…
my Jesus deflected it, so really…
you missed!” 
elsewherebygrace 