I’ve been asking God this very question for nine years, ever since I got on my healing journey from PTSD. Yet, I’ve never heard God give a satisfying answer, maybe something like, “Yes! And you only have six months of healing left to go until you are perfectly clean!” Instead, God has repeatedly skirted around the question, and I feel like that doesn’t bode well for me. In fact, it makes me think of two possible reasons why God won’t answer me the way I want:
1. Either my healing will end before I die, but my hearing that will derail my healing journey somehow.
2. Or my healing will only end when I die.
I gotta be honest, I hate the idea of option two, because it implies that it is not possible for me to “arrive” to a healed state in this life. That implies that I will always have heart wounds, and those heart wounds will often ruin my joy. What kind of life is that to live? It’s not one I want.
Beautiful in God’s Eyes
I mostly ask this question to God when I get face-to-face with my brokenness. Most recently, it was in an interaction at the church we are currently attending. When the dust settled, I seemed to be in the wrong because I made someone else feel devalued. I don’t want my actions to hurt others, so I was willing to apologize, and also to bring it to God so that I could change my ways.
When I went to my Father God in prayer, I asked him if I was wrong to say and do what I did. “I only see beauty before me,” said God. “Does that mean you see the beautiful creature I will become, or are you saying that I wasn’t the one who was wrong in this situation?” I asked. “Here is a true beauty, in whom there is no deceit,” said God—misquoting John 1:47 to make it fit my situation.
“I only see beauty before me,” said God.
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Ultimately, I could only conclude that God was saying I was not accountable for the hurt I seemed to have caused—but was I still responsible to fix it? I still didn’t understand why God said that, but I felt better somehow that God wasn’t mad at me, even if some less perfect people were.
Later, I had a vision:
In a chamber of my heart stood Yeshua next to a large black boulder. I asked him what it was. “This is how you have had to cope with all the criticism your mother heaped upon you as a child,” said Yeshu. A heavy, black boulder didn’t seem like a very positive image to me. Whatever my coping mechanism was had turned my heart into dark, hard stone in this area. “Let’s get rid of it,” Yeshu said, and he pushed it out of me and into his broken body on the cross. It was gone. Then, he came up to me, nose-to-nose and said, “I do not blame you for anything having to do with that boulder,” he said. “You are without fault before me.”
My vision ended and all I could think was, “Why does God keep telling me that? There is no deceit in me, no fault, no blame? Do I need to hear that I am inherently good, so that I can become good? Do I need to be protected from a demonic strongholds of guilt and shame, which are seeded through other’s accusations against or blame of me?” As I was re-reading these questions in the editing of this blog post, it hit me:
God is telling me that he does not blame me because I have routinely accepted blame for other people’s problems. My mother liked to criticize people—her problem—but I assumed she criticized me because I had done something wrong—my problem. This person at church who I seemed to have hurt was insecure about herself—her problem—but I assumed she felt hurt because I had done something wrong—my problem. When my version of our interaction story didn’t match their versions of our interaction stories, I assumed it was because there was something very wrong with me. Over the years, these little pieces of dirt built up in my heart by false accountability turned into a boulder of false guilt and shame, as if I was accountable for everyone else’s brokenness, and therefore, responsible for fixing it by healing myself!
The Wrong Question
When I began my healing journey, I thought I could finally fix the part of me that was wrong because I believed other people when they told me that their problems were my fault. But God was saying that this attitude was actually brokenness; also that this brokenness in me was not a part of me, it was just a squatter taking unlawful residence in a chamber of my heart, which was to be “sent away” (which is the root meaning of the Greek word for “forgive”, aphes.)
That’s why God never answered the question of whether my healing will ever end—as in, “Will I ever be healed enough for other people to not have problems with me?”—because this was the wrong question. The right question is, “God, is every trial I experience mine to fix?”
God’s answer is, “No.”
One response to “Does Healing Ever End?”
[…] motives, as well as apologize where it was possible we could have wronged someone. I was willing to fix myself to keep the church leaders happy, but when, in my follow-on conversation with one leader, it was suggested that the freedom with […]
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