Am I at my Road to Damascus?

Well, my SD starts Monday. What a relief.

Things at home have been tough though. I've become so fully aware of the strong negative aspects of my personality, and the impact that has had on my wife. Basically, it's as if I'm incapable of truly relating to people who are close to me - as if I hold something back, stopping me from really committing to them. No lasting empathy. A central part of who I am which has not been developed or is absent. This is what has hurt my wife over the 16 years we've been married. So much so that she feels battered and bruised. We'd have great sex and then afterwards she would feel like from my perspective it had never happened. She would be expecting some deep connection with me, but all she would get from me is.. I'm not sure what, but not what she wanted. I use this as an example.

Last week she took to sleeping in a separate room because of the anger/hurt she felt. She could barely talk to me. Two nights ago I suggested we use the fire pit in the back garden (we like sitting round an open fire), and we were able to talk, me explaining I understood how she felt and that I'd booked to go and see a psychotherapist to help me work through this bit of my personality I don't get/understand.

That helped, talking I mean. [and we are sleeping in the same bed again!] But I am aware that I can, in some way, dominate, suck life, be bossy, be ungracious, take over, demand.. and the reason that I can see it is because my parents are like that, as are 3 of my 4 sisters. I've worked hard on NOT being like them, and yet clearly the same DNA (and I use that in a spiritual/personality/nurture way) is still there - no matter how hard I've tried. It's hard to explain unless you knew my parents. They see everything from their perspective, everyone else is wrong, everyone else doesn't somehow match up to some New Testament law perspective. Judging. Partiality. Resulting in hypocrisy.

I tell you, James 4/5 has really hit home with me. The wisdom of God is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of good fruits and mercy, without partiality or hypocrisy. I've lived the opposite for so long, under a pretense of being "wise and understanding". Yet James says that those who consider themselves wise and understanding should conduct good works in the meekness of wisdom. Words like peaceable, gentle, yielding, meek are not words I have associated with myself. And yet here I am having studied these very words almost every morning for the last 3 weeks.

It's as if I've missed some key instruction in building my house, and one of the walls is leaning. Impacting those around me. Or taking a different illustration, I'm in a train carriage hurtling towards my destination thinking all is well but those I share the carriage with feel that, at times, they are with demented frightening tramp (vagrant).

This is a painful revelation. I had someone pray with me at church three weeks ago, and they said they felt I should focus on James. But they also said that they felt I had been playing snakes and ladders but with the wrong rule set. My ladders were my snakes and my snakes my ladders. And I agreed wholeheartedly with him. My ego, nature and nurture has got in the way. I've pursued what I perceived as godliness only to be halted on my Road to Damascus. I guess I'm at the stage of waiting for Barnabas to come and pray for me in order that scales can be dropped off my eyes (maybe that's happened already) and that I can now offer the fruits of repentance - a changed life.. Lord let it be.

I guess if I reflect on the last 12 months (since I started drawing near to God, because He woke me up!), and the fact that I have, sincerely, read my Bible, meditated on what I've read, prayed, interceded, cried out, praised, worshipped etc - that the Lord has been gracious in leading me to this place. I have to believe that He's brought me to this place to take me beyond it. To understand what it means to be with my wife, rather than to do with my wife. To be with my girls, rather than to do with my girls. The same with work, church, friends etc. That the Lord will allow my marriage to blossom, my wife to blossom, my girls to blossom, and, I guess, for me to blossom.

Lord, I want your heavenly wisdom to be evident in my life. As James says, if anyone lacks wisdom let him ask in faith.. not doubting..