Mending

 Somehow, I never expected I would learn it this way - that I would discover healing didn't mean what I thought it meant. That I would have to find hope in the most round-about way possible and that I wouldn't know love unless I'd lost. It just never occurred to me that, in order to mend, I would have to be broken. 

I've been going through spiritual growing pains of late... pains that are forcing me to deep-dive into the ultimate root-pain and are exposing things long hidden. Things I had no idea were buried so deep in the dark recesses of my soul. It's as if naming one un-named thing ultimately led to the naming of many others and thus, I am being torn open in order to be repaired. 

It's taken me years to realize this truth, but I'm starting to catch the pattern of how He works... 

If you don't experience the opposite of what you want, you never actually know what you really need. 

And the very things we are hurt by the most, in a strange way, move us toward the things we most want. 

Sometimes, it takes being wounded by the unkind words, the unexpected rejection, the sudden betrayal, the traumatic loss to see that you don't want to become that yourself. That you don't want to gather those around you who choose to become that. It's like you have to have your eyes opened to the horrific reality of what it's like to not live loved, chosen, accepted, and beautiful in order to welcome and embrace fully the life you've been given instead. 

I wish it wasn't so. 

I really do.

And for years, I thought healing meant you just tried to forget. Tried to ignore. 

That if you went long enough without giving acknowledgement to the words, the actions, the unpleasant memories, you would slowly keep distancing yourself from the things that caused you so much pain. But the fact is, unless you find a place for them - unless you make peace with them - unless you put them to bed once and for all, they'll keep coming back. Like ghosts in a haunted house, they'll keep haunting you until you reach a place where you no longer remember who you are and everywhere looms a threat and there are no safe places for your precious heart. 

All this time later, it's finally sinking in that healing isn't what I once believed. 

It isn't all about forgiving and forgetting because... you never truly forget. The mind retains and the wounds remain and the damage was still done no matter what. You can't change the fact it happened. You can only change where you go from here. Because healing isn't so much about returning to the pristine version of yourself you were before that awful thing happened... rather, it's about learning how to incorporate that pain into your life in such a way that you become stronger, braver, wiser. 

Healing sometimes looks like Surgeon's hands tearing away flesh and penetrating deep to cut all the way down to the heart of what has gone wrong so that then He can sew and bind up - mend and restore. 

These days, I'm discovering there's much more to my internal pain than I realized. That things I refused to acknowledge out of a desire to let the past be continue to play more of a role in my life than I know and that it is for my good that He keeps on opening and cleansing and repairing. However unpleasant, this is how His grace finds its way in. 

And so, one little bold step at a time, I keep leaning into the hurt. I keep trying to look for all the ways in which these surfacing memories point me toward healing and toward the One who has carried me through it all. Who was there for all these painful moments and Who feels for my ache as only He can. It's a mercy He's leading me down these roads I resisted for so long because, in the end, those roads lead to home. 

Lead to a place of peace I've always wanted. 

Lead to a space of love I've always needed. 

Lead to a future I would never have found if a breaking heart hadn't changed everything.