After A Tactical Retreat Where Am I Now

• Had an epiphany: “I was little, 6 or 7, when I was traumatized by a couple of things, I couldn’t do anything about it then… and I can’t do anything about it now, and even though I’m BIG I still can’t do anything about what happened to me.” But it did happen.
• I was having a pity party and telling God, ‘Nobody ever gave me anything, mom tried, my brothers helped a couple times, but that was more out of a false sense of duty than anything, what I do have it’s hard to be grateful for because everybody talks about your “gifts” and what God “has given me” but for me everything has been so hard, I’ve worked for what I have, it wasn’t “given” in any sense of the word that I understand… “gifts” are freely given, regardless how the recipient receives them.
• His Word says, in Genesis 3:19 “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.” Sounds like “work” to me.
• Then that still small voice, the voice of God said, “You are right.”
• Having somebody finally hear me, hearing what I was saying, revealed to me just how tumultuous my inner being was, it’s chaos, I know chaos.
• Then… Jesus revealed himself to me, so I can witness to the fact that indeed he is not dead, he is alive, and more than that, as he approached he held his hands out to me and said, “My peace I give you.”
• My “ear/heart heard”… “I don’t give as the world gives.” Found in John 14:27, and I realized that is what I was truly missing… “peace” of any kind, and now understanding my experience has been true, my inner turmoil is true, my feeling of being constrained somehow is true… but when I “apply” the “peace” that Jesus has given me all that anxiety is dispelled, like a morning mist hovering over a lake as soon as the sun hits it… POOF! gone.
• So if my “trauma” is true I decided I wanted to take a deeper dive on working with my “inner child”… turns out, that’s real too.
• Que in “emotional upheaval” at random times due to random situations.
• Case in point: The Scrap Yard, I am cleaning out the garage, again, as we prepare for a complete kitchen remodel and I need some working/storage space. So I load the truck up with all of my metal and head to the scrap yard.
• At the scrap yard all is well, in my scrap were some 30yr old baseball bats, aluminum, and an “old timer” was ahead of me, and while the staff was checking out his load, he was checking out my baseball bats “for feel”. I said, “go ahead, take it,” which he did thanking me very joyously. I only had a few 5 gallon buckets to dump so the staff unloaded me first. I hopped back in the truck, happy with the check I got, and happy I was able to “Davey-Do” my “good deed for the day” with that “old timer”. Then as I was about 1/2 way home, taking the scenic route, my “inner child” screamed “DON’T LEAVE ME! DON”T LEAVE ME!” and that woke up my “poverty stricken spirit” and it yelled, “NOT MY BUCKET! NOT MY BUCKET!” I had pulled out of the scrap yard without retrieving my last bucket from the staff.
• Good grief Charlie Brown.
• But instead of being inside my head, I heard “my/me voice” the voice of awareness, say to my inner child, “Hey, I’m right here, it’s ok, I didn’t leave you, I got distracted and forgot the bucket.” Then the spirit of poverty chimed in, in a panic, “We gotta go back and get it!” No, no we don’t. “I get it, it was a good bucket, we have more at home, and we can replace that one, everything is ok, it’s not the end of the world, I know you feel like I left you, but I didn’t, and I know it feels like we’ll never own another 5 gallon bucket as long as we live, but that’s not true. And… (and this was a big AND) I know your feelings about that are true, YOU WERE left behind and forgotten, on multiple occasions, your “abandonment issue” is real, and I remember the time dad hollered from the car, “I’m leaving!” and we hopped out of the wash tub, and didn’t make it across the kitchen floor, we slipped and cracked our head so hard we knocked ourself out and laid there naked and curled up in the fetal position. I understand now how absolutely scared you were of being forgotten; of being left alone sleeping in a school bus at the end of the day because the driver forgot about you; of never getting to go with dad and the older kids because you were too little… those are true, that scared feeling is true… but we fixed it a little when we had our own 5, we were with them so much they said, “You don’t have to come to this one”, or “it’s ok dad we are all going together.”
• Then as I was “trying to be the adult I needed when I was 5,” another epiphany hit me, very clearly, it was this “My inner child is the hero… he saved me first!”
• You may be thinking, “How?”
• By performing what Military Strategists call “A Tactical Retreat”
• The Military Strategist Sun Tzu in his “The Art of War” teaches the principle of a tactical retreat, “If you are of equal strength fight if you are able; If you are fewer then keep away, if able; If you are not as skilled, then flee, if you are able.”
• A little kid can’t fight; can’t flee; and isn’t skilled at anything yet… so what do they do? They “retreat” into the deepest recesses of their minds, “They’ll never find me in here.”
• Sun Tzu also says, “Those skilled at defense hide in the deepest recesses of the ground.” As little kids who have been hurt they dig in, deep within themselves, like the Viet Cong fighting the USA in Vietnam, they had whole installations buried under mountains!
• But my inner child is more like Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, the last Japanese soldier to surrender… 29 years after World War 2 ended… they even had to find his old officer; fly him in; so that he could give Onoda the official command to stand down.
• Sounds like Davey-Do alright!
• So now I’m trying to convince my inner child to come out into the sunshine, to trust me, and guess what… you guessed it… that kid don’t trust nobody no how!!!
• Quite a few famous Generals utilized the Tactical Retreat to their advantage… George Washington at The Battle of Brooklyn; The Duke of Wellington & Sam Houston against their respective ‘Napoleons’ and even Hannibal, at The Battle of Cannae, used a tactical retreat of his “center” to lure the Romans in so that he could, in the words of Shaka Zulu, “Place them on the horns of the buffalo,” thereby completely encircling and annihilating the Roman Legions.
• But all that running and hiding was just that for a little kid, he wasn’t mustering troops, looking for proper ground to mount a flanking maneuver catching the enemy by surprise, he was just running and hiding… got real good at it too… real good… but he missed out on living & learning & experiencing all that God wanted him to.
• I have come to a conclusion… this world is all wrong, think about it, here we are trying to make plans, some of us, about life & liberty & heaven & hell but all the information we have is corrupted or just straight up false!
• My inner child isn’t “broken” or “schizemed” he’s a hero… he did want he could do at the time it needed doing, he made it so that I didn’t go completely crazy for all them years. I tried to, I tried to even kill myself, if it wasn’t for God and the love that little boy has for his mom… I wouldn’t be writing this right now…
• Speaking of “Legions” in the book of Mark, Jesus heals the man who is possessed by “Legion” by the many unclean spirits, 2000 of em’ some translations say, and yet after Jesus heals him it says, “¹⁴ Those tending the pigs ran off and reported this in the town and countryside, and the people went out to see what had happened. ¹⁵ When they came to Jesus, they saw the man who had been possessed by the legion of demons, sitting there, dressed and in his right mind; and they were afraid.”
• I’m not sure where we go from here as far as healing that little boy goes, that’s the work of the Lord, but I know, because HE says I will know, I will be aware of it in order to complete my task as a witness, as it’s found in Isaiah 43:10-12
• ¹⁰ “You are my witnesses,” declares the Lord,
      “and my servant whom I have chosen,
  so that you may know and believe me
      and understand that I am he.
  Before me no god was formed,
      nor will there be one after me.
  ¹¹ I, even I, am the Lord,
      and apart from me there is no savior.
  ¹² I have revealed and saved and proclaimed—
      I, and not some foreign god among you.
  You are my witnesses,” declares the Lord, “that I am God.“

The Emerging Man writing to Encourage, Equip & Engage!