Pain and Rememberance

So I've been kinda quiet here lately, but with good reason. I've been taking a discipleship and evangelism class that has kinda been blowing my mind with some difficult questions. I have yet to come up with answers. It's a process. BUT that's not what this post is for.

I've been having a time of silence and solitude every week for this class that increases by ten minutes every week. Today was for fifty minutes. I went down to the fallen tree behind North-I mean...uh...Hutch, and sat there for fifty minutes. Almost not doing anything. Most of the beginning of my time was spent trying to clear my mind. It took a while but it finally happened.

A little background before I go any deeper, every time I've had a time of silence and solitude, God has somehow brought up the time when I ran from him last year. Aside from my many...many........MANY requests, God still brings it up. I hated myself then and I don't want to remember that time. I don't want to go back to that pit. I'm still healing from that. I asked myself multiple times, "Why do you want me to go back to that time, God? I was glad to be rid of it!" *background over*

SO, today, God decided to bring up a point that I haven't thought about, like ever. We sometimes tend to focus on just the pain of our past that we forget to focus on the healing. What happens after we've been hurt? We heal. In this discipleship and evangelism class, the professor brought up a point I haven't thought about as well. He said something along the lines of "We try to cover up our wounds. Sometimes God comes along and takes off the bandage and digs around inside that wound and cleans it up better than we could."

The healing. It's a strong concept. Whether you're talking cells healing themselves, emotional pain, or even the environment slowly healing, it's a concept that won't go away. It's always there. Even in death, the body erodes away and gives nutrients to the ground around it. And some of healing is almost unbelievable. Accounts have been recorded of people miraculously not having cancer right before going in for surgery or Chemo. As I have mentioned in a previous post, we long for a release. It is our nature to be pulled tight and stressed, but we long for the healing.

So I offer a word of encouragement: You may be going through a struggle and feel that it will never end. You may think that it's not worth it to keep going. Don't let those lies be twisted into your thinking. Time will heal things. I am living proof of this. I was beyond forgiveness and beyond hurt, I almost went beyond the point of no return. But I was healed.

In the midst of remembering a dark time and still longing for healing, God provided me hope. And that helped heal me. Hope of a better future because I know that God never left me. Hope of knowledge. Hope of healing.

We tend to focus too much on hardships and pain when we endure it. What about the healing that comes after?