Woman Of Promise: Letters To The Single MotherSample

Day 3: Promise: God will heal your wounds.

Dear Single Mother,

God will heal your wounds and bind up your broken heart. It’s in His nature to do so.

I know you are hurting. Just as God calls us to release our spirit of poverty to receive His abundance, He seeks to remove the ties that bind us to old wounds so that we might receive His healing. The Bible refers to these ties as chains around our neck, cords of death, cords of affliction, and burdensome yokes, each expression symbolizing an emotional or spiritual bondage, or slavery to sin. 

In Luke 13:10–13, we learn about a bent-back woman who had been crippled by a spirit for eighteen years. Unable to lift her eyes to heaven, she held little hope for healing. She felt constant pain, and the dusty ground beneath her feet offered the only beauty she saw in life. Though the community likely overlooked this woman, Jesus saw the bondage of both her body and spirit and called her forward. Through the power of His word and touch, He released the crippled woman from the “spirit” that tormented her and she rose and lifted her eyes to heaven once again.

Jesus continues to heal bent-back women today. He came to bind up our broken hearts and release us from our captivity. He came to remove the cords of death around our necks and restore our minds and bodies to health.

I remember standing outside on a moonless night years ago, holding a dozen journals in my arms. Over a decade of my life was inked upon their pages, serving as a permanent and visible record of my wounds. Some were leather journals, with pages bound together by string. Some were bound with wire, others with glue. All the journals, however, remained bound by pain. I had done the work of healing, but the journals did not. Every time I opened their pages, I felt a cord around my neck pull me further to the ground, bending my back once again. They had to go. 

I knelt down in front of a rock-rimmed fire pit and laid my journals in the center, one by one. Memories bound by string, wire, glue, and pain. Minutes, hours, days, and years of my life lay on the cold earth and I struggled with the match to light the kindling. 

But as I watched the words of my life burn and turn to ash before me, I remembered God’s promise—the same promise available to you today. He will give you a crown of beauty in exchange for your ashes[CS1] . 

Believing with you,
Michelle Lynn Senters
“Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfill his promises to her!" Luke 1:45 (NIV)