LIFESTYLE, ARTS & CULTURE
Broken Mended &
Made whole
the healing process.
And so I’ve discovered how this accident parallels what we face when we encounter situations that hurt and wound us in life. Many times we experience something so painful at one point in our lives and it takes twenty years to recover! We often deal with the effects of our wounds and not the cause of them. And the truth is: the healing process hurts . . . and it may take longer than we thought to totally be healed. As long as we keep talking about our pasts, exposing our wounds to every new set of ears, we are delaying our own recovery.
Satan works from the day you are born to bring hurts into your life. He sends messages your whole life that say you’re not valuable, you’re flawed, something is wrong with you, you’re not good enough, you’re worthless! We’ve all been hurt at different times in our lives, some more severe than oth- ers. Some hurts are only on the surface – not
too bad; others
go deep and leave a permanent scar in our minds and affect us for years (maybe even a lifetime).
Text: Terry Savelle Foy Images:
free-extras.com
Two months after I got my driver’s license at 16 years old, I was at home one rainy Monday night doing my homework. I ran out of paper so I jumped in my brand new red, Mustang convertible and headed for the store. When I got to the stop sign at the end of our street, I put on my brakes but the car slid in a 180 degree turn on the wet pavement. As I was sliding, a car going 50 miles per hour hit me head on!
Everything went black. I don’t remember anything except lights coming at me and then waking up later seated totally in the passenger’s side of my car. I thought I was dreaming. I got out of the car and just stared at my car in the ditch trying to understand. I felt something pouring down my face and when I reached up to feel my head – it was gashed wide open! My head had actually cracked the front windshield.
Next thing I know, I’m sitting in an ambulance and the para- medic is wiping the blood off my face. I couldn’t help but think about him taking my make up off – and how I really wished he wouldn’t! That’s when they knew I was totally conscious!
He asked, “Are you hurting anywhere?”
I said, “Yes. It hurts so bad!” I pulled up my jogging pants on my right leg to show him where the pain was excruciating and there it was: a tiny, little scratch across my knee! He simply wiped the blood off. Meanwhile, my head was gashed wide open with arteries hanging out….but all I could feel was the lit- tle scratch on my knee!
What I’ve realized is that when we’re hurt in life, we tend to focus on minor things when the real issue is left untouched. To finish the story, I had to get stitches on the inside and outside of my head, and then they allowed my mom to take me home. I realized through this painful experience that as I began to recover, the healing process can be more painful than the initial injury. As the days went by, my stomach muscles became so sore that it became more and more difficult to get in and out of bed. The bruises on my face began to turn dark purple. And my right eye turned bloodshot after about three days.
When word got out about my wreck, all my friends wanted to come by and check on me. As each one visited, they all wanted to “see the wound” and “talk about it”. And each time I pulled the bandages back and exposed the wound, I delayed
18 RAY MAGAZINE
Is there something from your past that wounded you emotionally, an experience of rejection, betrayal, or abuse, and although you’ve blocked it out and moved on, you still feel that something isn’t totally right in you? I know I hid all of my pain behind one big band-aid. I just “covered it up”. Band-aids don’t medicate or heal deep wounds, they hide the wound and make everything look fine. I went through some very painful experiences of rejection and I hid every bit of it behind a giant band-aid of activities, a big smile, and accomplish- ments — meanwhile I was bleeding on the inside.
When you’re bleeding inside – it’s eventually going to show up on the outside . . . in your behavior, your relationships, your career, your self-image, your overall choices. Since I felt so bad about myself inside – I had to do things on the outside to feel better (at the time, I didn’t know this was why I was doing it). You may be thinking, “I’m fine. What I went through was so long ago. I’m over it!” I thought I was too, until God began to show me little by little where I needed some major healing – deep down inside.
Things will never be right around you until they are first right in you. God will change your circumstances, but He’ll change you first. Just because we ignore something doesn’t make it go away. What happened to you that wounded your personal- ity? Who hurt you? Who rejected you? Who belittled you? Who made you feel that you weren’t as good as someone else? Did you used to be fun or funny and now you just go through the motions of life? What memories are you still re-playing in your mind? Did you used to have dreams and goals on the inside?
With all that aside, what are you going to do with the rest of your life? Are you going to sit back and allow an experience(s) or a person stop you from doing what God put you on this Earth to do? You may be crying out, “God, what do you want me to do with my life?” And He’s saying, “Get healed.”
When soldiers get wounded in the war, they pull them off the front lines and let them heal. They’re no good to us out there fighting all beat up. You may be trying to fight the devil with one eye shut, one arm in a sling and on crutches. You’re not gonna win! You’ve got
to get healed! I know I had to.
Isaiah 61:1 says, “He has sent me to heal the heartbroken . . . and comfort all who mourn.” Luke 4:18 says that Jesus came “to set the burdened and battered free…” In other words, Jesus came to set the captives free; Satan came to take the free captive! Satan wants to keep you trapped in something from your past – what you’ve done or what’s been done to you. Obviously, God knew Satan was out to break our hearts and steal our dreams or he wouldn’t have sent Jesus to be the Healer of the Brokenhearted.
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