17. June 2026

The Storm of Healing

Romans 12:2 (NIV)

2 Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—His good, pleasing, and perfect will.

Healing is a broken road filled with twists and turns that can easily blindside and confuse the traveler. Often we may think that healing is already a softer version of our lives as we gently release every hurt into the wind. In reality, healing is a brutal, mind-bending, and heartbreaking distortion of a picture not yet finished.

I did not have an accurate vision of what healing truly was. I thought healing meant talking about what ails you until you are blue in the face and everyone who breathes has heard your story. Sadly, the recounting of our grievances, when done with no purpose toward actual reconstruction, can become a pathway into deeper resentment, victimization, and many other misused pathways that never free us from the pain.

In Romans 12:2, we are called to renew our minds. This is a continual act of faith as we walk with Jesus. Yet in my healing journey, I came to discover that the renewing of the mind often felt sinister and left me bruised, misunderstood, and dismissed in the eyes of others.

At the time I began to take steps to allow God to heal the broken versions of myself, I had invited Him to move in whatever way He needed to. However, because I did not know Him well, I did not know what He was doing, and I often felt abandoned. I was angry at God so often. I questioned His love, His intention, and if He even knew me.

There is one specific memory of my earthly father that has often haunted me through life. On one particular occasion, needing the comfort of a father, I showed up at his place of work hoping to find the solace that I longed for. Yet, for one reason or another—as was often the case—I found him at a time when he was angry. Though I no longer remember the full conversation, I do remember that he screamed at me, “Stay away from my good children.”

The words he yelled were embedded into my heart like a sharp, broken piece of glass that leaves you bleeding as you move through life. There is no Band-Aid that could stop that type of bleeding, so I walked through life bleeding onto everything I touched. I was marked by those cruel words, and in that moment I received an identity and a label of an “unwanted, unworthy, tainted, dirty, orphaned child,” and the pain buried itself deep within my soul. I was unworthy. As far as I knew, I was simply a wasted space in time, a mistake, a burden, and a discarded piece of trash of which everyone else’s lives were enriched by the absence of my existence.

That is a very heavy and destructive burden for a child to carry while their mind is still developing.

Because of this specific instance, I believed God saw me the same way my father did. It was one of the pivotal events that marked my life for struggle. How cruel and bitter life can easily become when you carelessly discard the worth of those who were placed into your care. How lost a soul can become when stripped of any value, and how gaping a void one can carry hidden beneath the mask of “normalcy.”

The truth is, I have carried many soul and spiritual bruises through my days. My life tells many stories of a heart that has been often shattered by the blades that I have lived through, and recovering from that has been a hard-fought war of many battles. Walking through life with the idea that God agreed with the words my father said was something that made trusting Him very difficult and one of the reasons why healing took so long. Every “no” felt like rejection, every correction felt like I was being told I was not good enough, and every loving relationship felt like a laid out trap waiting to destroy me further.

Once healing became unavoidable, it confused me, terrorized me, and often left me crying out for death. I cannot count how many times I pleaded with the Lord to end my life. The confusion, the pain, the agony I felt throughout the healing process—none of it made any sense. How could healing make you want to die?

In the process, I learned something from a source I can no longer recall, but the whole premise of the message was, “The process of healing makes you long for death, but while we think we are longing for our lives to end, we are actually longing for the brokenness within us to die.” In God there is always life behind a death.

Isaiah 55:8–9 (NIV)

8 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the Lord.

9 “As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

When the time for healing came into full force, I didn’t truly know who God was. This realization brings to mind the statement Job expressed as he sat in the darkness that promised to consume him. In Job 42:5, Job says to the Lord, “My ears had heard of You before, but now my eyes have seen You.” Job was crossing a painful season filled with loss. Everything that God had blessed him with was stripped away and he was reduced to ashes and judgment by his own friends. Still, in his despair and anger, he found his way to God Himself and allowed the Lord’s correction to speak life back into him. What a beauty it is to get to know my God. To get to experience Him in ways I’d only heard of. I am grateful now I get to love Him, but how deeply sweet that I get to be loved by Him—not only to know that I am loved, but to actually be able to accept it. Meeting God in the center of my pain makes me love Him even more, and though I still struggle with accepting love from others, the more I know Him, the more I can trust that even if, or when, I do get hurt again, God is already with me, ready to redeem.

The journey is not yet complete, but I offer Him my all. Even in the fear of the unknown, I can trust Him and trust that He will guide me through my days. I now know that I am not alone. I have a clearer picture of the love that bought me. 

I have already lived a life in which I deprived myself of God. I starved myself of Him and everything He is. I knew darkness, I knew pain, but what I didn’t know was that it was never God’s intention to leave me in a state of active death. I want to live a life now saturated in His grace and grip, to know and love His heart and to spend the rest of my days living just for Him.

Knowing Him better now, I understand what He was doing, but it does offer a reflection on the misconception of a healing journey. I learned very early on as I entered the walk into recovery, that to the public eye, healing makes you look insane. Often people who are healing are dismissed as lost, unredeemable, or irreparable, and they lose hope in the possibility for transformation. We can easily dismiss a healing person as crazy, dramatic, or simply hard to get along with, but what they fail to understand is that you’re actively fighting for your life, even as you stand in front of them. I am grateful God is different. We do not need to be “better” before coming face to face with Him; we simply need to be and melt away into His grace.

How do you explain to someone who doesn’t walk in your tattered shoes that as you flow within the crowds, you are sitting on the very altar of sacrifice? That you are right in the middle of the fire as you dissociate to protect what little sanity you have left, and that you constantly cry out to God, begging Him to rescue you. Healing is brutal! It’s the very essence of being skinned alive as your old state of being actively battles with the new creation being molded.

The only path to healing, as I learned, is walking back into the very fires that birthed the distorted version of yourself. Healing feels unfair. It is a critical moment in which you realize you have to purposefully call to mind all the words, actions, and moments that broke and wounded you. You go back into battle to identify the triggers and the chains that keep you captive, and if not surrendered to God’s plan, that realization may very well continue to increase the bitterness inside you.

I had this idea in mind that healing would be soft and I could simply say, “All is forgiven,” but in healing you are forced to forgive the unforgivable. You fight your flesh as you tear down your flawed idea of protection and learn that God is all you need. In healing you are called to do what you don’t want to do, and revisiting that darkness will make you feel like you are drowning. There is a righteous anger that consumes you as you understand the weight of the injustice done to you. It is confusing, and thus so critical to stay connected to the Word, community, and Jesus as you walk through it. Basically, you have to do EVERYTHING that your mind will fight against.

I failed to anticipate the state of panic I would enter as my world turned upside down. During this time, so much of what I knew began to fall apart. I was losing grip of all the pieces that made me who I was. I fought against and struggled through God’s truth. I wanted to trust, to believe, but the best I could do was sit in the middle of the storm and simply “burn.”

It is a frightening thing when your idea of safety is being ripped away, when the walls you used as protection begin to crumble down, when your silent voice is being activated, when the hidden child is being told they must step out, when a wound is showing and you want to hide it from the world, yet the isolation that you used to blanket all the hurt is now treated as an enemy.

It is a frightening thing when new voices begin to speak and love becomes a heightened enemy. A wounded heart doesn’t know how to accept love; it doesn’t know if it is safe, and so we run away from it.

Consider the conflict this creates between the one who needs healing and the caring hearts that cannot quite grasp the Armageddon brewing within a single mind. This alone adds to the pressure and the torment. The hurt and disappointment on the face of someone trying to love you adds guilt and shame to an already difficult process. It adds to the embarrassment of not being able to function as a normal person.

Yes, healing is a brutal, ruthless act. I could no longer protect myself the same ways I used to. I went from one extreme—verbally tearing down anyone who hurt me—to the opposite extreme: completely fearing my own voice. I had to relearn all the ways that I moved through life, and my replace my words with God’s. That is not an easy task.

Today, I have a better understanding of the battle that I sat in. I was sure I was unfairly being torn to pieces, never to recover once again. But God’s ways, as stated in Isaiah, are higher than anything we can understand.

The battle of my mind is constantly shifting. I still pace within walkways of uncertainty, but God keeps calling me to trust Him. I have to keep surrendering constantly when words or situations want to trigger an old response within me. God is still working, and little by little He reveals things that still need to be surrendered so they can be exchanged for healing. The biggest difference now is the understanding that I can fully trust Him, knowing He is for me and that I was never the singular exception to His grace and mercy, nor is anyone else out there. God offers this to everyone who wants it; it is our choice to take it.

Through this process, I often asked myself why I was forced to relive the moments that had killed the normal versions I could have been. Why would I have to walk right back into the fire that had destroyed the simple opportunity to be a healthy child? But God helped me understand. He helped me as I saw how the lies spoken over me had to be identified and exposed to be replaced with truth. I saw how the cruel labels had to be replaced by what God says about me, how the broken pieces of glass and visions of violent nights had to be surgically removed and healed by His love. All open wounds needed to be given the attention they required, identified, and sutured by His loving hand.

Old agreements regarding my identity had to be broken as new management took over. I came under a new covenant and new contract in the safest place I could ever find myself.

That is the will of God: that even though we have been clobbered through our circumstances, we learn to seek protection in His heart and bring all that we carry so that He can exchange it for the soothing anointing only He can give.

Healing is a choice, a risky one, but the only choice that can truly save us.

Deuteronomy 30:19 (NIV)

19 This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.