Lent 13 ~ The Real Jailors

Let the prisoners’ sighing come before You;
with Your great power free those doomed to death.   ~  Psalm 79: 11

          How many, many times I have prayed these verses from the psalm, binding my suffering and tears to them. Today, I am finally freed from the prisons which a number of people have locked me into. After close to 25 years, I have walked free from my last prison.

          Looking back, I wonder if I would ever fall back into prison again. Absently, seeking the faces of my old jailors, God places something else before me instead.

Narcissism and Jealousy

          In a silver moment that can only come when God’s light has pierced the heart, I realise that it was not specific people who had imprisoned me and thrown away the keys to the prisons. It was the twin spirits of Narcissism and Jealousy.

The love of self to the point of delusion, believing that you are loving and serving God when it is actually yourself that you love to madness.

The hatred that you foment against others who refuse to make you and your beliefs the centre of their lives because they have found a far greater Love.

Those were my real jailors.

          I had always assumed them to be two separate evils that had found home in various people who had come through my life. But today, my Heavenly Father shows me that they are but two faces of the same darkness.

          Narcissism and jealousy are seldom easily perceived. Too often, they lie cloaked in various garments – of authority, of knowledge, of wealth and power, of even love. We succumb when we fear, when we doubt, when we seek to be loved and cherished and respected.

          In short, we give power to narcissists and the jealous when we believe they have the God we seek.

When we believe God is where He is not.

          With that, the answer to my seeking today becomes clear.

          We are imprisoned only when we take our eyes off the true God.