Slowly Healing

I just realized last week that my blog is supposed to help me to stay in touch with all of the people that I want to write to and don't have the time, not supposed to be one more thing to do. It should be simplifying my life, not making it more complicated! So I want to try to use this more like a blog and better keep updated the important ones in my life. At the same time, I hate feeling like I'm writing a public journal entry that just talks about the chronological events of my life, so I'm going to try and stay away from that. 

As most of you know, I am in my last summer as a college student and about to begin my senior year at Covenant! It is so amazing to me all that God has done in my heart the last three years. Really, I am so excited about whatever He has for me after I graduate. I am not nervous or afraid, but very expectant.

This summer has surprised me in a lot of ways... I didn't know what it would be about or what I would learn or what I would do for a lot of it. I had so many ideas and plans for it, and mostly all of them fell through. So my only plans that I made were: 1) Go to Ohio and work for my dad for the first bit. 2) Go to Florida to visit a dear friend I hadn't seen in years. 3) Go to Honduras for five weeks to be with my sister Sharon, my brother-in-law Marvin, and my six-month-old chubby and happy niece Michayla. Other than some weddings, those are the only plans I made. Now that I look at it, maybe it is a lot of plans! I have some other ones for the rest of the summer still pending... We will see what happens. 

At this point, I am in stage 3 of summer, in my third week of being in Honduras. What has surprised me most  is the theme of this summer, which I didn't anticipate, and the theme has been: healing. Really, there are many themes. There has also been serving, trust, evangelism... But healing has run through all of these and my heart is filled with hope for the freedom that Jesus is allowing me to walk in through healing my heart. When I talk about healing, I don't just mean healing from specific physical or emotional wounds. I do mean that too, but I also mean healing from my fallen way of being. 

We rarely understand how far we've fallen from what we were made to be... Part of the way that Jesus' pierces our hearts when we read about His life is by the stark contrast between our way of being and His. Since Adam and Eve, He was the most human person who ever walked this earth. I don't like the phrase, "I'm only human!" in the way that most people mean it, because they want to say, "I'm not perfect and I make mistakes," but that isn't what being human was supposed to be. Jesus reminds us of who we were truly made to be: living completely free from worry because we are trusting and depending on our God, loving extravagantly and patiently, bold and so humble, and only ever about God's glory and never about our own reputation or success...

It is so piercing... I can't be that way when my heart is twisted like this. That is where the healing comes in: softening my heart where it is hard, enlarging it where it is small, stoking the fire where it is cold, bringing it to life where it is dead. I am finding it very painful in the best kind of way. I've done a lot of crying this summer, and I am so grateful for that. Even that is a testimony of healing, because I haven't had many tears in my  life over the years since learning too early in life how to say a tearless goodbye. This really is the first year that I've been able to cry about things in life regularly again. (I don't know how you reading this feel about tears, but I think they are wonderful! You can't truly rejoice until you've truly mourned.)  

I'm running out of time to write this particular blog post. I'd love to hear thoughts about anything I've written or tell more about specific ways God is healing me. I want to share a quote that has stuck on my mind from a book that I finished yesterday, Tortured for Christ, by Richard Wurmbrand:

"We should never stop at having won a soul for Christ. By this, we have done only half the work. Every soul won for Christ must be made to be a Soul-Winner." 

What if every Christian was a Soul-Winner? (Or in other words, a Fisher of Men?)  

Dreaming

Last night I had a dream.

I was sitting in the back of a pick-up truck and a few people were with me—I think they were family members. A man on a motorcycle drove up next to the pick-up, a lasso in his hand. He began to wave it over his head and tried to use it to catch us and pull us out of the truck. I don’t know why, but I wasn’t afraid. I had a knife in my hand, which I opened as I crawled towards the edge of the truck. I thought that if the rope lassoed anything, I might use the knife to cut it.

I looked at the man and he looked at my knife. Suddenly, I was overwhelmed by a desire to tell this man a story—the story of his life.

I asked him, “Don’t you have days where you wake up just knowing that something is wrong with the world? Don’t you feel that something is so terribly wrong with the world, but you can’t even put your finger on it?”

He agreed immediately and I pressed further, “And don’t you ever think to yourself that the problem isn’t just out in the world, but also inside of you—an evil that you can’t fix?”

He nodded his head and I told him a story. I told him a story about God, who had created him and knew him and cared so much about the thing gone wrong that He’d sent His own Son out of Love. I told the story of Good News, eloquently and passionately, overcome by my desire for this man to know who he truly was and what had been done for him—for him to live as a son of the King.

This is the second dream that I’ve ever had where I shared God’s story with a non-believer. The first dream I had about a year ago—I witnessed to a group of Asian girls who were trapped in the sex trade. One by one, they left the room as I shared the God’s story until only one of them was left. But I myself was so caught up in the incredible beauty of the story that I didn’t mind. I woke up in awe, grateful for that gift.

Dreams…they seem to be a theme recently. Sometimes I wake up knowing that something is terribly wrong with the world. But some days I wake up in awe. What are the dreams that our Creator has planted in your heart?

I have struggled recently with deep disappointment—feeling like the dreams and desires that I have in my heart aren’t being satisfied. When will my desires finally match His?

            

    Soft whispers…

“Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart…”

                “…He satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagles.”

                             

                                “…no good thing does He withhold from those who love Him…”

And I’m reminded that my heart is in the midst of construction—but the One who made it also knows what He put in it. Some of these dreams that I have, I don’t understand. I don’t feel equipped to live them out—I’ve only ever shared the Gospel one time in the waking world, and I blundered my way through it timidly. In the waking world, I am terrified of sharing my faith with others.

     There are stories that shape the way we think about things. There is a story that shapes me—a story of God, more human than I’ve ever been, taking a blind man by the hand (who didn’t ask for help by the way, it was his friends) and leading him out of the village. God held his hand, flesh on flesh, the skin of their palms united as the One gently and patiently brought the other. Jesus didn’t bring a fancy, white handkerchief out of his pocket (as I’ve seen an evangelist do, flourishing it through the air like a torch before he pushed people onto their backs)—he used the spit of his mouth onto the man’s eyes, and then put his hands on him—the same ones that led the man out of the village.

     Then he asked the man a simple question, inviting the man into conversation, “Do you see anything?”

     “I see people,” the man replied, “They look like trees walking around!” I don’t know how he felt—confused or disappointed? To be healed, but only half-healed—to finally have a taste of vision, the glory of light out of darkness. What do we say to God when we know he is in control of our healing, but also know that something in our vision is desperately off? It is a small miracle—to be able to see at all. Shouldn’t we be satisfied with the fact that we are seeing people, even if we are seeing them as trees and not as they truly are? God, heal our sight.

     Jesus simply touched the man’s eyes again, and his vision was completely restored. And the question I always ask in my own life is—why can’t You just heal me right now? Right away? And then, this story whispers into my heart that the God I love is a God of process—and I notice how he invites me to know him and be in a relationship with him at every step.

Every step of dreaming…