Revisiting Our Healing Moments
Engaging with God over life issues can be one of the most life-giving experiences we can have, as God shows us what we have missed and what we need in order to move on. But we need to stay teachable, because these issues often have more than one layer to them.
For example, during one conversation I had with God about my self-hate, He gave me an insight that healed my self-image in some very important ways. He revealed how many of the terrible things I believed about myself had more to do with the ways my family saw me during my early childhood than it had to do with who I really am in God’s eyes. It was a life-giving moment, as if I had been given a cool drink of water in the desert.
But along with the healing, I uncovered a lot of buried anger about the injustice of having received such a destructive sense of self from my parents – a powerful 
hatred of myself which I had lived with for decades. It was only in a later conversation with God that He revealed to me how they had been as much if not more wounded than I was in this area and could not have possibly given me a sense of self they did not possess themselves. I had known this in theory, of course, but when God spoke it into my heart, it rang true. It was a correction I needed in regard to how my sense of self had been damaged. Although my prior conversation had given me an important truth, I had also internalized a faulty view of my parents that God needed to address.
When I sit down to spend time with God, sometimes I begin with a passage of Scripture, and other times I bring up whatever I am dealing with at the time. Either way, God reveals His heart to me and helps me see things from His perspective. Most encounters with Him are like meeting with the Father I always wished I had – who always has time for me, always knows what I need, and knows how I need to hear it so that I “get” it.
Over time this has become a way of living, a way of proceeding that has far more heart than I ever knew before, and more hope than I ever dreamed possible. More and more, I anticipate God’s care for me as well as His particular lessons on life. I trust Him more, I love Him more, and I feel more secure in my journey with Him with each passing year.
The other day I ran across the verses in Romans 8 where Paul asks, “Who or what could possibly separate us from the love of God? Hardship? Distress? Hunger? Danger? (He has quite a list here, much of which he himself experienced.) He goes on to declare there is nothing that can separate us. So I started listing all the things in my life that have derailed me or come close to derailing me. It turns out I have quite a list, too. That’s when I felt led to recall all the ways in which God has restored my life. Man, that was fun! What a long list of mentors, healings, great books, wonderful teachers and so on He has used to overcome all the things which might have otherwise separated me from God’s love. It was great to spend time with God, rejoicing and thanking Him for all the ways He has shown His love to me. And that was just one day’s re-alignment of the sail!