Choosing “Through”
My mom passed away two years ago from an accidental overdose. She suffered from undiagnosed and untreated Bipolar Disorder for my entire life. It wasn’t until my college years that she began self-medicating with alcohol and anxiety medications after gastric bypass surgery. When she began falling into these patterns, I felt as if my world was falling out from underneath me. Everything I knew to be true felt like it disintegrated into chaos, and the strong matriarchal foundation I needed was struggling to hold on to reality, herself.
For a long time, I was angry, and I let her know it. Anger is a natural response when it seems people we care deeply about are deliberately making decisions that hurt themselves and the people around them. What I would find out later is my anger may have been more accurately directed at the spiritual realities that were preying on my Mama’s wounds from being abused as a child by several family members, losing her dad when she was a year old, and being severely bullied at school when she was growing up. She learned to protect herself by either fighting back or running away because staying to talk through things with the people who had caused her harm was never a safe option for her. If she had nowhere to run, she felt her only option was to be the most aggressive in the room so no one else could cause her any harm.
The anger I carried for so long liquified into compassion when I finally felt the urging—of what I now know was the Holy Spirit—to surrender all my longings for a mother without mental illness to God and seek permission to mourn the fact I would never experience that from the mother I so deeply loved, the mother I actually had.
As I began to release the expectations I had unknowingly held for my mother, the Lord began to show me how His compassion flowed toward the wound that was causing her behavioral patterns. I began to see her as a little girl who felt she had no safe place, and the Lord began to teach me how to be a safe place for her to unravel. It was as if He was teaching me about His nature as He was helping me to tame my own.
The years that followed my journey of surrender were deeply healing for us as mother and daughter, and even as friends. It was as though this woman who had always known the importance of the faith she had sown into me was suddenly reaping a harvest of healing that she never expected to receive. And I was receiving it, too. Unfortunately when the healing of our souls isn’t accompanied by the building of new habits, the deliverance God longs to offer from the harmful patterns doesn’t often take place. God wasn’t interested in healing the heart of Israel and leaving them in Egypt just to have to continue healing them over and over and over of the thing He could have simply delivered them from forever.
Photo by Alex Wolf
Deliverance can be a trigger word for those who have been hurt by people who misuse the term or who attempt to use it for their own gain. Trust me, I know the feeling. But God never intends to hurt or shame us while He is delivering us. His deliverance is His process of saving us from something that intends to harm us. Like the story of Israel and the Red Sea, Daniel and the Lion’s Den, Gideon & the wine press, and countless others where God sees His people being oppressed or afraid, calls out to them to wake up to His saving presence and offers them the opportunity to trust Him.
The thing we aren’t always taught about the way in which God delivers us is that He gives us an opportunity to link arms with Him as He paves a new path for us. He bends the heavens to listen to our prayers and responds by incarnating Himself to say to the world, “I am WITH you.”
We’ve often been taught His saving of us was a rescue mission. While that isn’t untrue, we can also understand God’s deliverance as His attempt to wake us up, to give us conscious awareness of the masterpiece He created us to be so that we might begin to recognize our identity as children of the Most High God and allow that knowledge to shape the person we become.
In the story of Sleeping Beauty, the prince didn’t come to rescue her from the bed on which she was sleeping, but to wake her from the slumber that was keeping her bound. He could’ve lifted her from her bed and taken her back to his castle, but what good would that have done either of them? The kiss of love enabled her to wake up and break out of what kept her bound to that bed and to lend a hand to help her move away from the position of her slumber.
Photo by Alex Wolf
In the Exodus narrative, God could’ve whisked Israel out of Egypt on giant clouds to the Promised Land, but instead, He asked them to trust Him and partner with Him as His very presence walked with them and made ways where there were no ways.
The sheer fact that He continually tells us in scripture He is creating a way for us points to His intention to walk before, with, and behind us as we learn to trust Him. God never intended for us to be damsels rescued from distress, but for us to be His co-laborers in this beautiful world, which means he wants us to wake up to who we were created to be.
Trauma has the ability to seep all the way into our bones, even in a physical way. Understandably, it alters our patterns of behavior and has this sinister way of stealing our hope so we can’t see a way forward. A few days ago as I was in prayer, I saw a picture in my mind of the Red Sea and the Exodus of Israel. My vision began diverging from the biblical narrative when the very ones God was attempting to bring out of oppression chose to set up camp on the dry bed of the sea. I could see a long table set up for a feast and people gathered around the table with candles and loved ones.
For the life of me, I couldn’t understand what He was showing me, so I asked what it was He wanted me to see. I had a deep sense He wanted me to see what it looks like when we allow trauma to be our Promise Land. God wanted to separate them from the enemy who intended them harm, but they wanted to sit in the middle of what God had called them to travel through. I could sense the deep and eternal compassion of God towards the hurting, as well as the power He was offering them to continue moving forward into all He wanted to give them. Almost as if He was showing me we are stopping after one glory when He intends to bring us from glory to glory.
While we long for destination, Jehovah Rapha, the God who heals, beckons us to journey with Him.
To learn to trust His goodness in the face of disaster. We see this so clearly in the person of Jesus and the courage of Calvary. I’ve wondered so often over the last few months if it was His choice to forgive his murderers that opened His heart to welcome the repentant thief into the Kingdom. I wonder if His choice in that moment was the difference between staying stuck in the middle of the pain or choosing to say yes to the “through” of death in order to experience the promise of resurrection.
Photo by Alex Wolf
As we walk our own journey of suffering, the solace we are offered is this—God is the God who suffers with His children. While we long to be delivered from our pain, the Lord understands it is to the benefit of our souls that He deliver us through it. There, on the cross beside us, our Lord refuses to deliver even Himself from pain because He longs to commune with us in our suffering.
When we entrust our pain and our future to Him, He uses it to transform us from glory to glory. To resurrect us, you might say.
And this is what creation is groaning for … to itself be delivered from bondage and into the same liberty of those who emerge victorious through their suffering because they persisted in hope.
When we set up a feast on the dry bed of the sea, we are proclaiming our hopelessness for the future. But, when we choose the path “through” our suffering, we are choosing to do the hard thing just as Christ did.
It is a declaration of hope and an act of faith that informs everything and everyone around us—this is not the end of our story and greater is ahead than that which lies behind us.
May we see our suffering through new eyes today. May we come to deeply know God is not at all absent from our suffering, nor is He inflicting it upon us. He is ever present with us in it and experiences it with us.
May this revelation fuel us in and through the pain, availing ourselves to the Potter’s careful hand as He uses that which the enemy meant for evil to carve us into the masterpiece we’ve always been. The statue of David always existed in the piece of marble every other sculptor rejected; it took Michelangelo’s vision and careful hands to carve until he found him and set him free.