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The Keys to Emotional Healing: Part 1
After seeing God bring about major transformation of emotional healing in a number of broken people, I asked Him what was happening when He healed people’s hearts. I wanted to understand the process. His answer was simple and profound, but never easy: “grieving and forgiving.” Both of these emotional disciplines are necessary to move from the place of sustaining a wound to the soul, to the place where that wound no longer controls and diminishes us—because it has been transformed into a healed scar. Grieving means moving pain and anger from the inside to the outside. Tears are God’s lubricant for that process, and what a gift of grace tears…
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GOOD GRIEF: Seven Steps to Embracing Emotions- #6- Protect Who They Are by Teaching Them How to Say a Healthy Good-bye
Life is a continual series of gains and losses. Even at birth, as we gain entrance to this world, we lose the soothing sound of our mother’s heartbeat. For months the rhythm of her heart has been the sound of safety and our first lullaby. In a very traumatic moment it is lost to the chaotic sound of our own first breath followed by our piercing cry for comfort lost. With every gain in this life some measure of loss is experienced. The price for having is the surety of loss. Loss is inevitable but it doesn’t have to be devastating. Staying in the womb is not a…
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GOOD GRIEF: Seven Steps to Embracing Emotions- #2 Normalize the Feelings
After the death of his wife, C. S. Lewis wrote in A Grief Observed, “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” If an adult is so surprised by the feelings that accompany loss how much greater is that intensified for our children? Children who face loss without explanation will reject the feelings. They will bury them under other feelings or stuff them down through unhealthy actions. The next time loss comes they’ll fear the feelings while reinforcing the wrong responses never learning to truly grieve loss. Loss is a part of our lives. We lose track of time. We lose lots of stuff: everything from…
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Grieving- Throwing a Life Line in the Sea of Emotions
When Your Heart Feels Like Winter & Your Tears are Frozen Grief is unpleasant. It is a process of emotions that we each must pass through in order for our hearts to heal from a loss we’ve experienced. As an adult I have had to deal with grief in all shapes and sizes. My first big conflict with grief, though, came at the age of eleven. My mother died. Perhaps my words below will help you understand what I felt when I lost her. “It feels like the worst of winter has settled in your heart. It is not just the worst of any winter. It is like the worst winter…
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Exploring Grief
“Good grief,” is more than just a quote by Charlie Brown. Grief is real and it is no respecter of persons. Grieving is done by all but it is not done well by all. It comes to everyone sooner or later. For decades many children have fallen through the cracks of their parents' grief. We grieve many things from small losses like the ice cream falling off the end of our cone to huge losses like the death of loved ones. Yet every loss no matter how small carries with it a need to grieve. What are you teaching your children to help them with their daily small losses? What are…
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Is God Really Good?
How many of us fully understand the truth that we are unconditionally loved? Unconditional love is very foreign to us. We can define it but we never fully give it nor get it from anyone but God. Only God can teach this truth through us to our children. Do you feel the tension as you grapple with the truth that love can be unconditional and still insist on change. God loves us just like we are but too much to leave us in these selfish patterns. His love insists that we grow in our ability to truly trust Him more. Trust allows Him to make us more holy…
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Adios Summer!
Have you ever had a moment in time when you felt completely unworthy? Out of nowhere a season of wrestling, heartache and loneliness takes a hold of you and you don’t know what to do? You can barely breathe and everything you do just feels wrong? You feel disconnected from everyone and from God? Ever felt like this before? Let’s face it, feeling unworthy is for the birds! It’s not fun at all. Talk about a joy killer! I felt like this most of the summer and it brought me to my knees. I’m seriously thankful to say adios to a very difficult time in my life. Yes,…
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The Stink of Self-Pity
When I got polio as an infant in 1953, just before the vaccine was developed, my parents were instructed by the doctors and the therapists that the very worst thing that could happen was for me to wallow in self-pity, and to never let me go there. Maybe they all thought that if no one ever talked about the huge assault of this life-changing trauma, it would never occur to me to think about it, and so I’d never end up in the Self-Pity Mudpuddle. So what was modeled to me, and which I dutifully followed, was a constant response of denial. So I grew up wondering, but never able…
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The Keys to Emotional Healing – Part 2
In part 1, I talked about grieving as a necessary part of emotional healing. The other part is forgiving, separating ourselves emotionally and spiritually from the offense so that we can continue to be healthy toward the offender. As I said last time, forgiving is like pulling out the soul-splinter that is causing pain and the emotional “pus” that accumulates from unresolved pain and anger. (Grieving discharges this emotional pus.) Forgiving releases the person who hurt us into the Lord’s care, for Him to deal with. We see this modeled by the Lord Jesus during the crucifixion process, when He repeated over and over, “Father, forgive them, for they know…
