(A LITTLE STORY WITH A BIG HEART)
Stay away from me
Once upon a time there was a little girl who didn’t like to be touched. Why? Because her daddy touched her in ways he shouldn’t have. So she learned it was better to not be touched at all than to be touched and take the risk of being touched the wrong way. She felt safest not being touched at all.
So she built a shelter around herself of walls, but not being touched was only one big thick wall she put around herself. She also made a big wall around her heart. She let people near, but she didn’t let people close. To her, there was a difference between near and close. Near let people come just near enough to enjoy their company. But close was too close.
And when people got to that place of too close, she made certain that near didn’t become closer. People didn’t understand her walls, not especially when one day she found out she wasn’t a little girl anymore. To her great surprise, she discovered she was a woman. Only her heart never got past the little girl’s heart, the one her daddy had broken.
Not especially when the hardest part of all wasn’t how her daddy had touched her in ways he shouldn’t have. Nor was the hardest part of all that the people she thought she needed to believe her thought secrets were better than truth and chose not to believe her. The hardest part of all was that no matter what her daddy did to her she still wanted him to be her daddy and to love her.
But her daddy figured he didn’t want to be her daddy anymore when she came out and told what happened. So she figured she best make sure her walls were solid and sturdy before anyone else in her life got in past near, and came too close. Because her heart thought even if she could handle being touched wrong again, she certainly couldn’t handle not being loved anymore by the one she so desperately wanted to love her.
To her total astonishment, the little girl who became a woman found one day that someone – that’s some ONE – got in so near, and so close, that she couldn’t possibly keep Him from touching her, and she couldn’t possibly keep Him from loving her. He was just too big, and too touching, and too loving, for her to keep Him away.
Besides, when she spent a good, long, careful, time figuring out just who this some ONE was, she realized she wouldn’t for the life of her want to keep any walls in between her and Him at all. That’s because after lots and lots of checking Him out in this book written about Him called the Bible, she realized GOD HER FATHER IN HEAVEN was the one she had needed, and wanted all along.
And He didn’t want to touch her in wrong ways, nor to love her in ways where He would eventually leave her. He wanted to love her forever. And this was so true that He sent His precious Son Jesus to earth and then to the cross to pay for all the mistakes the whole world had made – her daddy’s mistakes, and her mistakes also.
Because by now she knew she was just as capable of doing wrong as anyone, even her daddy. And even though it took her a long, slow time to really realize that this some ONE she could totally trust, she at last figured it out.
And even though she still has a hard time with people sometimes, and still puts up walls a little bit now and again, her walls are nothing like they were before. And even when she does find she has put up walls again, and knows she needs to take them down, she always discovers that there is ONE already inside her walls forever because He is in her heart and her life for good. For eternity. And she knows she is in His heart forever also!
And, that, the little girl now turned woman finds, is the best gift in the whole wide world. Because no matter what her daddy did wrong when she was little, and no matter how much she cries sometimes because as a woman she doesn’t have a family because nobody in her family knows Jesus and nobody in her family wants to talk about the truth, she knows she always – ALWAYS – has the ONE who loves her forever and ever.
And the only kind of touching He wants to do is to touch her heart with His everlasting love. Now, she knows at last, she is safe. Not behind her little girl and big woman walls that only go so far, but safe in the loving, touching, eternal, comforting, merciful hug of her Father in heaven – the one who has adopted her into HIS family because she believes in Jesus His Son.
And, for this, not only is the once little girl thankful. But because of this, she now loves her family, and forgives her family, and prays with a pleading heart to God her Father that He would draw her family also into His loving Kingdom and embrace so her daddy and the rest of her family can also know the love of the only perfect Father in the universe. The Lord – and to trust in His beloved Son Jesus so one day they can all be in heaven together where no tears, no pain, none of the hard stuff remains. Just love. The End.
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