I have been through quite a bit of trauma in my life. I obviously am not going to go into any great detail here, but let’s just say it was pretty ugly. And those sins against me caused a lot of problems in my life and in my relationships. Now, I am in no way saying that I am completely healed and perfect in any way… nope still have a LONG way to go. What I am saying is that I have received a radical amount of healing to my soul.
Because I *finally* LET God reach in to the broken parts and my bruised and battered heart and start to put the pieces that both my abusers and myself had damaged and broken apart through various sins. Now if you are waiting for me to reveal some juicy sins or drama, I am not going to, suffice it to say when I sat down and committed to find some sort of peace or something… I prayed in Adoration, in desperation, I asked God to do whatever he needed to, to use all things in my life, to replace my heart of stone with a heart for love.
I didn’t know what that would mean at the time, I didn’t know what kinds of purification I would endure here in the World, what I hoped for at the moment was just enough peace internally that I could survive my time on this Earth, what I got was far more then that.
What I received from God was that *I* was the pearl of great price, *I* was the one sheep that He left the 99 to go find.
That *I* had worth and was valued and loved.
The damage that had been done to me through sin was an awful burden, one that I can only describe as being weighed down by every darkness I had ever encountered. This weight on my soul took its toll even on my physical body. Recently someone who hadn’t seen me for a few months was around, and commented that I “looked taller”, which is a bit odd because as I am in my 40’s I’m not exactly going to have a growth spurt. But in reality what this person saw was that I did not seem as weighed down, I wasn’t slumping or trying to appear “smaller” in the way I stand or sit.
I was healed by God in a Radical way, by His Radical Love of me and continual pursuit of me. Now what does all of this mean? It means that my tendency to beat myself up over every error or failing of mine has become almost null – its more rare than it’s ever been. Instead I feel genuine sorrow for my sins and the things I do that harm others.
Learning how to LET myself be loved has been one of the hardest things in my life. Learning how to view myself as having value and worthy of love and being treated with dignity is the other. Having those to wounds, my deepest and most painful wounds, the ones that have festered the longest, having these wounds healed in an extraordinary way is breath taking. Like any human I tend to pick at the scab every once in a while, but overall the wounds have been closed.
The medicine for this great healing?
Prayer, not audible rote prayers, but meditative prayer and lectio divina, followed by frequent confession, spiritual direction, and Therapy. Yes Therapy. While the great majority of this post has been about the Spiritual healing of my soul. The physical healing of my mental wounds has also happened.
I have explored in great detail my grief, my trauma, my own issues with anger and resentment, my tendency to beat myself up mentally, my issues with trust and my fear and my PTSD. I still have work to do both in my faith life and with my past trauma. But I have come so far from where I was.