Connecting with God in the Real
Hurting people do whatever they have to do to ignore the pain, to minimize its hold on them.
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 what happened in the past is outworking in our present. Those whom have been hurt will counter the pain in some way by putting something else in its place. That is where addictions and over-achieving and over-controlling and over-eating, man-made idols, and many self-coping pleasures and self-coping destructive behaviors come in. There are endless ways we as a people pursue happiness to remediate our pain: the fun things that make life bearable, to find our small momentary happiness even though it is often elusive and temporary. The emptiness, the despair, the quiet desperation, the disappointment with life, the sense that things aren’t quite right, is ignored, bypassed, or remediated with an indulgence, activity or pursuit. We bury the pain 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 will find a substitute to self-medicate the internal injury especially if it is one of those over-the-top on the emotional Richter scale. We can’t always tell who has those hidden hurts that trouble them. They may look good to others, leading Bible studies, involved in a ministry, but at some point the pain will surface and the effort to hide it will come back. 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 that sets us back and causes confusion. Sometimes even when we love and serve God, it is as if He is silent, deaf to our pleas and unwilling to help us. He fails to deliver that which we desire and wish for so desperately, the longing deep in our hearts, a residual element that betrays us as we live out our Christian walk, 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 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 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 brings healing and joy in the quiet areas of your soul, those areas that have brought us much distress. He will guide you on a soul journey that will, in time, bring you to wholeness through a renewal and restorative process.
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N. L. Brumbaugh, with a sample from A Soul-Changing INTERVENTION” Connecting with God in the ReaL
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