When the Spirit Shows Up…

I sat on a picnic table in the middle of the church with my beautiful friend, Paula. Tears filled her eyes, threatening to spill over at any moment. For reasons that she couldn’t explain she just began to open up on this particular day. We started talking about her recent reconciliation with her boyfriend, but quickly moved into the deep hurts of her heart: how she has been handling her father’s death, her strained relationship with her mom, the affect of living with her sister and her sister’s abusive husband, how alone she feels in her life, etc. The words just spilled forth endlessly. Every so often Paula would stop and ask my advice. “What’s your opinion? What should I do?”

These are all situations that she has no control to change. She wanted advice on how to fix all of these things, but the hard truth is that sometimes you can’t do anything to change your situation. However, the one thing I knew that could change is the constant ache of unhealed wounds that she is carrying in her heart. As she was talking I was praying, inviting the Holy Spirit to speak, to open my eyes to what she really needed. The Lord kept speaking “She can’t change her situations, but she can walk through them with a healed heart. She needs to invite me to work.â€�

I talked to Paula about the way we build up walls in our hearts trying to protect those hurt places in our hearts. And yes, those walls will keep those wounded spots from being touched, but they also keep the Lord’s love at bay and they do not allow the pain to escape. The result is that we carry this pain around every moment of every day and spend our lives trying to numb this throbbing ache in our hearts. Paula just nodded recognizing this is her own heart. I told her about another way…

I told Paula that she cannot dismantle the walls in her own heart, but that she can give the Lord permission to enter into the deep places of her heart. He asks for our permission to work and then asks us to follow Him into our pain. It can be a terrifying journey to actually confront the pain that you have been hiding from, but it is the only road to healing. As we follow the Lord into the dark, hidden corners of our hearts, we will feel the full weight of our pain. However, as we sit in this pain for a moment we will begin to hear something else rise above the overwhelming ache. It is the loving whisper of our Father as He brings His truth and love to these wounds. This is how we are healed. It is a frightening thing to enter your woundedness, but IT IS WORTH THE RISK because healing awaits on the other side of this road. Amazing things happen in our lives when we stop hiding and invite the Holy Spirit to move about freely in our hearts.