[nandm]

I can so relate to your feelings about accepting help from people. I am terrible about doing for others but when it comes to me asking or accepting help I have a lot of trouble doing it. I think sometimes it stems from feeling so unworthy for such a long time. I spent the first 30 years of my life trying to be what I thought everyone believed I should be. It was miserable and in the process I lost who I really am. It has only been over the past 13 years of so that I have regained myself and have learned that I can not please all the people all the time, and some people will never be happy no matter what I do. I like the saying that what others think of me is none of my business because it reminds me that the only person I have to work at keeping happy is the one I see in the mirror each day. But I still have trouble accepting help. I don't want to appear weak and helpless in fact I have fought most of my life to avoid that appearance because for me it wasn't safe. Being tough and not allowing anyone to see that I could be hurt was a definate safety net for me. But in the long run that is part of what made me so unavailble to my children. It has also affected every relationship I have ever had even my current one. I am learning more and more that there are some people I can trust enough to reach out and ask for help from. That those people don't expect me to be strong all the time. They want me to be human which at times means I will be weak or in need.

I am glad the "God" concept helped. Being raised in the church and my father being a deacon, my mom the church secretary really made it hard for me to accept the God of my childhood. The reason being, my father is a pedophile. Talk about hypocritical! I also started questioning at an early age, about 6 y/o, how a God of love could let people in other countries die and go to hell because they had not had the opportunity to learn about him. Or how he could let people die, bad things happen to the innocent, etc.... It actually left me rather angry at God. I actually went through a phase where I felt anyone who was religious must be a hypocrit, someone I could not trust. Today I know that it isn't about religion it is what is inside that makes the person a good or bad person. There are religious people who are bad just as in any group of people. That is just life. I am more open to the God of my childhood today but it has taken me a long time to get there.
Since I am on the subject of religion, tithing is one of those things that I question from the Bible. I think many times people of religion take one or two passages from a chapter in the Bible, pull them out of context so they can apply them to whatever they are against or for at the time. For a long time the Bible was used to subjigate the black American population and justify slavery, the laws against them voting. Then it was used to justify keeping women down. Today they pull about 7 different passages out of the Bible to justify their hatred of the gay population. Each of the passages when put into the context that they were written in have either nothing to do with gay people. The one big one that they use about a man laying with a man being a sin is actually from the same chapter that speaks about not eating pork, a woman being property of her husband and if he dies she is to marry his brother, a women is to keep getting pregnant until she produces a male heir, etc... and was written as instructions for priests to set themselves apart from the general public. Sorry for the rant. I have made a point to study the Bible to learn about these passages because I guess a part of me still believes in that God but maybe in a different way than I was brought up to think.

I see you must be having trouble sleeping as well tonight. It is almost 3 am here. Fortunately I had two nights in a row where I got to sleep before midnight and actually slept well. Guess that I should be thankful for that.