Where am I today? I am fighting hard to get to the place I should have reached many years ago. With my parents help I have a new home this time furnished the way I want it to be. If anything is not as I want it to be then I can change it. I want to move something then I can although being on my own I sometimes have to get a helper with large or heavy items. A lot of the clutter that I used in retaliation against my now ex-husband has come with me and I am slowly trying to reduce it and find places to stow it which for someone who is at least a third generation hoarder is not easy. A history of years of not feeling I was worthy to have a pleasant home has taken its toll. There are times when my lack of self-worth means that I am not able to keep on top of the housework. I put it off and give other things greater priority then say I am too busy to do things. I then feel worse about myself because I know the things that need doing around the house. I used to make myself do things around the house for our daughter’s sake. However, she left home as a teenager because she was unable to cope with her dad’s illness and hardly visited us afterwards. What was the point then of making myself do housework for someone whose behaviour devalued our home. It was like having to fight on two fronts as once. I would try and fight back and do something only to find myself getting upset because this made it more obvious what the losses had been on the other front. It seems silly but something that many people would see having a clean and tidy home as a little thing and yet this has been a battleground for me for many years. These days however, I do have a helper. Shortly before writing this I had a time of procrastination where I avoiding doing the things that I knew I should be doing and just felt worse and worse as I felt so incapable of doing what I knew I should be doing. It was then that I asked for God’s help. We have had a relationship for a long time but sometimes I let things get in the way and we are not as close as we might be. The following morning I woke up dreaming that I had been lying on someone’s shoulder and they had their arm around me making me feel so loved and wanted that I knew that it could not have been my ex-husband even during the very best of times. It dawned on me that this was God showing me that he loved me and that he was he was willing to take on the role of a husband in terms of caring for me and protecting me. Knowing you are loved by others builds up your self-love and sense of self worth. This then gave me the strength to make the required effort to do some jobs around the house and the more I did the better I felt about myself. Ok you are not me and you do not have a relationship with God like that so what can you do? I am not sure what else you can do but there is no reason why you could not have a loving relationship with God. There is a verse in the bible that says "This is how much God loved the world: He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life.” (John 3:16) If this sounds a bit different from the way you remember hearing it before I have taken it from something called The Message, an easy to read modern paraphrase of the bible. I can personalise this verse so that it goes like this “This is how much God loved Susan: He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And this is why: so that Susan need not be destroyed; by believing in him, she can have a whole and lasting life.” Well if I am part of the world then I can say this about myself as well can’t I and guess what you are part of the world as well so you can also say. “This is how much God loved me: He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And this is why: so that I need not be destroyed; by believing in him, I can have a whole and lasting life.” Now you know God loves you what is all this stuff about giving his son. The bible also talks about us doing wrong things that separate us from God. Remember how at school when you did something wrong the teacher would react in an unpleasant way and you felt the gap between you grow as you had upset them. It is the same with God we do all kinds of things wrong and the gap between us and God can grow. The problem is how to get across that gap. This is where we really see the love of God in action. A holy and good God cannot let these unclean wrongdoers near him so what he did was send his son to pay the price that is required by for us to come near to God. All we have to do is accept that Jesus died in our place to start this new relationship. It is as if once we accept that Jesus died for us all our wrongdoings are covered over with a beautiful robe that makes us fit to be welcomed into a new relationship with God. Now just as when making up after a breakdown in a friendship in the natural the first thing that you need to do when you start this relationship is to ask forgiveness for the things you have done wrong in the past. Then you have to decide that you are going to do things to please your friend from now on something that is called repentance in Christianese. The great thing about this change of lifestyle is that you are not alone. God knows why you do things and can help you in a variety of ways to stop doing the things that he does not like you doing. He provides you with an instruction manual to help you learn how to please him called the bible. He gathers groups of his children together to support and learn from each other also known as churches. He has some of his children communicate with others via DAB radio stations and satellite TV broadcasts. Some of his children write books or sell them and others have web sites to help others. You won’t get things right to start with but with the support of God and his other friends you will grow and develop just as a child first crawls then stands by holding onto something or someone and then walks. When a child falls, they look up to someone who loves and cares for them and they receive the help they need. That was what I did when I struggled to do the things I knew I should be doing. It can be an ongoing fight to have the life that I should have but I have God on my side helping me and so can you if only ask him for help.

Sometimes it seems that nothing in life is easy doesn’t it. We battle to achieve things. We battle to keep things. We struggle to earn money. We struggle to spend it wisely rather than waste it on temptations that last a few moments and do not bring lasting results. We know we should do A B and C today but we do something else because we cannot face doing those things. Then sometimes when we do them we think that was silly there was no reason to delay doing that and feel we have really achieved something for overcoming the procrastination that had held us captive. My battle is not your battle. After nearly thirty years of being a homemaker I still struggle to keep my home to a standard that many people seem to achieve effortlessly. It is not just a case of lack of discipline either it goes deeper than that. Some of this situation is caused by the way I see myself and some by the behaviour and attitudes of others. My first home like many people’s first home was put together from a selection of second hand items and hand me downs. My husband did not see spending money on carpets and furniture as big a priority as spending money on drink to help him cope with life. We had the basic essentials and that was sufficient for him. I was not sure of my own self worth so wondered if I really deserved pleasant things around me. I was told that my desire to have better things was really me being over materialistic and that I ought to be thankful for what we had and not desire anything else. In other words, we both had issues that interacted and hindered rather than helped each other. Fast forward 25 years. I live in a house that some people think looks big enough to be a pair of modern semi-detached houses. My husband has been diagnosed as having obsessive compulsive disorder and I have been told by a psychiatrist that this is why he struggles to maintain our home. I have a list of things that I want doing around the house that runs to three or four typed pages some of which have been on that list for 15 years or more. I am told that I am in the wrong putting pressure on him to do things so try not to do so. As a result, I feel crushed by the slow decline of my home as when things go wrong or otherwise decline over time they stayed that way. For example, the spring on the garage door broke and it was not repaired for many years so I was not able to get the car out on my own. He puts things down and expects them to be left where thay are because of his irrational overwhelming fear of moving them. Sometimes I am told not to touch certain things because of his fear or even go into certain rooms for fear I will touch something he is frightened of. I become overwhelmed by his fear and struggle to cope with it myself. What is worse there are times (mercifully many) when his fear of something not being clean means that he stands over me dictating exactly how something should be cleaned. That does not sound that bad but once when I explained in detail to someone why it took 5 times as long to do something his way rather than the way I would normally do it they saw it as him abusing me. What made things worse was that I could not live in the state of constant forgiveness that was required in this situation. I retaliated. When he struggled to maintain our home from a male perspective I did not bother cleaning it as I should. When he made the couch and the floor at one end of our living room into his storage area then I used the floor at the other end for my storage area. Here we go again interacting with each other in such a way that we make the other’s issues worse. Between the pair of us, our home was an absolute disgrace. In the end, he decided that he could not cope with my behaviour anymore so he decided to divorce me. I on the other hand felt that most of the things he listed as my unreasonable behaviour were due to my inability to cope with his issues. By the time the divorce took effect I had improved my behaviour and managed to explain to him why I had struggled. But it still went ahead because he could not manage to deal with his issues sufficiently well to stop me getting hurt all over again. Where am I today? You will have to wait to next week to find out.