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By Joy Ballard

Healing is a journey for the brave, a journey that takes more effort and risk than you may imagine. It is a journey Jesus invites you to courageously take with him. Will you come?

We Are Holistic Beings

God often uses physical life to teach us about spiritual and emotional truths that we cannot see. He created us as holistic beings with each part of us having an effect on the rest. It stands to reason that inner healing would take a similar course as physical healing.

Have you heard of the healing process burn victims have to endure: the excruciating redressing of their wounds, day after day for weeks? Or the painful physical therapy patients undergo after a major accident? 

If a patient decides the pain is not worth the healing, he will not heal well. The reality of their predicament propels the physically injured to undergo whatever it takes to regain their health. 

Time Doesn’t Really Heal

When it comes to inner healing, the reality of our predicament is not as clear and many of us choose to skip the painful healing process. 

It is much easier to move on and avoid the subject, hoping that time heals. We can find things to numb the pain so we can cope with life and things can go back to normal. But will they?

Jesus Invites You

Jesus’ invitation to the healing journey remains open, whenever you’re ready.

Why doesn’t he just instantly heal? He does, sometimes. 

Most times, the journey is the healing. It is in the paradox of life, the joy and pain and every tension in between, that we encounter the wild vastness of God’s love and find true healing.

All that’s needed is to take the first brave step: say yes to the journey. 

Then the next step, and the next. Each step will require that you be brave… 

You Are Brave Enough to Heal

Brave enough to trust that what God says is true.

To let God deal with justice.

Brave enough to shine a light into the darkest corners of your heart to expose bitterness, disappointment, jealousy, rage… whatever the enemy says you have a right to wield as weapons against your pain are actually lies that bring more death. 

Enough to allow Jesus to turn the dead parts of your heart back to life again. 

Brave enough to embrace vulnerability with trusted friends who will not let you become a fake version of yourself.

To sit in the middle–between grief and hope, answers and questions, Heaven and Earth.

Brave enough to embrace the disciplines that will help you live in wholeness–learning a new way of living as a disciple of Jesus.

Enough to keep going when the only guarantee in life is his presence with you.

Brave enough to: “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.” James 1:2-4 NIV

Elisabeth Elliot was a missionary in the jungles of Ecuador. Her husband was killed by the spears of a violent tribe–a tribe among which she and her small daughter eventually chose to live. She expresses being brave enough perfectly: “I believe with all my heart that God’s Story has a happy ending… But not yet, not necessarily yet. It takes faith to hold on to that in the face of the great burden of experience, which seems to prove otherwise. What God means by happiness and goodness is a far higher thing than we can conceive.” (From Becoming Elisabeth Elliot by Ellen Vaughn)

Wife Step: We all have a need for inner healing by nature of living in a broken world. What is the next step in your healing journey?

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