Mikki's Blog - Living in the Grace and Love of God » Emotional Healing

8 Important Things to Know During Hard Times

Mikki — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 13:53:03 +0000

We all live in a world cursed because of sin. Part of the effect of that curse is hard times, difficulty, pain, and sorrow. I so wish I could tell you that Christians don’t have to go through any difficulties, but the Word of God contains story after story of believers in difficult times. Paul and Peter in prison, Daniel in the Lion’s Den, Stephen being stoned, believers being persecuted, the very life of Jesus, and I could go on and on. And this list applies to all storms whether we caused them, Satan sent them, or God designed them. In a moment, I am going to share my list of eight things you should know about hard times but before I do that I need to give you some foundation.

Unfortunately some Christians’ theology denies the place of pain and suffering in the Christian life. This is a tragedy because such a theology shames a believer when they try to make sense of their trials and suggests that a good Christian, a faith-filled Christian, wouldn’t be subject to such difficulties. It is also unfortunate because it shames or rejects one of the primary paths to knowing God and becoming useful to Him and others.

The reality of living in a sin-cursed world has to be reconciled to the heart of God. God never intended us to live under the curse of sin and in the end all will be restored to us as it was in the Garden of Eden. And we are in a process of restoration. However an honest Christian faith which represents an honest Christian God must deal with the truth about pain and suffering in order to throw the rope of faith to struggling believers in the midst of difficulty.

My life has not been exempt from pain and suffering although I am certain mine has been far less than many others’. Yet from my personal walk I can offer a few thoughts which can help you make it through hard times and become better. As I begin this list, I am going to assume that you know prayer is important. I am going to assume that you know the Word is important. I am going to assume that you know communion with God is important. My intention is to focus on some of the other things that I have learned as a result of my trials.

1. God is giving you an opportunity to know more of His heart. He is working to reveal a greater knowledge of Himself to you. He wants to use this difficulty to deepen your relationship. He is teaching you that He is faithful. We really can’t understand what God’s faithfulness is until we feel abandoned and eventually, and I said eventually, wind up in the place where we can see His handiwork. When I walked through my darkest storm 2 years ago, I felt abandoned by so many and by God most of all. God allowed it and He used it.

2. God is giving you an opportunity to know more of your own heart. God knows your heart better than you do. He is working to teach you more about your own heart. This is a priceless gift from His hand. Contrary to what you might think at first, I am not talking about how dark your heart is. I am talking about how God uses every storm to reveal your woundedness, your unwholeness, which is hindering your relationship with Him and others. For example, my storm brought up every core issue in my life. The fear of abandonment. Rejection. And on and on, but here’s the point. God is getting at something – or many things – inside you. When you know your heart better, you can recognize the lies of the enemy when they come against you again.

3. God wants to use your storm to make you better. Your faith will be tested and tried and PURIFIED. There is nothing too dark, too black, too hopeless, too hard, that God cannot use it for your glory. As 2 Cor. 4:17 says, our afflictions are working something greater in us that we can know. The end result will be glorious for us if we embrace what God wants to do in our hearts.

4. You will fail God during the storm. I am not trying to discourage you or speak a curse over you, but it the nature of a storm distorts your vision. Everything becomes dark and hopeless. You lose your footing. You grope in the darkness. God offers mercy to us all. He “remembers that we are made from dust.”

5. The storm has the potential to destroy you. Storms are powerful, destructive forces. As during all our life experiences, we have the power to chose each day whether to trust ourselves or to trust God. Do we rely on our own strengths to fix this thing? Perhaps you default to manipulation or control. Whatever or however you react in the storm, it really comes down to this: Will I trust myself or will I trust God? We often choose to trust ourselves even though our mouths are saying we trust God. Our actions are screaming, “I am going to fix this!”

6. Freedom can be found in the suffering. Just as our ultimate freedom was found in the suffering of Christ on the cross, our emotional, mental freedom can be found in our suffering. As we find ourselves vulnerable, we can learn to deny ourselves and find freedom in and through the suffering. Again, the ways of God often make no sense to us in our humanity.

7. Your suffering can provide a way for you to be like Christ and provide healing for others. As Henri Nouwen teaches, you can choose to make your wounds available to others as a source of healing just as Christ was our wounded Healer.

8. In God’s reign, “everything belongs,” even the broken and poor parts (Richard Rohr). Nothing catches God off guard. He really does work everything together for our good.

So if you find yourself in a storm, in hard times, my testimony to you is that you hold something powerful in your hands. It is an opportunity to be destroyed or it is an opportunity to be transformed. The darkness will pass eventually, the clouds will clear, the wind will cease, and the end result for you individually can be that you know more of God’s heart, that you have learned to trust, and that He has healed your heart in ways that you didn’t even know you needed before. That is one of the beautiful things about serving a God who is mysterious, powerful, and all-knowing.

Perhaps you might pause and ask Him to help you cooperate with His plans in your life, submitting your heart and will to His anew. Is it hard? Yes. Is it worth it? Unequivocally.

Why You Must Go Back

Mikki — Tue, 18 May 2010 13:19:36 +0000

God’s ways are mysterious, beyond my understanding and often seem downright contradictory. While in my humanity, I prefer to think in straight lines which lend themselves to defining a goal as completed, a task marked off, I find that God’s ways are usually not pictured best by straight lines. They are paths which appear, at times, intertwined, difficult to map out, going forward, then backward, orbiting around a center, and often perplexing my human mind. The longer I walk with God, the more clearly I see that He is truly not confined to my limited understanding. He is working, often His deepest purposes in me, when I am clueless.

This week, I was meditating on two of the seemingly contradictory ways of God. In the next few days, I want to explore these two thoughts:

1. You must go back.
2. You can never go back.

Huh? Sounds confusing? I hope you are intrigued sufficiently to continue reading for both statements are true and I am not being ambivalent. There are times in life when you must absolutely go back. You must go back, as it were, in your mind, your emotions, your relationships, to moments of the past and experience the moments again. There are some very important reasons for us to go back. And in other ways, we must never go back and in fact, cannot do so, but that is for another day this week.

We are the sum total of our life story. Often we are not really happy about that. We all wish we could erase or at least, rewrite, pages, even entire chapters, of our story. I personally love the undo key on my computer. If only life were so simple! Surely it would be better if we could just get rid of the painful parts of our story! Yet with God, there is a sense in which we become better, stronger, more complete, because of those very parts of our story.

You might say, “How can I embrace the darkest days of my life? How can I accept the darkest parts of my story?” I can only share what I have experienced.
My life story has had many pages, even chapters, of failure, pain, and disappointment. For most of my life, I’ve done my “dead level best” to avoid thinking of those days. I tried my best to forget the painful chapters. Many times I’ve ripped up a photo if it made me think of something painful as if ripping it up would make its reality disappear. I learned to be quite an avoider of painful memories. Then my life fell, what appeared at the time to be, completely apart. Humpty Dumpty, who had a great fall, looked to be in great shape afterwards compared to me. But enter the mystery of God…

I’ve found that God’s deepest work in me often happens during days of my personal suffering. Certainly as Christ suffered on the cross, the greatest work of God was happening in and through the suffering. Suffering changes the human heart. It can transform us into strong, beautiful people who can walk in the contradictions of God’s ways or it can turn us into weak, bitter people who shake their fist at God and anyone else who would get too close to our wounds.

When I found myself in deep brokenness, I could no longer keep my painful memories stuffed inside their deep grave. They sprang forward for they were not dead and I found myself face to face, for the first time, with my story. Like a jack-in-a box, I tried to stuff the story back in but to no avail. Initially, I could only barely stand to take a quick peek at the previous chapters of my life, but I have learned to allow my heart to re-experience my story.

And I found this amazing mystery. It is my story that equips me. It is my story that connects me to humanity. It is my story that offers hope to others. It is my story that makes me accessible, approachable.

So today, I want to encourage you to go back. When the things of your past are still controlling who you are in the present, go back. When the things of your past are still influencing you in unhealthy ways, go back for you must go back in order to go forward. Here are some of the reasons you should go back:

1. To find healing. If a memory is still painful to see, to think about, to reflect upon, perhaps you need another level of healing in that place. God is not confined to time as we are. He can transport you, as it were, to those places where He longs to meet you to bring healing to you.

2. To gain understanding and perspective. When we are able to view our story with Christ, we can often find that it was not exactly what we had believed. Lies can be dismantled.

3. To find God. Going back can allow us to discover where God was in our story.

4. To grieve loss. If we haven’t truly grieved over a loss in our life, then we need to go back and experience that. God’s Word says there is a time to mourn.

5. To break the power of shame, guilt, and pain. Allowing the power of the cross to wash away the power of shame, guilt, and pain can bring deep healing to our souls.

6. To find compassion for your own heart. Many of you need to ask God to show you how to have compassion on your own heart. Self-hatred is a tool of the enemy.

7. To find the common themes of your story. These can help you find your purpose in life.

8. To find hope for the future.

9. To discover keys to helping others.

So today, I want to say, “You must go back!” If part of your story is buried alive, if you have ignored, denied, or avoided your story, it’s time to go back. Redemptively. Just as William Paul Young describes how Mack in The Shack has to go back to a painful time in his life to find restoration and healing, we must do the same. The beauty of going back is the mystery of how the going back becomes the key to going forward.

Perhaps your “going back” should be done in the presence of a spiritual director, a counselor, or a very trusted friend. Certainly, it should always be done with the leading of God’s Spirit for he is THE COUNSELOR. He knows when and how we should address our past. Our part is to cooperate with his work when he is leading us in the paths of redemption. Nothing is wasted with God. As Richard Rohr says, “In God’s reign, “everything belongs,” even the broken and poor parts.”

May God’s grace lead you in paths of healing as you continue to learn more about His mysterious ways.

By His Grace

Mikki — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 14:37:09 +0000

I woke up this morning with a song in my heart and a dance in my feet. I love it when a day begins – and ends – that way. I slept great last night. I finished two grad classes yesterday and am sliding in to finish with just one more class which begins today. My husband fixed my computer, which I am quite sure had been possessed by some evil spirit. The sun is shining; the birds are singing with me on this springtime morning. My diet is working and the scales are going down, down, down. My husband and I are experiencing a new honeymoon of sorts after 32 years. My kids are doing well. I am expecting my first grandchild. I have friends who love me. My church is filled with amazing people. I have an appointment with my hair stylist who will effectively hide all my gray today and make my hair look like the sun kissed it. Someone is looking at my house for the second time in a week and I pray they make an offer so we can downsize.

Does life get any better than this? It is so easy to thank God during the good days, but what can we do when the days are not so good?

I assure you I know what those days are like too. Two years ago, my marriage was in shambles, my kids’ hearts were broken; I was in a storm of the worst kind. I had lost my job. My ministry seemed to be over. I was caught in the middle of a controversy which seemed to be of mammoth proportions. I lost friends, ended up leaving my church. I spiraled into a deep depression and considered suicide. So you might ask (for those of you who don’t know me personally), “How did you get from that point to where you are today?” And I do have some suggestions for those of you who are hurting right now, but my simple answer which I give with an humble heart is, “By His grace.”

Oh, I know that these thought don’t give you a formula or even a pattern to get out of your pit, but for me, it is the simple truth. It’s by His grace.

I came to the absolute end of myself. All my defense mechanisms no longer worked. My self-reliance failed because what I had perceived to be my true self found itself empty. In my brokenness, I could no longer do anything for God or others. Anything that even smelled of a formula for succeeding or knowing God or making life work, lay at my feet alongside my dreams in a million shattered pieces.

Although I am not advocating this, I wound up in a place where I didn’t have the strength to read my Bible or listen to worship music. I felt abandoned by God and many others in my life. All my strength was gone. And God begin to weave the brokenness into something new. Looking back, it was as if He unraveled all the threads of the tapestry of my life and began to make me anew.

The process hurt. I hurt. I wish I could say it didn’t and give you a false sense of “Everything will be alright soon.” But I don’t want to give you an untrue picture of what it means when a life is redeemed. For now, I am not speaking of my salvation in relationship to my redemption. I am speaking of how God redeems one’s life from unhealthy patterns, wrong mindsets, and faulty understandings of who He is.

How do you cooperate with God when you find yourself in such difficult places? I offer some humble thoughts with a quiet caring understanding that many of you are in painful places. I pray they don’t sound like a “fix” or a “formula”, but truths learned during one pilgrim’s journey.

1. 1. Know that God will carry you will you have no strength, and in fact, it is during such times that He can do His greatest work of revealing His heart to you. “In your weakness, He is shown strong.”

2. 2. Rest in the knowledge that He will not abandon you no matter what your feelings or circumstances say. “I will never leave you or forsake you.”

3. 3. Understand that the body of Christ, the family of God, was designed to walk with each other and carry each other’s burdens.

4. 4. Faith is about trusting Him, not yourself, and a mustard seed is quite small.

5. 5. Lean on him, relying more and more on Him, and less and less on yourself.

6. 6. Realize that the One who began His work in you has promised to complete it.

7. 7. Know that God has set a boundary over which the enemy cannot cross. That line may not be where you think it should be, but it is there.

8. 8. He is truly able to make something good out of brokenness.

9. 9. It’s all by His grace.

May the following Scriptures from Psalms bless and strengthen you.

By His grace,

Mikki

Blessed are all who put their trust in Him.

I cried to the Lord and He heard me.

I lay down and slept and awoke because the Lord sustained me.

The Lord will be a refuge for the oppressed, a refuge in times of trouble. Those who know Your name will put their trust in You; For You, Lord, have not forsaken those who seek You.

Uphold my steps in Your paths, so my footsteps may not slip.

He sent from above, He took me; He drew me out of many waters. He delivered me from my strong enemy, from those who hated me. For they were too strong for me…The Lord was my support. He brought me out into a broad place; He delivered me because He delighted in me.

You enlarged my path under me, so my feet didn’t slip.

The Lord is my shepherd…He restores my soul.

In times of trouble, He will hide me in His pavilion; In the secret place of His tabernacle he shall hide me; he shall set me high upon a rock.

Even when my father and my mother forsake me, the Lord will take care of me.

The steps of a good man or woman are ordered by the Lord…though they fall, they shall not be utterly cast down; for the Lord upholds them with His hand.

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and repentant heart, O God, you will not despise.

I will cry to You when my heart is overwhelmed; lead me to the rock that is higher than I am.

God puts the lonely in families.

God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

You, Lord, are good and ready to forgive, abundant in mercy to all those who call on You.

You, O Lord, are a God full of compassion, and gracious, patient and abundant in mercy and truth.

They cried to the Lord in their trouble, and He delivered them out of their distresses.