A Lesson on Blessing/Cursing - My Fear, Means My Son Cannot Overcome

Title: A lesson on blessing/cursing - my fear, means my son cannot overcome his fear!

Always learning things.  Lessons about blessings/curses and flow of channel from parent to child.

Our 12 year old son - has many health challenges.  Over the last 2 years and escalating to an intense level in the last 6 months, he has had severe pain in his gut and head - causing some pretty scary aggressive and violent behaviour.  Without the communication to tell us what has been wrong, unfortunately it has taken us a long time to work out the reason for the problems.  Recently, with some dietary and supplement changes, we believe the Lord has eliminated the pain that has caused the behaviour.  He typed to us on his communication board that the pain was gone.  Praise God! Halleluljah!  I've often said that if we could eliminate the "plopping" in his head (as he described it), a lot of our problems would be fixed.

So it's all fixed right? No - the next zone:  We believe he went through a zone of oppression / harassment by Satan and his agencies.  He was daily struggling with crippling fear / paranoia. It was a fear that the pain would come back.  All day long, he was having struggles with these thoughts and manifesting it in the exact same behaviours, as the pain had caused - still screaming, throwing things, breaking things, hitting us, kicking us.  We did a lot of praying daily.  Learnt a lot about ourselves.

Unfortunately, over the last couple of years - living with this behaviour from our son - and trying to deal with it - has meant that we have developed our own paranoia / fear cycle.  We were living in fear of anything causing his aggression and violence to manifest.

One of the fears that I had developed, was fear that if our son saw what I was eating which he couldn't eat or saw me cooking food that he couldn't eat, this would set off a barrage of behaviour.  So I started to do cooking when he had gone to sleep at night (hence not getting enough sleep myself at times) and eat in the walk-in pantry, or eat at odd times so I wasn't discovered; and I found myself eating really fast, to get the mealtime over with - almost a chore to have to eat.  You would think by my behaviour,  I was eating wicked food - but it was normal food (fruits, veggies etc).  And while I am eating, I am almost in a state of panic that he will come through the door and see my food - hence my digestion was getting worse.  You need to be relaxed to digest food properly.

Assessing my situation, one day last week (I was trying to do some cooking during the day) - I realised that all day long I was in a state of panic.

God showed me my mistake:  the channel concepts / blessing concepts, that what is in our hearts as parents, we flow in blessings or curses to our children - that meant that if I am in panic / fear all day long, and I am expecting him to resist the temptation to be in fear / panic, I am expecting the impossible.  My fear shows that I am not trusting God to help me through the barrage of behaviour if it comes.  So it is unfair to pray for my son to not be living in fear.  My fears allowed the devil to have access to my son to fuel his fears!

I repented of my evil in not trusting God, and asked Him to help me to live according to the text: 2Timothy 1:7  "For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. "

I determined to trust God, rather than live in fear.  Mind you, I still try to eat when my son is not around and cook when he is not near, but I am determined to not do this in a spirit of fear, but trust my Heavenly Father.

Well do you know that within a few days of this realisation, and determination - my son's fear / paranoia has ceased.  Praise God! Hallelujah!

So it's all fixed right? No.. now I am still getting some of the same behaviour - but now when I question him as to why he screamed,  or threw something or hit me - it is now to do with normal emotions.  He typed that it is "to show that I am not happy".  For example - that he is not in heaven already/ still in this world; that he wants to be where his Dad is (Adrian has had to go away for a couple of weeks, to get to some mountain air for his health); that his ipod's battery needed charging and so it wouldn't work.

So our next phase - praying that God will teach our son how to communicate about negative emotions in more socially acceptable ways.  His aggressive and violent behaviour is "the only way he knows how to show he is not happy".

Always learning.  What a dramatic lesson we've been through on the effect of our hearts state, on our children, and their ability to overcome temptations.

It is always necessary for we as parents to change first before we can expect our children to change. We have learnt this on other issues through our struggles with our son in the last 6 months particularly.  Issues of resentment in our hearts that our life was too hard, too many trials (wanting that dinner party on the battle field!) - for a period of time our son was struggling with resentments that he couldn't do what his brother could do, so was targeting his aggressive behaviour to his brother and his brother's things.  This seemed to be overcome when we were overcoming our own resentments and trusting our lives more into God's hands - trusting that the trials were allowed for our character refinement.

Another lesson we learnt, to our shame, was that we were sending him the message that our things were more important to us than he as a person was.  When our son had been manifesting this aggressive behaviour and so much property was being damaged (things smashed, holes in walls etc) - obviously it makes parents angry.  And being hit and kicked by our own son, also had made us angry.  And our behaviour toward him was becoming a bit aggressive back at times - sometimes out of self defence, but other times out of shear frustration, and not knowing how to stop all the bad behaviour.  But through all of this - we realised, to our shame, that we were sending our son the message that things are more important to us than he as a person is.  This we have had to repent of and change our behaviour.  We have needed to reassure him and comfort him, rather than be abrupt and rough in our manner with him - for his behaviour is usually the result of something inside him that he doesn't know how to handle. And because his life is limited to being at home with me - I am his world.  When I have not been kind to him, what hopelessness he must have had to deal with.  I pray that God will help me to make his experience in this life sweet - so that he will have some rays of the light from heaven shine across his path.

Oh we have so much to "unlearn", so much to repent of, so much to "re-learn" - so much growth needed to become like Christ in our manner of dealing with our children.  We have so much need for complete trust in God - if I trusted my whole heart to God, I would have no cause for fear at all.  Then my son would have greater chance of overcoming his fear.

Praise God for this probationary time.  Praise God that through the trials we are growing in our trust of God in every area of our lives; and we are more and more yearning for the Holy Spirit to be in our hearts to make us like Christ.