MY LOST BIRTHRIGHT AS A CHILD OF GOD or "Adams's Pride"

      

      "To thine own self, be true, and it must follow as night the day thou canst be false to any man." This quote from Shakespeare is one of my favorite admonitions, although it has also been the most difficult for me to follow.  As a small child I primarily lost my Birthright as a Child of God through resenting my mother.  My father passed away when I was still a toddler and my mother was a frightened, angry soul who took out her frustration and bitterness on my brother and me. He was eight at the time and I was almost four.  He conformed to her and I rebelled against her, so I was the one she angrily spanked and told I was a "Bad little girl" when my misbehaviors added to the overload of emotional stress she was already facing.  (It was the time of the Great Depression era in America; jobs were scarce for even skilled fathers, and at that time, there was no state or government subsidized welfare programs for indigent people, so feeding, housing and clothing two young children presented quite a challenge for a widowed mother with only an eighth grade education and few marketable skills.)

      Being too young to understand my mother's plight, I was angry and hurt that she vented her impatience and anger on me, and as long as I could resent and judge her for it, I had the energy and confidence to keep on rebelling against her until I was around seven or so, at which time I felt my first real pangs of guilt from my conscience. However, the guilt I felt wasn't for resenting my mother, because, with her unjust way of disciplining me I, could easily justify it; my guilt came from resenting God, and I could not justify that.  From my cradle days on I had been taught by my mother and extended family members that God was my Creator and the source of all that was good in my life.  Since my environment in general was so deprived and seemingly devoid of anything good, I blamed him for causing my father to die at the early age of thirty-one;  for giving me to such a mean mother, and for allowing my big brother to continually tease and try to "Lord" it over me.

      So, I then drew my seven-year-old shoulders up proud, set my naturally square jaw in defiance and judged God to be a biased, cruel taskmaster; telling myself that "If God doesn't like me, I don't have to like him," That defiance was my waterloo, because my conscience started bothering me a lot after that, and the guilt I felt became so great that, during the church service one Sunday morning, I interrupted the pastor's sermon by leaving my seat and running down the aisle to the altar.  Crying woeful tears, I then begged God to forgive me for being so angry with him.

     After that, I was afraid to allow myself to feel anger towards God, or to even think bad thoughts about him.  I then began to make a conscious effort to try to control my emotions and to become good, intellectually  reasoning that if I tried harder to be good, both God and my mother would like and treat me better. However, just because I decided to be good didn't mean that other people would make it easy for me to do so, or that I could willfully keep from being angry at someone who mistreated me.

      And hurt me they did; my brother and the bullies at school seemed to sense that I wasn't nearly as volatile in physically defending myself as I had been earlier on, so they would try even harder to "get my goat" by teasingly degrading me for being a girl and therefore inferior to them.  To show them that being a girl didn't stop me from defending myself, I would again double up my fists and let them have it, just as I had always done; and if my mother or a teacher spanked me for fighting, I still would resent and judge them for their seeming discrimination against me for being a girl.  (I based that on the fact they always seemed to treat me more harshly than they treated my brother, or the other boys that teased me.)

      So, even though I had experienced the guilt of resenting and judging God, and out of fear had become submissive to his superiority over me, I was still resisting my mother, brother and peers; fighting to keep my sense of self-worth from being degraded by their efforts to put me beneath them.  Then, the year I turned nine, I faced another situation that brought me to my repentant, submissive knees and nearly annihilated my selfhood as a Child of God,

      During the summer of that year my brother drowned.  He was thirteen, a lonely little boy who, with no father or man in his life to engage him in more masculine experiences and activities, was enticed by some macho acting sixteen year old boys to go boating with them.  He was thrilled to be included in the adventure, but knowing our mother would forbid him to go because he didn't know how to swim, he did it behind her back. While they were out on the lake, the older boys, thinking they were doing my brother and another little boy a favor by forcing them to learn how to swim, threw both the younger boys into the lake. Both boys panicked and started struggling to swim but failed in the attempt. The older boys managed to save the younger boy, but my brother drowned.

      Having resented my brother so much in the past for trying to bully me,I was again inundated with guilt, thinking that I had caused his death by resenting him. Instead of blaming God for his death though, I blamed myself.  Then like the prize fighter who inadvertently kills his opponent in the boxing ring and, being overwhelmed with guilt is afraid to fight again, I  became afraid to defend myself--either physically or by silently resenting and judging someone. 

      Had I understood that my angry, resentful and rebellious personality was not an outer reflection of my true selfhood, but that of a negative spirit that had been projected into my consciousness by my mother, I could have dealt differently with the guilt it created for me with its negative responses to the injustice and stresses I faced.  But, thinking that I was the Bad little girl that my mother and the world (and in my mind, even God) saw me as being, I  had turned my anger, resentment and judgment on my self; "beating up on myself" with self-degradation and condemnation every time I felt any hint of anger rising in me or had a bad thought come into my mind. It was as though, my mother, with her ego-degrading physical and verbal abuse was still disciplining me from within my own consciousness.

      Because of my self-condemnation, as well as the continued degradation I received from others, I lost more and more confidence in myself and became less able to stand my ground in a world that seemed bent on either controlling me or destroying me.  Being fearful of God and ashamed to face him, there was no help coming from him to me, so I became a "People Pleaser," serving my mother, grandparents, teachers, and later on, my husband, in-laws and anyone else who sensed that they could easily control me by defaming my sense of self-worth.  Because of my submissiveness, they knew that I posed no real threat to them, so they all took advantage of me; demanding more service from me and giving less back in the way of praise and acknowledgment. Then, if I objected and protested the injustice, the same old ego-degrading verbal fault-finding and rejection technique would soon bring me back to being submissive and in their control again.

    After a time, I became so accustomed to people finding fault with me that I became sensitized to being abused, feeling felt ill at ease when someone was nice to me. I well remember being glorified one year at the end of my term as PTA president for my son's elementary school.  Evidently, I did an exemplary job because at the last meeting of the school year, my publicity chairman set up a huge screen that filled most of the stage area.  He then projected a huge picture of a photo frame on the screen and started putting sections of my picture inside the frame like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, with each piece being accompanied by an accolade of praise for what I had accomplished in different projects that I had undertaken to fulfill that year.  After all of the pieces were in place, a giant portrait of me was revealed.  Everyone began to clap and gave me a standing ovation, and I was so embarrassed and uncomfortable by it, that I wanted to run out of the room.

     I was very confused over having that feeling, and after questioning myself why I had it, I realized that I had a perverted need to be abused and mistreated, not only to justify my own resentment and judgment towards myself for the  submissive "mouse" I had become, but because I also needed the challenge of trying to upgrade my self-image in the eyes of others and to also give me some reason to get out of bed each morning.

     Because my true selfhood was suppressed and more or less "put to sleep" within me by the negative spirit, that had been projected into me from my mother, it was no longer the "center or nucleus" of my being, The negative spirit had become that "center" and was in charge; using my mind, emotions and body to fulfill its negative agenda to the world instead of allowing me to fulfill God's purpose for my life.  To do that, it needed for me to emotionally remain in that depraved inferior state, so it could express through me as being a wimp and a coward, that would then "invite" others to mistreat me. It also knew, that being mistreated, I would be resentful and judgmental towards those who did it to me, and because of it I would feel guilty, doubt myself and feel inferior.  I then continued to be a wimp and a coward, which kept on controlling me.

     In that way I lived in "Hell" and was part of Satan's Master-Slave environment, wherein those on the lower rung of the social "Totem Pole" "burn" with envy and hatred towards those on the upper rung, never realizing that their prideful need to be glorified relative to God (the Creator) is the primary cause of their descent into the negative realm of Hell.  Nor, did they understand, that all that is required for them to be reinstated as Children of God, is to humbly submit themselves to the jurisdiction of God's superiority over them, and to accept the forgiveness he offers to them.

      So, to find my way back through that maize of darkness and self-deception, I needed to better understand and to virtuously deal with the element of my own pride, which, according to Webster's New World Dictionary: expresses as an inordinate high self-esteem, arrogance or conceit.  I had to also realize that, even though I seemed to be such an inferior,"nothing" person on the outside, deep inside of my consciousness, I had this prideful need to feel superior relative to other people.  That need then invited others to try and make me feel inferior, the principle being;  "You can never be made to feel inferior unless you first have the prideful need to feel superior."
    
     Therefore, it was pride that caused me to resent other human beings who belittled and put me beneath them, It was pride that caused me to resent God for placing me in a deprived, abusive environment that undermined and degraded my self-esteem and self-image, and it was pride that caused me to beat up on myself with self-recrimination so that it destroyed my self-confidence and made me doubt my ability to defend myself rightly.

     It was also pride in Adam and Eve that allowed the negative spirit (the Serpent) to tempt both of them to disobey God, and then to justify their wrongdoing by blaming something or someone else for causing them to do it. It was pride that separated them from God and caused them to fall to this lower level of existence.  We, their progeny, then come into the world still separated from God and still subject to the control of the negative spirit, that works through our pride to tempt us to continue needing to glorify ourselves relative to God.  That is how we lost our BIRTHRIGHT AS A CHILD OF GOD and how we pride-fully continue to lose it.

      "For those who are led by the spirit of God are Sons of God." (Romans 8:14 NIV) .

       And, as I see it: Those who are led by the spirit of Pride are the "Sons" of whoever degrades them or promises to glorify them.



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