I feel that God started preparing me for this week’s topic already in the course of last week. Things stared coming up I thought I had already dealt with, I thought were a part of my past but not my present. I thought I’d had more than enough time to heal and ought to have done by now, but started realizing that not everywhere and all the time, but in certain contexts, in some situations, I still resort, almost cling to, things God surely didn’t intend to be a part of my identity. So I need to ask myself why.
The second teacher in the Children at Risk School, Christy Scott, taught us about inner healing, applying the topic to our own lives as well as to working with at-risk children. She said that we often build what she referred to as high places in our minds (alluding to the Bible), making certain experiences or areas of our life bigger than God. It can be that we know Him in every other area of our lives but one, thinking He is all-powerful and able to heal and restore in every other area except for this, especially if we grow up hearing lies about who we really are.
The first step in dismantling the high places or uprooting the lies spoken over our lives, is asking God to define what they are and when we first believed them. “You can cut down a branch,” Christy illustrated, “but the tree is still there – you need to go to the root”. As Christians we also want to ask God what the truth is that He wants to speak into our lives in place of the lies. When we dig up what was there, God doesn’t leave us empty, He fills us with truth about who we are. Just like when you plant a tree, you need to take care of it, and even when you do, it takes time for it to grow, Christy encouraged us to wait for the fullness of what God has spoken into our lives, to write it down and to speak it over ourselves.
God has spoken and continues to speak Life to me, but there are still patches of dry land that remain, devastated, overwhelmed, by sorrow. Gradually, I learn to let go of the things too heavy for me to carry, even the ones that have become a part of me. And I pray and I trust that He will carry the burdens too heavy for me and reshape my identity where it is defined by things it was never intended to be defined by.
My King comes to me humble, low. I can’t get past how deeply that moves me. Hosea 11:4 says: I led them with cords of human kindness, with ties of love. To them I was like one who lifts a little child to the cheek, and I bent down to feed them. And Zechariah 9:9: See, your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.
Healing, I believe, is a process. Investing in broken lives requires commitment, dedication, time. Coming to terms with our own brokenness, not dwelling on it, but rather moving towards restoration, hopefully makes us that much more willing to face brokenness in other people and have hope and faith that even though my understanding is very limited God’s love is unfailing, and what looks like a desert now, those cracked and dry patches of land, will one day be a garden where His streams of abundance flow, because, as Christy so poignantly put it, “the truth outlives a lie”. Consoling.
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