The Struggle of Me

Healing begins with recognizing the Healer and offering proper praise and thanksgiving for what He’s done.

But, if not diligent, the light of God’s healing can get covered up.

Matt 5:15: “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.”

Shame and fear cover. It keeps us from the healing community we connect with in a safe and vulnerable way to overcome the shame of our past, move forward and grow in grace, as our Lord Jesus enabled us to do through His blood.

God healed me, and I wanted to dissolve back into the background and never tell anyone about my struggle with alcohol. The story, the ugliness of it, I just didn’t want it to exist. I wanted to get rid of it and never talk about it again.

I now see that I wanted to erase the need for God’s rescue and His saving from my story.

This is the struggle of a heart that ultimately wants to be its own savior. 

The struggle was part of me, part of my story, and now I was asking myself to deny part of myself. That’s what distortion in thinking does, apart from God’s truth. That’s what the fear of shame and the desire to curate our social image do to us. It actually splits us into fragments. Some parts of us are okay to share, and others aren’t. We are dividing ourselves, dividing our hearts in those moments when we deny reality. We aren’t operating wholly or with a wholeness of spirit. Still, one of our enemies – Satan, our flesh or the world is asking us to deny what God’s done and keep it to ourselves. 

If the ugly continues to have power in our lives through secrecy and silence, we will not be able to overcome it. We will continue to have the Achilles ‘ heel and a place the enemy will want to strike to wound and debilitate us. This vulnerability and shame is what the first appearance of the Gospel message points out in Genesis 3:15: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” 

“Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing praise. Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working. Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth, Then he prayer again, and heaven gave rain, and the earth bore its fruit.” James 5:13-18

I wanted to hide the healing work of God in my life because of fear of shame and fear of what people would say and think about me. I wanted to splinter my soul and divide my mind to forget and never talk about my struggle and weakness ever again. 

The beautiful thing about God is that He doesn’t call us out of the shadow of sin and death and drop us off and say see ya later to abandon us to ourselves again. His call is an invitation into a family. One that will help us heal to overcome the woundings of the bad doctors and those weapons that were formed against us but were not allowed to prosper.