I met Therisa, this month’s Live Like It Matters guest post writer, about two years ago in a writing group. She is as bright and cheery as her website portrays her to be. Energy and enthusiasm flow from her. So does kindness and compassion.
I was heartened when I read her story on her website, because after what she’s endured, she remains hopeful and faithful, and works to help others do the same. Her mission is “to infect hope, influence faith and initiate a mindset shift in others.”
We can all relate to what Therisa addresses here. We all experience pain and in our efforts to make it go away, we mess with it. What we need to learn is the difference between messing with it and sitting with it, working through it in a healthy way, and surrendering it to God.
Our wounds can be what God uses to draw us closer to Him, and love others in their trials. Our wounds can lead us to say with Therisa, “By the grace of God, through all of that, I was able……”
Just Stop Messing With It
by Therisa Means
In life, we go through so many emotions and sometimes it feels like we are stuck within our own cycle of negative situations. It is at those times that we must listen even harder as God speaks and gives us the answers to our problems. God is so amazing that He would send us answers in phenomenal ways using the simplest examples! A few days ago, I had a most wonderful revelation, that I most definitely needed, in the most random of moments. It was like I finally had the key to some of my extremely difficult problems. Let me share it with you.
Poking Around
A few months ago, I had dental surgery to remove all four wisdom teeth. When they completed the surgery and I was sober from all of the pain medicine, I used my tongue to feel around my mouth and felt four huge holes where my teeth once were. For the next few weeks, randomly throughout the day, I would take my tongue and feel how big the holes were. I wanted to see if they were healed yet, how much they had healed, and how much more I had until the holes closed up completely. I did this probably hourly even though they were still sore and hurt. As the days went on, I could feel the holes at the top spots closing and skin beginning to grow over them but the ones in the bottom seemed to take FOREVER! Nevertheless, I continued to poke around in my month, constantly, trying to rush the progress. I can most certainly say that my curiosity and my impatient attitude really got the best of me for weeks.
It Didn’t Hurt Anymore
Fast forward to a few mornings ago when I was brushing my teeth. I realized my mouth wasn’t hurting at all anymore and I had not felt around to see how much my holes had healed in a long time. As I began to move my tongue around to measure the holes, I was surprised to notice that all of my holes were almost completely closed up. It was at that moment that God spoke to me. This is what He said:
That’s exactly the process of healing from everything. Heartbreak, pain and trauma are just like those wounds where your teeth were. They hurt at first, really sensitive to the touch, and you poke around messing within it for a while. It feels like the pain will never go away because you are so focused on how it feels and how it hurts, but healing comes when you shift your focus.
His Hands
You will eventually stop focusing on that pain and may even get distracted by other things in life. You will take your eyes and your hands (and in my case, my tongue) off of it and that’s when God can do His best work. Once you stop messing with it, God can put His hands on it. Then one day you’ll turn around and you’ll notice that you didn’t even realize the exact moment the pain stopped. You are completely healed, and that thing that used to hurt and bring you so much discomfort, does not do that anymore. That thing that made you have such a negative reaction does not cause you to react the same way anymore. That action that someone did to you, that made you feel like you hate them and would never forgive them, doesn’t hit you the same way. One day you realize that God had been doing a work in you all along.
For…Not To
We must understand that when we stop picking at the wounds, they can heal. We must allow ample time to truly completely heal without picking and messing. Just like a wound, if it starts to heal and we go back and start messing again, we open the wound back up and start the entire healing process over again. We just have to take our hands off of it, literally give it to God, and focus on those things that are happening FOR us, instead of all that we feel is happening TO us. Look for the light in all situations. There is always light in every situation and if you can’t find it, you need to look harder. Let God be God and handle it for us! He loves us so much and wants to take care of us, so let Him do just that. So, I say this, just as God said to me: JUST STOP MESSING WITH IT! GOD HAS GOT IT!
“He heals the brokenhearted and bandages their wounds.”
Psalm 147:3 NLT
Photo by Nadine Shaabana on Unsplash
