People whom have been hurt, especially deeply hurt, will do whatever they have to do to ignore or bury the pain, to minimize its hold on them.

A SPIRITUAL INTERVENTION

I don’t blame them.

We do what we have to do. I suppose this is because we don’t know what else to do. We don’t understand that that which happened to us in the past is now outworking in the very daily present. Those whom have been hurt will counter that pain in some way usually by putting something else in its place. That is where addictions and over-achieving and over-controlling and over-eating and other man-made idols and many self-coping pleasures come in.

There are endless ways we as a people pursue pleasures to remediate painful emotions: We substitute. We pursue the fun things that make life bearable, places or things we go to in an effort to find momentary happiness even though it is often elusive and temporary. The emptiness, the despair, the quiet desperation, the disappointment with life, and the sense that things aren’t quite right, is deep-sixed, ignored, bypassed, or remediated with an indulgence, activity or pursuit. We bury the pain to where it becomes hidden under lock and key, where no one is allowed to enter, not even ourselves.

We don’t go there.

We may lie to ourselves, excuse and justify—if it is something we have done wrong—or completely deny the whole thing. A person does whatever they have to do to deal with the hidden stuff. They often will find a substitute to self-medicate the injury especially if it is one of those over-the-top on the emotional Richter scale. We can’t always tell who are the ones who have those hidden hurts that trouble them. They may look good on the outside, busy leading Bible studies or involved in a ministry or two, but at some point the pain will surface. Then the effort to hide it will take tremendous mental energy. One may even consider doing something crazy or desperate.

Besides that, there can be another problem that stymies us. In this personal Christian journey of ours, there is something else that often sets us back and causes confusion. There are periods, even when we love and serve God, when it seems as if He is silent and deaf to our pleas, unwilling to help us. He fails to deliver that which we desire and wish for so desperately, He fails to act on that longing deep in our hearts. This is a residual element that betrays us as we live out our Christian walk motivated by doing and doing, doing all the right things. But the emptiness, the sense of being abandoned by God, may be present even as we do our many good and righteous deeds out of our faithful, obedient, Christ-loving hearts.

What can this mean? Why is this? This is one of the hardest of questions to answer. I will attempt to give some insight into the situation.

It is not just about us. It is also about God.

What God desires is to be close and complete in you. He may allow or at least use these difficult things to gain our attention. He desires for us to reach out to Him that He may help us and offer us comfort and a new and better way. God does not want us to live the way we have been living for it is bound in a spirit of fear with unhealed hurt trapped in the interior places and it needs a refreshing, the freedom found in a life hid in God.

He wants to set us free and to restore us to wholeness. God desires for you and me to come to Him with the painful stuff that He may minister to our need, that we may grieve the offense, that He may enter and heal the hurt and remove its sharp piercing, and that He may place peace as a salve that eventually will bring healing and joy in the quiet areas of your soul in those areas that have brought us much distress.

God will guide you on a soul journey, one that will, in time, bring you to wholeness through a renewal and restorative soul-changing process.

To enter into God’s presence for the beginning of your healing and awareness of your own inner self, it is necessary to take personal inventory. The next post will have an application piece that will help facilitate healing and help. After that step, we enter the solution phase of this writing. Hang with me.

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©N. L. Brumbaugh

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