I want to tell you a story about a lady I read about.
She lived in Virginia.
She was happily married.
She had three children.
Everything of a normal life she enjoyed.
But then one day, while her kids were of high school age, her husband died .
And everything changed for the woman as you can just imagine.
She would ultimately become all the more devoted to her children.
Who could blame her?
And I also read, she’d change her clothes even to those of a young adult of twenty and join in her kid’s parties and fun.
That didn’t seem too unusual.
And it wouldn’t have been except for in the next few years quite the transformation began to take place with the lady.
Her kids noticed that as they were growing older, their mom was growing younger.
If only you had that problem, right?
But it was even more than that.
Much more.
PERSONALITY REGRESSION
You see, there’s something that psychiatrists call: “personality regression.”
“Personality regression” literally means: “a person walking (or growing) backward.”
Ever hear of that?
I mean, we all grow up.
Right?
That’s how it’s supposed to work.
We don’t grow back or down.
But it seems that some people do.
And what’s interesting about this disorder even further, the downward trend usually stops at a certain point and age.
But it didn’t happen that way with this woman.
She continued to slip backward – listen – at a rate of one year every 3 or 4 months.
And so that’s like for every year you become 3 or 4 years younger.
Do the math.
If you’re 40, it doesn’t take long to go to 30 or 20 or 10.
At the rate of four years per year, let’s say, I was thinking, you go to 10 years old in less than 8 years. And so on and so forth.
This lady I’m talking about was 61 years of age at the time her regression reached to 6 years old.
She acted and talked like a 6-year-old even though she was 61.
This 61-year-old lady who just turned 6 would be sent to a sanitarium, the story goes on, where she’d insist on wearing short dresses, playing with toys and babbling like a child.
But it didn’t stop there either.
She became like a three-year-old.
She spilled her food.
She cried, “Mama.”
Backward still further to the age of one, she drank milk like a tiny baby.
Finally, she went back too far and died.
It’s a true story of “personality regression.”
BACKSLIDING
I share it and as startling as it is and simply alarming – and how much more, I was thinking, is it in the spiritual realm when something like this happens?
What about “spiritual personality regression”?
We have a term for it in evangelicalism.
Do you know what it is?
The term is: “backsliding.”
Backsliding is when you go back.
You go back from being in love with God to not being in love with God anymore.
It can start out gradually – with a slight turn away from the Lord here and then another slight turn away from the Lord there.
And then there’s a bigger turn away from the Lord here and an even bigger turn away from the Lord there.
And back and back.
And back and back.
And back and back until, like the lady in the story above, backsliding gets to where you are totally cold to the Holy Spirit.
Ice cold.
With no pulse.
In Hell.
Do you need to return to God before it’s too late?
You still can.
“If you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Romans 10:9)
“If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” (1 John 1:9)
(Psychology via pixabay.)
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