"I'm ugly, I'm worthless, I'm stupid, I'm an accident. God's grace can't save me," Brandon said. " Have you ever felt this way before? I know I certainly have. In fact, of all these thoughts, as hurtful as they are, these are the better of some of the lies that Satan had me believing."Brandon has been an inmate at the Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent since November 19, 2010 and continues to meet with fellow Chaplain Dick Rothlisberger and me. Originally, Brandon was in a wheelchair because of incidents surrounding his crime. He wanted comfort and help from God but was stressed and could not concentrate or remember what we shared about in our previous visits.
I asked if I could share what he read to me this morning here with readers of my blog. Let's let him tell his own story:
"(I am talking about) things I have done in the past and the pain that I have felt in relationships with family and friends and teachers and others who have come into my life who affected my outlook on having a close relationship with God.
"I didn't know the true power of God's saving grace. I never knew what it felt like to be free from the bondage of sin. One day, I was living the 'FREE LIFE,' I thought I was, anyway, when my whole life changed in less than a minute. Everything I had was taken away from me and there wasn't a thing I could do about it. I almost lost my life and got my family killed that day.
"The most ironic thing was I had everything I would want but I still had an emptiness inside. Satan, the deceiver, had me lost and I was believing all of those lies he put in my head.
"The Lord made you in His image," Genesis 1:26. So, regardless what we look like, or how we appear, you can be sure it is beautiful in the sight of the Lord. God does not make mistakes. Your days were numbered before you were conceived. The Lord made you in the womb, Psalm 139:13-16.
So, me and you are not a mistake but a loving plan of God to show that God's creation is not worthless. Just turn to Matthew 10:30. Every single hair on your head is numbered and created individually. Anyone who has someone who cares enough to intimately know the atoms of millions of hairs on their head, my friend, is not worthless.
"If I had found time in my all too busy life to pick up a Bible, I would have understood why I had such an overwhelming emptiness. Man does not survive on bread alone, but off every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God, Matthew 4:4."The Bible is nothing but the word of God. Therefore, the emptiness I felt was my lack of the word, or spiritual food. Without the word of God, I had no armor to protect myself from Satan's attacks which left me spiritually blind.
"Then, I was susceptible to believing all of Satan's lies. Who goes to war hungry? Any wise soldier would eat and renew his strength before battle. It should be the same in spiritual warfare. The Bible is our daily bread which gives us strength and wisdom to fight off Satan's attacks. If there was a choice for me to pick one message for the reader to take with them out of this letter, it is this, "Seek first the Kingdom of God...and all these things, _______, _______, will be added to you."
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