Voices in my head...

I'm not mad - I promise...well at least I don't think I'm mental. Recently, I have been having a tough time, more so than I ever have before, mainly because I have never allowed myself to get this far down the road less traveled. Life is good, many positive things are afoot and I am making progress in many areas of life, but equally life is very hard and sometimes feels like it is too hard to face. It is times like this that I am thankful for my job which means I have to get out of bed and thankful for friends and family that spend time with me (even though they don't know how much I need it at the moment.) Sorry to be blunt but you need all of this 'heart-warming' information so that the next bit makes a little more sense.

I have heard much said about the enemy; the devil, and how he tries to put you off your path with God and lives, in order that you will not. And up to a point I thought it was a little sci-fi until now. At church, people have prayed with me at various times and in their prayers they have asked God to protect me from the devil and the voices that are speaking lies to me and I just accepted that sometimes people pray relevant things and sometimes they don't. But more so than ever those are the prayers that I am clinging to now. The voices that I am battling, the voices from the past and the things that they are saying are tearing me apart, they are like knives into my very soul and the weird thing is that until yesterday when I prayed aloud at my Life Group meeting for God to make His voice the loudest in my mind, that I realised that there were so many negative voices whirling around in there.

It's funny but if you have been hearing something for long enough, you don't hear it anymore, not like an outside thought, you feel it. It becomes a part of you. The words that I hear the most, many of which are highly unpleasant, feel like they are who I am. As if they are so a part of my core that if you sliced me in two they would appear there like in a piece of seaside rock.

The realisation that there are these voices that have been with me for many years has had a two fold effect. Firstly, it has annoyed me. I feel like I have been stupidly duped into believing these things and that I have been weak enough to accept them. I am now more angry at the injustice of it, and at myself for allowing it.

Secondly, I am scared. I am scared that now I am aware of these voices that they are louder. That although I know them to be the work of the enemy and his accomplices in my life, they are all struggling for space at the same time. (This is hard to explain so i'll used an analogy...it feels like the difference between a bank queue and the stock market floor...before this realisation the bad thoughts were in a nice neat little queue, biding their time, waiting for their slot of airpace in my head. Nice and neat, one at a time, constant but simple.
Now it is like a crush of thoughts and voices grappling for attention, like the people trying to get the attention of the sellers and buyers, trying to make their voice the loudest and no one is taking their turn anymore - it is a free-for-all.)

With this image in mind, I am now trying to listen to God's voice, which would be the one voice that I want, and need, to hear. The one voice that speaks the truth and the only voice that can lead me out of this. The problem is that I can hear nothing but babble, too many voices all at once, I can't process which are good or bad until I listen to them and at the moment the ones I have allowed have been so cutting that I am scared to allow any more though - I am tired of this inner battle already.

So, I am back to wishing I had never started down this road, that I had just stayed where the voices, although bad, were in a manageable queue. On some of my worst days I hear the one voice that hurts the most, the one that tells me that God doesn't love me or He wouldn't have left me all those years ago. That one is the hardest to hear because I have no answer to why God would have let things go on as they did. Instead, all I can cling on to is the fact that God loves all of creation, even little me.