[Trapped]

Everything everyone has said has been very helpful while simultaneously hitting directly onto the crusted padlock that binds me that I've carried around for years. I'm not saying the padlock is opened but just that you all have hit right on it.

On one hand I've lived my whole life observing and hearing everyone speak as if and live as if the Lord is communicating directly to them. As a young person I have several different memories of a parent driving me somewhere innocuous (say, Back to School Night or something like that) and halfway there for some reason they didn't "have the peace" to continue driving to it and we had to turn around and go home. I learned from a young age that "the peace" is the overriding factor that I could never reason against, further being complicated by the fact that it was never accompanied by an explanation. Often there was an apology if it was a let down for me, but I knew I just had to accept it because that was the only choice. So as a kid, "the peace" or "the Lord's leading or speaking" was at a minimum something distinct enough to disappoint your child over.

I think I've mentioned on another thread about being told in high school conferences that "the way" to choose a college was to write down your options on a paper, sit down and pray over those options, and go wherever the Lord is leading. Well of course I did that, but never got "the Lord's leading", so I got frustrated and just chose to go where I wanted to go. In college I had another big choice about studying abroad, again couldn't get any leading, and ended up having to do the "I'm going to take steps in this direction and if You don't want me to do it, then You have to shut the doors" thing. Well, He didn't shut doors even though there were many He could have, so I went through with it, and had a big negative experience as a result that has affected me since then. I always wonder if that was God "giving me what for" because I somehow didn't do what He wanted me to, even though I never got His leading about it in the first place when I gave Him the chance. In other words, I tried to get "the peace" about college and going abroad, didn't, and after the choice still wonder to this day what God's thought about it was. Did I make the right one? How do I know? Will I ever know? If not, how do you live your life that way, not knowing or having a gauge on what the Lord's feeling is about what you do? What is the point then? I've lived a lot of my life pushing Him aside but to find out that others who seem to live letting Him in end up living in practice without His actual input makes my head spin. I can't put the two together, given the way it was spoken about growing up.

The thought that the Lord speaks through others or through your situation has also always confounded me. More often than not "others" are just thoughtlessly flapping their tongues rather than being conduits for the Lord's speaking. Speaking through situations is problematic too.....I recall years ago I took a short class on a practical topic that was a big hurdle for me to even sign up for, given the context of this thread. I really liked the class but on the last meeting of it, I had an unusually, bizarrely, horrible time getting to class, so much so that I thought "does the Lord not want me to go to this class or something?". It struck me all of a sudden that maybe the Lord was intentionally preventing me from going for some reason and using the environment to "speak" that. I pulled over and was paralyzed by the thought of continuing on and possibly something bad happening because I chose to keep going even though possibly the Lord didn't want it. The other side of things was that there was a prayer meeting that night at my house that I was missing for the class. This hit me and I furiously "realized" that God wanted me to go to the prayer meeting and miss the last day of the class that I really liked. So I turned around fuming, missed the class, and went to the prayer meeting, telling God He had better make it worthwhile. Well, the prayer meeting wasn't anything special. I literally checked the news for a day or two afterwards to see if someone had gotten shot on campus the night I would have been there to see if the Lord had "saved me from something" by using the environment to stop me from going. Of course no one got shot. So I was just left with the thought, AS USUAL, that God does not like me having any simple, non-sinful, human enjoyment and rips it away wherever He can. So long story short, I just cannot live myself trying to read meaning into situational circumstances in that way. God may use both humans and situations in that way, but I have always had trouble with it.

I didn't want to get into the LC thing but given my background I really don't have a choice because that's the basis of the formation of the padlock in this area. Paralysis by analysis really is the case. Many years have gone by without any human growth or advancement in my life because I have been so conditioned to not take a step without a distinct word from the Lord, lest I have the gall to take one step without His express permission or direction. It is difficult to describe the weight this puts on a person and the unnecessary agitation and frustration it produces in what should be a normal human life. Somehow the balancing thought of compassion, mercy, and forgiveness from the Lord if we do something He didn't lead us to do got all but lost in what was spoken in the LCs, and the heavy insinuation that God would come down on you if you dared take a breath without His approval becomes a tight bind around your hands, feet, and ribcage. I'm just choked. It sounds crazy, but even something like "I want to go mini-golfing today, so I'm going to go do it" comes with massive chains and the fear that something bad might happen on the golf course if I did something like that without the leading or the "okay" from the Lord.

As an adult finally coming to the point where I care less and less about how I look vocalizing to people my bewilderment about the Lord in things like this, it is actually distressing to a certain extent to find out that others who have given their whole lives to the Lord also say they have never had the Lord's speaking, and are similarly shrugging their shoulders when it comes to figuring it out. I cannot reconcile being a Christian and following a Person who by all accounts doesn't seem to "show up". Is everyone else grasping at air like I am? I cannot live a life that way. Why does everyone seem to talk in concrete concepts about following the Lord and "the Lord spoke to me xyz" or "the Lord said abc"? Are they the loony ones? How does everyone else seem to be so much more sure and firm in their faith but when I dig into it I find out they aren't living "according to" any actual leading anyway?

Like I said, everyone's responses have been very helpful, and my ears are open for any more. I think if I had heard OBW's response of "The answer may already be in front of you. It may simply be what you would rather do. If either choice is moral, righteous, not in contradiction to something clearly stated in the Bible, etc., then you have freedom. It is a theft of your freedom in Christ to come under attack for not arriving at some "sovereignly-ordained" response rather than simply taking the path you decide upon" growing up then my life would have been very, very different, in a good way. I need to hear it every day for about 5 years though to make what I'm trapped by fade away.