What Was Meant for Evil

Day 8: I am thinking about a battle many of us face without us realizing it. It sours our relationships, and blocks our path to true freedom. The biggest problem is that many go through life without a name for the animal. We do not know why we react and feel powerless to choose a better response.

I want to share how I feel the Lord has helped me overcome it to the degree that I am able as Steven Covey taught:

Between the stimulus and your response lies a period of time where you can choose your response. How you use that time makes all the difference.

I have had an horrific life, but you would never know it because I was led to the gospel of Jesus Christ and have been given the Gift of the Holy Ghost which enables me as it is eluded to by Paul in the New Testament to have the benefit in prayer to have the spirit to utter the things to the Lord that I need that I am not able to communicate in words. What mercy!

In the beginning when bad things happened, I would black out and wake up on the other side of my response. Scary eh?   Well after my membership in my church and dedication to newfound principles, I became more conscious. I learned that my responses were a sum total of my experiences and the experiences of my ancestors...both habitual and both in my DNA.

I learned that even though I was not bound in chains, my mind was. I was not free. I attribute this knowledge to the desires I had to become a better person and to help others do the same.

I felt inspired to pray a specific prayer that I would be shown the things that were learned during enslavement and adaptations that I needed to unlearn. My answer came years ago in the book mentioned in the Ebony article, Do You Have Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome? I learned what I asked to learn.

Bad things have not stopped happening to me, but today I feel great power between the stimulus and the response. I am able to prolong the response without flying off the handle. I actually use the bad things smiling because I know by the power of the Atonement of Jesus Christ what was meant for evil will always turn for my good.

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