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Study of Text, C 14: VII. Sharing Perception with the Holy Spirit, P 3. 5-22-17

VII. Sharing Perception with the Holy Spirit, P 3

Journal
I was once married to a man who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. In this delusional state of mind, he saw and heard things that no one else could see or hear. Think about that for a moment. What if you saw someone coming after you with a knife? It would be terrifying as he drew closer and closer to you. You would run for your life!

Now suppose I grabbed you and said, “Slow down! Why are you running? Why are you afraid? There is nothing chasing you.” You look behind you and the knife-wielding man is gaining on you. Would you stand there and think to yourself that this crazy person trying to hold you back probably has a point? Or would you throw him off, and take off running again?

Schizophrenia is a harsh path. Not being able to trust your own senses, and being afraid to trust anyone else’s. But, really, this is where we all are right now. We are looking out our eyes and letting them convince us of the craziest stuff, stuff that could not possibly be true. We have allowed ourselves to believe everything the eyes tell us even though the eyes themselves are part of the hallucination we call life.

What happened with my ex-husband is that over time we built up trust between us. He began to sometimes come to me to ask if what he was seeing was real. He brought his hallucinations to someone he could trust, and so was able to accept that there was another way to see the situation. This was not always true and after awhile it became necessary for us to go our separate ways, but when he was able to do this, it helped him navigate the world his misfiring brain showed him.

We are learning to bring our hallucinations to the Holy Spirit. It usually starts off slowly and the trust builds over time until we turn to Him all the time. The Holy Spirit knows what we see, but he also knows what is really there. He helps us reinterpret what the eyes are showing us. The more we do this, the more clarity we have.

There was no way that Charlie could have looked at the danger he seemed to be facing and convinced himself there was nothing chasing him. How could he? He could see the danger, but he couldn’t see what I saw. It took trust for him to accept help. In the same way, we cannot dismiss what we see and what we feel and hear unless we have help. We have to build trust and we do that by bringing our thoughts to the Holy Spirit over and over. Eventually, our trust pays off and we begin to see differently, too.

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