how to deal with past pain

This is my 30th post! Crazy!

It's spring break! Spring break means a lot to me these days. It means a much-needed school holiday, sometimes exotic destinations (okay, not really, but I'd like to believe that), and in recent years, the week in which God reminds me He hasn't left.

Sound dumb?

It may.

But it's true :) I don't know what it is about school, but all the really awful things in my life come to a climax right before spring break, then things get better. When I think of the past two years at this time, I was a complete and total wreck. I think I cried everyday of both of those breaks. This year, it isn't that bad! Progress!

But in any case, the question remains, how on earth do I deal with the pain of the past? For a while, my brain could shut it out. I couldn't deal with it. It hurt too much. But nowadays, it sneaks up me. My mind wanders back to those days when I was too sad to even get up. I cried out to the Lord to just let me die because nothing could ever be okay again after so much pain. I wished I could just lay down and never get up again. Even glimpses of that pain make me want to rip my heart out... I can't even imagine going through those things again. Pain so unbearable that I couldn't describe it in a million years. So much that I was happy when I was in excruciating physical pain, because heart attacks are less painful than that much heartbreak. And I was doing it alone- everyone chose to leave except for Jesus. My mind flickers to times when I lay on my face screaming, begging the Father to help me.

I quickly pull myself back. Whatever is true, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, praiseworthy. But unfortunately for me, the glory of The Most High God shines right through my pain. He brought me out of that state. He is worthy of massive amounts of praise because I honestly thought the only way to get out of that was to die. I seriously thought the absolute only way out was death. But you know what?

DEATH HAS LOST ITS GRIP ON ME.

God saved me. He will again. He always will. He's so much stronger than evil. So that verse applies here- thinking about those things is thinking about what is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, and praiseworthy.

But how to deal with all that? All the darkness... the nightmares... the bondage...

How do you do it?

I will update again as soon as I've begun to figure things out.

So far, all I know is that God is stronger, and that reading the bible brings me peace. Also, that loving others and sharing the gospel revamps my love of salvation and understanding of how freakin awesome His love for us is, and that makes everything better :)

I'll meditate on this and give you my thoughts. Meanwhile, though I doubt any of you will actually write on this site, you can share your thoughts if you are so inclined. Or you can tell me in person, because that seems to work better for most of you!