A time comes when you no longer think about those things that cause great pain of spirit. They have plagued you like ghosts at midnight. All your effort went to the building of fortresses to keep the thoughts out. You learn to go numb, to let exhaustion overcome you. Crying washes over you regularly, like the soothing rhythm of waves breaking on the beach. The crying is a macabre lullaby preceding the hours spent inert upon your bed or couch. And yet now you have arrived at a new point where walking away from these tormenters requires as little effort as once did sleep.
Time does not heal wounds; rather wounds are programmed to heal. Time has no intrinsic power – it is an impotent method of measurement, good only for comparisons. Quantum physics postulates time to be illusionary – not really linear at all. Dimensions of things are happening at a point in time, yet we perceive only that which our senses allow Genetic disposition transcends time. Only one other transcends time, and he is God. And it is he who enables every cell in our body, every atom in our cells to return to a status of health after disruption. Faith knows this.
It is because of this very knowledge that we are able to move on. We move forward by instinct. Even when gloom refuses to abandon us, we still move forward – however slowly. But healing is much more than this. Healing flows from hope; and hope comes from God. The whole world is generally hopeless. For that reason humanity strives for acquisition, or success, or “meaning”, or value, or dominance. A few dream of sculpting a heritage, sometimes late, after others have set or run their course. In the world, hope bows out to prowess, fame, and every sort of accomplishment the human mind can concoct. When one cannot hope in God one is constrained to design and control one’s own path.
12 In those days you were living apart from Christ. You were excluded from citizenship among the people of Israel, and you did not know the covenant promises God had made to them. You lived in this world without God and without hope.
Ephesians 2:12 New Living Translation (NLT)
Hope is that message written into the DNA of our cells and our souls that whispers that God is in charge and that he is unchangingly trustworthy.
19 We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. It enters the inner sanctuary behind the curtain, 20 where our forerunner, Jesus, has entered on our behalf.
Hebrews 6:18-20 Today’s New International Version (TNIV)
Hope is silently working in us even though our attention is engaged in futile activities such as worry, anxiety, or strivings. It will be there to greet us when we emerge from the fog of despair, having been conveyed forward by that instinct mentioned above. Hope, then, is the catalyst for healing – for health itself. The heart is made sick by deferred hope (Proverbs 13:12).
So, the renewed ability to walk away from tormenting thoughts is a sure signal that hope has begun its work. Thoughts might still come in the night, but that is the time to wear hope like a helmet, and to wrestle against dark powers that come to discourage.
7 For those who sleep do their sleeping at night, and those who get drunk get drunk at night. 8 But since we are of the day, let us be sober, having put on the breastplate of faith and love, and as a helmet, the hope of salvation. 9 For God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ,
1 Thessalonians 5:7-9 New American Standard Bible (NASB)
© Janet McDonald
I love this!
ReplyDeleteGina, thanks for the comment. I actually abandoned writing this blog as I was not getting comments. But recently God has nudged me to continue. Your life is so similar to mine that I feel as if we are soul sisters (not in the Motown sense). I love reading your blog. I have actually used the term "cracked pots" in my writing/teaching. Other similarities are being part of the adoption community, having an adult child with major addiction issues (including the threats), depression, and trying to climb out of the belief that my children's failures are somehow my fault, and that I have to fix them.
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