Family Dinners

My wife and I were watching TV the other night and a silly ad for TV trays came on...This spurred us to start talking about family dinners. Anyway, as we were talking I realized I really don't have many memories of family dinners. I can remember being a kid at relatives for dinners, but not my own family.....My wife was asking what our dinner table looked like and I couldn't remember. I could not remember one dinner around the table with my sister, mom and her different boyfriends or husbands...at first I just thought that I had a memory block but then I remembered that I ate meals at either Togo's or my friend's house. I had a place at my friends table that was mine. I confirmed all this with my sister....I don't know why this surprises me, but I feel broken again.

I can't make the brokenness go away by myself....I can't fix myself. I want to either pretend I am OK and that my childhood pain doesn't affect me or I numb myself with the "noise" of information from all the blogs I read....I was both sad and angry that my mother cared more about her needs and staying over at her boyfriend's house than what was going on with my sister and me. Sure we had a roof over our head....but kids need more than that. It was almost like my sister and I were raising ourselves and we weren't even on her list.

Only Jesus can heal my brokenness. He needs set me free. It brings me back to a post I wrote back in September, about Freedom, that I brought up a set of verses that God keeps bringing back to me:

Isaiah 61:1
" He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners"
I was writing in my journal today and looking through my Bible and was led to this verse Jeremiah after reading Isaiah 61:
Jeremiah 30:17
"But I will restore you to health
and will heal your wounds"

I need Jesus to hold me and heal me, hold me and heal me, hold me and heal me, then rebuild me. It seems to be a process of 3 steps forward 2 steps back where there are cycles of feeling strong and then feeling weak. I feel very weak right now.

I will close with a verse that has been one of my favorites and it is kind of ironic that it is just a little past Isaiah 61:1 and it is what Jesus is doing with me, although sometimes I am tired of feeling broken, but He has his hand on me now, and was protecting me during chlidhood days growing up, even before I knew him, he knew me and had a plan for me:
Isaiah 61:3
They will be called Oaks of Righteousness,
a planting of the LORD
for display of his splendor.

Jesus is building me into his Oak of Righteousness, but Oaks take a long time to grow.