Healing Wounds

This post was written by World Racer, Paige Lindner. 

As humans each of us keeps packing things into the soul and never take time to unpack them. If we don’t process, grieve, and heal successfully then more sin will come in the future and embed itself in the walls of our hearts. The Lord calls us to tangibly choose Him amidst the process of healing. It is not the Lord snapping His fingers and saying “you’re made better, child”- it’s a daily process to be changed into a better version of yourself in order to not revert back to the same things we once ran to that ended up scarring us. The scars will most likely exist but we will be thankful for them because they have defined the person, the YOU, that stands before the Father today.

Ways to properly heal are subjective, but on my own attempt to get rid of the hurt in my life I have found myself utilizing the following to GROW. And no one ever said it was easy or pain-free.

#1- Grief journal. No one really knows what to do with their pain and wounds. Grief is hard to process and not easy to gain courage to face. Eventually the hurt will be exposed. {Read the Psalms for grief.} The Hebrews suffered but they knew how to grief with intentionality. It’s hard to have tremendous honesty with God, but He is better able to answer our prayers when we humbly expose all of our sin right in front of the Father. If you can imagine this imagery, it is you before a smiling Jesus on the throne emptying all of your pockets before Him and He takes it with promises for you to walk further into life freed from the gunk that was weighing you down. Learn to fill the empty pockets you are now having with characteristics of His.

#2- Take time to actually FEEL pain. Know it, love it, and embrace it. If you don’t grieve the bad thoughts or bad circumstances, then the positive, the optimistic life perception and joy stops too. That cliche fact that the hardest times make the blessings from the Father that much sweeter. He never called us to be sheltered people from the hurts of this world, but to dwell amidst them knowing you’re being refined. Do you think that it feels good to be rubbed time and time again with sandpaper being that piece of wood? But if LIFE is the woodsman smoothing out a piece of wood, the Lord can stand back looking at us the woodwork and feel proud of what we let the world put us through in order to look more like Him. God doesn’t inflict hurt and pain, but He sure uses it for His good.

#3- Tell your story of pain with emotion. Don’t disconnect from the emotions of your story, be honest and take risks for Christ. Let your story provoke tears or pain on someone else, empathy, sympathy, and apathy. Get behind your story because the King of Heaven and earth gave it to you, He made sure it was saturated with His goodness and uses it as a tool for us to help others out of bondage we were freed of. Because if you cannot be real with your story and let raw emotions come, then you haven’t grieved properly. OUT OF THE OVERFLOW OF THE HEART COMES WORDS.

#4- Remember the price He paid for our freedom. Remember that He paid it willingly and with more love than any of us will ever know. Confess your sins and you will be made whole? No. By His wounds, by our wounds we grieve and are healed. You cannot heal without taking time to process and let your sin and pain sink into your heart. The only pathway to healing is Jesus’ suffering. If we never felt pain how would we know joy? There is no healing, no therapeutic new beginnings without the cross.

#5- Cry out in conversation to the Lord, be willing to challenge Him amidst your pain. Anything that comes into your life God can use to turn you into a human more like Jesus. ANYTHING. God promises that He will redeem that thing in your life to make you more like His son. If you’re going through a difficult time and you don’t know why God is putting you through such a thing? Just ask Him. Let Him know your concerns. Too often we ask God the the wrong question. We say “Why?”- He never promised to answer the why but He will answer the “How?” How will you redeem this God? He promises to always answer that.

#6- Do not waste suffering in your life. You may not always enjoy it but you WILL benefit. God may not have sent the pain but He can humbly redeem it. HE CAN, only God can do that. Forgiveness for the person, the lie, the terrible experience you went through, etc. Promise yourself that you will make the best of suffering. Don’t stop using the principle of forgiveness. Don’t stop using the principle of repentance. Do not stop using the principle of lies and truth. Let the wound succumb to healing.

#7 {the most biblical and important}- Ask the Holy Spirit to let the memories surface that you should process through in order to heal properly and justly. The past should be re-remembered when your heart is in the right place. God may surprise you. Let the Holy Spirit go after that wound. Let Jesus rub salve over your open wound and fix what has been torn apart. (see my next blog post titled about healing a broken heart)

Go back to that memory and SEE with your heart where Jesus was in that time. Jesus is ALWAYS there, simply in a loving place. He may have been wearing because of the hard circumstance. He may have been stroking my hair. Jesus may have been holding my hand, or watching and waving to me from afar.

Sit down with your siblings and process the pain of your childhood. It will be a fascinating conversation, God promises. God knows what needs to be healed and how to do it.

Put positive memories, feelings, and experience into that hole of a wound. That’s when healing will come. God may choose to sanctify the wound, let Jesus in. Jesus will be in your presence with YOUR pain.

The language of the heart is simple and sometimes god uses imagination to end the memory or to access it’s being. OPEN THE EYES OF YOUR HEART.

If you can only see Jesus’ feet, then you’re ashamed. Lift your chin up and SEE the face of God. Be humble and confess everything, all the ugly to him. Don’t let intimacy wounds block your perception of Jesus.

God doesn’t care about fixing you he desires a relationship. The pressures of wanting to be fixed lead us to Him.

Repeat this: “I am seen. My story matters. The pain I have lived through has brought me to today. I can see the work He has done in my life and I’m not done searching for His mercies embedded in my past. I am loved in ways I cannot even begin to understand by a God who is far kinder than I can imagine.”