Healing The Hurt // Renew Your Mindset Sample

The Plunge Into Healing and Wholeness

Pursuing healing isn’t easy. Sometimes it feels like one of the most painful things you’ve ever set out to do. But it’s a choice you make; it isn’t done to you. You choose to plunge into deeper water, places where you know there is treasure but you can’t see the depths. You don’t know what lives beneath the surface of this heart of yours—though the turbulence of unresolved pain, conflict, and circumstances tosses you about. 

You tire trying to stay afloat. You tire keeping your head above it all. You try to cope, using every tool you know—without even realizing you’re doing it. All you can think about is keeping your head above the waves, trying to stay focused, being committed to finding shore. But what about doing something different? .  . . What if there is more for you than just trying to stay afloat? What if you let yourself sink down into what lies deep, deep deep? What if you opened your eyes underwater, letting the shock of the icy cold wear away, and swimming deep down into territory you’ve been afraid to experience before?

Yes, it’s risky. You don’t know what this healing will require of you. How much time. Commitment. Patience. Perseverance. Fortitude. You wonder if you can do it, it you can let yourself pursue healing. After all, while your survival techniques are exhausting—keeping you just above the waves—they are, at least predictable. You know what this kind of swimming requires. You know the pace and effort of survival. And choosing healing? Well, there would be a cost. An unknown cost. After all, you don’t know what you will find if you plunge down toward what could be treasure, or could be, just as well, a trap that snares you and further injures your heart.

Yes, I know.

And I know you struggle to trust yourself now, at least completely. And I know you struggle to trust others, at least completely, too. But, now, hear this, you will forever remain the same, unchanged, untransformed, unless you let me into your heart completely. And letting me in completely involves letting yourself be healed, no matter what it takes. And perhaps it’s worth the cost.

So hear me: in the waves, in the storm, in the icy darkness of anxiety and unknown, I will be with you. I will never let you go. In the new discoveries of wounds—of revelation that feels too hard to bear, I will be your strength, I will hold you, I will catch each and every tear. In the exhaustion, the frustration, the doubt about how to keep going, how to keep your heart open and trusting and awake, I will be holding your healing heart. It will become strengthened and whole and new. 

So plunge down. Into deeper waters. Plunge down, and receive wisdom and hope. Plunge down, where there is treasure. In the depths of my love, I restore all broken hearts.

Exercise:

We humans are always looking for more knowledge—as much as we can get. And why not? Knowledge improves our lives. We benefit from breakthroughs in health care. From technological breakthroughs. Humanity, collectively, learns so much more each and every day about ourselves and about this world and how it works—and things improve . . . sometimes.

But there’s always more to learn, more to know.

You and I, though—we have the benefit of knowing one special thing. And this one thing is far bigger and far more important than all other pieces of knowledge in the world put together—the pieces we know and even the ones we don’t yet know.

Two thousand years ago, the Apostle Paul wrote about it. He was an educated man. Paul too knew a lot of things. He knew a ton about the Torah and the Jewish laws. But in his first letter to the church in the ancient city of Corinth, Paul wrote about how he had decided to put aside all his other knowledge in order to focus this one thing. One big thing.

He wrote that he was “determined to be consumed with one topic—Jesus, the crucified Messiah.”

You know the very same “big thing” that Paul knew. So do it. And shouldn’t that make us different? Shouldn’t that have an impact on how we live our lives? Shouldn’t that big piece of knowledge result in a few big yeses in our lives, as it did in Paul’s?

If so, what are your big yeses going to be?

One big yes might be to do what Holy Spirit just encouraged us to do—to begin trusting the depths of Jesus’ love. To begin trusting that He can and will restore your past wounds. To begin trusting that no chain is unbreakable. To begin trusting that He can and will heal your broken heart, if you let him. To be willing to dive into the risky waters of healing—to face your brokenness head-on, to confess sin boldly, to admit the ways you hurt people, and to embrace whatever else Jesus might ask of you in the name of finding more wholeness.

Holy Spirit, the very Spirit of Jesus, just encouraged us to “plunge down. Into deeper waters.” “Plunge down,” he said. “and receive wisdom and hope. Plunge down . . . where there is treasure.”

It might be be uncomfortable, sure. It might be daunting. But that’s okay. You were built for this. And God just promised you, “I will be with you. I will never let you go” . . . “In the exhaustion, the frustration, the doubt.”

So, let’s jump in. Let’s dive down. Because that’s the only place where we can find the treasure of peace and joy and freedom and relationship. It’s only by having the courage to jump in and dive down that we are able to begin living the full lives that Jesus made possible and promised us in John chapter 10.

Will you give Jesus your big yes? Will you, today, right now, say yes to Jesus and be willing to let Him guide you into healing?

Let’s do just that. Let’s tell Jesus what our big yes is—the yes that scares you, the yes that takes courage to commit to, the yes that requires you to trust Jesus more than yourself or anyone or anything else.

Let’s name it.

My friend, what is your big yes? 

And now that you’ve said it—now that you’ve given Jesus your big yes—I want you to commit to action, commit to swimming, commit to going forward and pursuing that thing you’ve said yes to—and we will too.