where i come from {save the scraps}

"i never tell the enemy, i've been on the cover of time magazine, i've gone around the world.  i don't use none of that stuff up there. i reach back into my history.  your power is not in where you are, your power is in where you've been.  for Jesus said, 'I am the same yesterday, today & forevermore.  and if I brought you through that, still I am.'" 

{t.d. jakes}

i come from a long, twisted heritage that reaches back into the darkest corners of the netherlands. i have heard of stories of where i come from & i cringe. that was the heritage i heard of.  the heritage i experienced was different.  my beginnings were wrapped in love & fresh air & everything beautiful.  the woods were where i remember chiseling out my first remembrances of home.  those deep woods full of long wonderings & wild imagination.  i lived in the trees, those whispering pines always singing their lullabies.  and in the springs, when the waters would flood & pool, there i found truest joy in my black rubber boots.  and my twirling fields, my grass covered mountaintops for seeing & thinking.  and that long, graveled road where i would collect my pebbles & dreams.  i came from there until the world began to impinge on my beautiful beginnings.  it crept in like a thief in the night.  it took my deep woods & my climbing trees, my innocent fields & lullabies and replaced them with fear & brokenness, rejection & confusion.  and that is where i was born.  that is when i began pushing & digging & fighting. from places of uncertainty, places of self-deprecation.  unwanted places, too soon places, not enough places. the woods got darker, the clouds temporarily covered my sun, the locusts ate my twirling fields & the trees towered in intimidation.  

"{and the Lord says} you know a whole lot about now, but you forgot about then.  there is no way you would have made it to this present danger if I hadn't done what I did yesterday.  you wouldn't be blessed to have the problems that you have right now."

{t.d. jakes}

but He took my not-enough places & He broke what was not enough & He multiplied them & healed my land.  He restored all that the locusts had eaten.  He filled those spring pools to overflowing and i sit here now, from that restored place.  from the place of plenty.  i have lived in the light for so long i had forgotten the dark in between.  victory had had an anesthetizing effect.  the flourishing, fulfillment place had forgotten the fight, the battle places.

He wastes nothing that good God of ours. nothing. not even the scraps. 

"until we can be thankful for what is not enough, what is not enough can't be multiplied into more than enough.  the blessing is in the breaking. that which refuses to be broken, refuses to be blessed. the breaking of life produces the blessing of life." 

{t.d. jakes}