Healing: Embracing God in the Lowest Valleysናሙና

If you have ever been in a season of healing you went through some type of pain. Before healing begins one must experience pain and most times pain doesn’t allow you time to prepare for a season of healing. No, most times you get thrown into it. The good days become few and far between because pain insists on being attended to. It stops you in your tracks and demands the attention you have tried so hard to ignore. I sometimes see pain as a toddler. When toddlers get upset they can throw a tantrum that stops your day in its tracks. Nothing can go on until the tantrum stops. So you have to coax the toddler, asking why they are throwing a tantrum, and then figure out a way to make it better. Pain is exactly like that. It stops everything in its tracks and demands the attention you haven’t given it. Pain, like a tantrum, can shut a person down (emotionally, mentally, physically, or spiritually) refusing to cooperate until they feel seen and heard. Sometimes pain doesn’t allow you to get your ducks in a row before it comes. No, most times it leaves you scrambling because pain never hits at a convenient time.

Healing happens after the pain comes. Most people remind you of the beauty in healing, they don’t talk about the hard part of healing. The hard part needs to be talked about so others can know that there is beauty after the hard and that the hard won't crush you even when you feel like you can’t take in another gasp of breath.

By definition, healing is “to make free from injury and disease. To make sound or whole. To make well again, to restore health.” However, healing is so much more than that. The definition of healing for me, doesn’t fit into a few short sentences. No, it takes up a whole page because while that definition may be true, it is not the whole truth of the word.

Healing is an up-and-down journey, healing is trudging through the lowest valleys oftentimes by yourself. Sometimes healing is taking one step forward only to be pushed three steps back. Healing sometimes feels like drowning, gasping for air as the waves are crashing over your head pushing you down. Healing is ugly and incredibly hard. Healing can wound the soul, sometimes destroying a person before the healing becomes healed.

Healing is the climb up. Healing is seeing the often very dim light at the end of the tunnel and choosing to move forward when the pain and hurt are begging you to stop. Healing is sitting in the pain, healing is processing, healing requires patience, and healing requires faith. Healing is feeling all the broken pieces of yourself. But healing is also giving those broken pieces to Jesus allowing him to rework them, molding them into a greater you.

As Christians, we don’t get a free pass out of the hard parts of healing, but we have an opportunity to grow and use our healing journey to help others. When we see our valley used as a tool of encouragement for others, as a tool to speak truth over others who are hurting, it can give us a little bit more faith.

For me, my healing season was all of the hard things written above. A season of the lowest lows I have ever experienced. A constant physical pain that would bring me to my knees. But in the most unbearable moments, the moments that were my lowest lows, that is when I felt Him the most. Like Jesus was sitting right beside me holding my hand, like a breath of fresh air. I know He walked with me in my season of healing just like I know He is walking with you.

I encourage you, the next time you feel like you have reached your lowest, lean in, lean into his whispers, lean into his hand, lean into Him. He is ready with open arms. That beautiful healing just might be around the corner.