As we close out the “Calloused Heart” series, I want to say something that I feel God placing on my heart to share. What I am sharing with you today is the result of my experience with a deeply wounded hurt due to a loss that paralyzed me and held me back for so many years.
I believe God wants to answer our questions. I wholeheartedly believe that he didn’t die on that cross to reconcile us with him, for him to be quiet when we ask him tough questions.
Bad things happen in our life, we experience deep loss and it is extremely painful. God is pure and the source of unconditional love. I don’t believe his intention when he designed us was to carry brokenness. I believe it is why pain and loss are so hard for us to process. In my experience, everything about pain pulled me further away from him and his design for my life.
What I learned in my journey of processing a deep wound, is that I am not defined by the loss and my circumstances, and it is crucial for survival that I understood this and responded to it accordingly. This is not easy to do, I had a great Christian therapist and a Christ-centered community that helped me tremendously through the process. It’s crazy because once someone asked me if I could do life all over again and not have experienced this loss, would I do it? My answer was a simple no. If I never experienced this pain, I would never have known Christ the way I know him now. Does this mean that you can’t know Christ unless you know deep pain? Of course not, you can know Christ at the same level without experiencing pain. I know so many people who know Christ the way I do and they didn’t know him from a deep deep pain like me. I am telling my story which has become my purpose in life. I will not let all these valuable lessons be wasted and hold them to myself for my own growth. I want to share my learnings to hopefully inspire someone right now who is experiencing pain and suffering due to a loss, to give them hope and a different perspective. I know I can’t personally save anyone, however, I hope my story will inspire someone to look at their situation with a different perspective.
Pain is inevitable in this broken world. But the good news is that there is a way to full restoration. God is in the business of restoration, it’s what he does best. Let me be clear about something, restoration does not mean you completely forget what happened to you. I think some people delay the healing process because they believe if they are fully healed of the pain, then it would completely erase memories of their story. For example, if you experienced the loss of a loved one, you may think if God fully heals you and restores you that it would erase the memory of your loved one. That couldn’t be further from the truth, God would never take that memory away. Christ understands this, that is why when he resurrected from the dead and appeared to his disciples he still had the scars of the cross in his hands. Restoration doesn’t mean you erase a memory, it means God is restoring your life with Christ so he can show you how he makes beauty out of ashes. God’s heart broke when your heart broke, he was always there with you and continues to pursue you every day. He has a plan for your life, despite the horrible circumstances and losses we experience, he redeems it all.
I believe he wants to answer our deep questions about the pain or loss we experience in life. I believe he wants more than anything to restore you and I and our relationship with him. I hope this series has shed some light on how one can move forward towards restoration. I hope my experience, shows that sometimes when we ask hard questions of God, it’s not that God is silent, it’s because our hearts are not yet in the position to hear his answer. God will meet us where we are at. He will know the right whispers to speak into our hearts at that very moment and if we listen and trust him, by slowly moving through the pain with him, we will eventually be in a position to hear his answers. I believe he can and will fully restore us if we continue to move closer to him. Go at your own pace, don’t try to rush the process, it will take time and perseverance, and when you move closer and closer to him you will find the answer.
It took me 10 years to process this pain, he met where I was at each step of the process. I asked the question of why he didn’t bless me with a godly father. I demanded answers. But he knew that I wasn’t in position yet to hear his answer. So each season, as I pushed and pushed for an answer he met me where I was at and he showed me something about my heart each time. Slowly over the years, he worked on pulling back the layers of my heart that kept me from hearing the answer; and when the time was exactly right, he answered my question.
If you remember, I said earlier that I would cry at the drop of a dime when I saw a little girl being treated like a princess by her father, reminding me of the deep emotional loss I had inside of me from not having this from my own father. Now, I witness these scenarios and I feel complete joy and love for that little girl to experience that with her father because that is something her and I share together, the unconditional love of a heavenly father.
God has healed this loss in me and now each day he teaches me what it means to be a daughter of royalty. There are so many blessings that come with becoming royalty and each day is a new day to learn something new about this new lifestyle.
Love in abundance,
Jamie
