Category Archives: THE DEEP HEALING Series (Inner Renewal)

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The Hidden Life (The Deep Healing, Part 6)

My Transformation

My deliverance was one of many steps. My willingness to be real with God translated into something beautiful being born in me. God knew me better than I knew myself. Like for all of you, the hurts in my life had a way of piling up. Christians are adept at hiding these wounds. We wear masks. Many are skilled at praying as they ask God to help them with the tough stuff. This is good, but it is not everything. You have to go ‘further still’ and go deeper to where you live under the surface of the normal, the expected. The cool thing happens when you access the hidden part. The hidden part is the transformation on the inside where no-one else can see. This is the most freeing of all.

God is waiting for you. You need to take action. I once heard it said that you may think you are waiting on God, when, actually, it is the other way around. God is waiting on you. God waits for you to stop demanding, to stop doing it your way, to start listening, to begin believing, and to trust Him and His way in order to bring it to pass. He leads. You follow. It starts with intention.

Intentional Choice

I made a list of requests for God’s eyes only. You can see my list here. I asked God to change, heal, and fix me. I asked for truth and joy. I surrendered the rest of my life to God. I vowed to use whatever God would teach me for the benefit of helping others. I meant it and lived it. After months of seeking God, I began to access His healing grace. God began to change my life. Here is how it happened for me.

A Natural Sequence

  • I pursue God and truth.
  • God refreshes the inner me.
  • Joy enters.
  • A new me is emerging.
  • I am aware of God’s presence.
  • I learn to listen as God teaches me.
  • I meditate and ponder everything.
  • I contemplate Scripture while writing in a journal.
  • Spiritual transformation is causing an awakening.
  • Life has a new quality to it.

The Deep Healing

During this time God was at work in me. He was doing a marvelous cleansing, healing, and teaching. God became personal and close to me. I was partaking of His joy, loving-kindness, and strength. His life was alive in my life. I became more aware of my sin, wrong thinking, and lacks. He began to show me my hidden stuff, where I was blind, that He might help me become free of it. He cleansed and nurtured my inner being. God comforted my darkest of sorrows and lifted my deepest of wounds to the light of His glory.

One spiritual experience changed my life forever. The deep healing began in full earnest at this point. Like I said in earlier posts, I asked God to change me and to heal me, although I did not know if it was proper to ask such a request of God. A few weeks later I was walking in the orchard when a memory came to me. It was a painful memory that still hurt some twenty years later. God put it to rest. God healed my fractured heart that day by removing its sorrow and pain, the ache that had been buried for most of my married life.

Next, I share with you what I wrote in my journal that same day.

Journal Reflection 2003

First revisiting of the past

To begin this process of walking through the pains of the past by remembering their hurt and then offering them to God; I went back to the beginning, those first few weeks of marriage when I realized that R and I were not going to have the close marriage fellowship I had envisioned and I felt the lack of bonding together, and the aloneness I felt.  I remembered how at the time I realized that my marriage was probably a big mistake, how I regretted my choice.  I also remembered my determination to put my marriage in God’s hands.  For 21 years that was the way it had been.

I allowed myself to feel, to remember that terrible day, when Josh was a baby, when R. told me he was leaving because it just wasn’t working out, how he didn’t love me or have feelings for me, and the doubts he had before we wed.  I remembered my disbelief and crying as I begged him to not leave.  The pain of these memories was so intense that I wept so hard my heart just hurt.  I asked God to release me from their pain.  I felt exhausted, depleted of all energy.

After the tears subsided the beauty of the trees and creation spoke to me.  As I stood there the memory of the biblical character Job and his intense suffering and faithfulness touched me.  I thought about Job and I felt comforted.  I want to listen for His communion when I finish this.  I think the hard part of that experience so long ago was feeling unwanted and having my dreams crumble before me.  I’m so thankful for the encouragers he brought into my life.  There was always someone who came along side of me and gave me the gift of friendship. End quote. Summer, 2002

The Deep Healing

That started the deep healing in me. It put me on the path to finding fullness of joy. A few days later I noticed an absence in me. After thinking on it a few minutes, I realized what it was, the inner ache was gone. I didn’t feel like crying anymore. The sadness had lifted. The pain had lessened. And the sorrow was no more. Simply gone. It has never returned.

I sought God for truth, joy, healing, and change. God met me where I hurt, where I was needy. He ministered accordingly. For my part, it took letting go, sincerity, openness, willingness, intentionality, and the beginnings of a heart and soul surrendering as best it could to God. Basically, I put God on the throne of my life and trusted Him with the rest. This became a new journey into life, truth and joy. The deep healing was and is a renewal process that draws me in close to my loving heavenly Father.

. . . . . .

Next Week, Part 7, will conclude this series. I am eager to share with you the benefits of the deep healing. This is what excites me the most. Much good happens when a person’s beliefs become tender truths lived under the feathers of His wings. It is like a deep well that never goes dry, like living water where one never thirsts again.

See you next week.

Part 7 of The Deep Healing can be found here.

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How the Deep Healing Changes You (Part 5)

A Renewed Heart; A Soul-Changing Relationship

A deep love of the Savior couched in an ever-deepening joining with Him is an intimate knowing of the One loved. One is drawn close in an ever-growing intimacy with Him. Intimacy, bred from a heart, bound in a living, loving relationship with God, in this way, supersedes any religious boundaries.

When it happens to you, dear Christ-follower, you are never the same. You have entered a hallowed place, a distinct living relationship that breathes life into your soul as you lean your being into God: Father, Son, and Spirit. From then on –should you remain fully focused on Christ and sensitive to His ways– you will freely partake in the joy of your salvation.

The Deep Healing Changes You

Those who fall away from the faith most likely have have not known Christ in this way. Knowing Him is to love Him. Once He is an intimate friend and your loving Savior, you will know a love incomparable to anything the world or religious institutions have to offer. To know Christ in close fellowship is to know the mind of Christ; to know the mind of Christ is to do His will; to do His will is to do the will of His father, God the Father.

Scripture informs and speaks God’s words to us. The enlivening of the soul through active communing comes through Spirit-led holy ministering in us. Reading Scripture, praying, fasting, and meditating are stepping stones that lead to its acquisition. If you want to go to ‘further still,’ you will have to employ great intention.

Eventually you come to the door. Ask, seek, knock, and the door will be opened to you. Do you want to know Christ? Do you want to pursue knowing Him? Do you want to live in freedom? Do you want to risk it?

You can open or shut that door. Opening the door means you have to go all in.

Let me explain.

You Have to Walk with God

How so? you may ask again. There is more than I already know? Let’s look at a few limitations first. Although Christian practices are all good and needful, spiritual living can become habit forming without liveliness in a person’s inner being. A dullness may set in. Preachy attitudes can arise and superior attitudes can inflict damage that blocks genuine spirituality and that falls short in many ways.

In addition, problems, troubles, emotional injuries, hurts, painful happenings, lingering pockets of sin, and areas of bondage that have their hooks in you, can be silent things that corrupt or dismay the unsuspecting believer, those whom have believed a lie that says all should be hunky dory when you’re a Christian, and to think otherwise is your fault. You’re living a semi-defeated Christian existence but not for want of trying to live it right.

Doubt assails you. Why is it so hard? I’m trying to do all the right things, but it isn’t cutting it. Where’s the abundant life I’ve been promised? All I know is disappointment, heartache, and pain. I fail more than I like to admit. Why do I miss the mark so often? How come I don’t have answers that work in real life? What’s wrong with me? These are honest questions that should be answered in order to be genuine in your faith.

You don’t have to live that way. God’s promises are real. They can be accessed and lived. This isn’t just a mental game, praying game, or practicing the faith game. This is a heart game. You feed the body, mind, heart, and soul with God’s living truth and His living presence. He is as real and living as real and living can be. God’s cleansing power renews, rejuvenates, sets free, and invigorates. We need to tap that resource to deal with all those questions that need qualified answers. Christ is the answer.

Let’s discover a new path that builds on your prior spiritual knowledge and well-intentioned religous experiences. Here is the first step to a personal and enlivening structure that will facilitate the beginnings of your accessing of the deep healing (God at work in you). Try these on for size.

Spiritual Exercises

Before next week’s post, I would like you to complete three spiritual exercises for me. I’m serious. I will do the same. I believe (promise) you that some movement will begin wiggling, jarring, emoting, in you, as you work through these spiritual exercises. They may even bring forth some amazing thoughts and understandings. Forward ho…

  1. Examine your heart. Ask God to show you whatever He wants to show you. Write down your reflections and any interesting thoughts that come to you. Repeat each day of the week.
  2. Let God highlight scripture verses for you. Select one of the gospels to read, Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, and notice which verses cause you to pause and reread them.
  3. Consider and ponder these verses. What strikes you as significant about them? Their connotation? Their implied actions or meaning? What are they saying? Why is this meaningful? What is your takeaway? Can you apply it to you, your ministry, circumstance, or other?

Psalm 19:14 (KJV)

Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength, and my redeemer.

Take these spiritual exercises seriously. Do the hard work. Let God quicken your soul and enliven your being. Open your mind to God. Let Him fill it with truth. Allow Him to minister to you.

More about this next week. I’m going to tell you a story.

God richly bless you.

Part 6 is here.