All healing is a process. It usually doesn't take place overnight. I've found that even instantaneous healings often include substantial backstory.
The reason for this is that healing isn't about healing. Healing is about relationship, as is everything in the kingdom of God.
Read 1 John. You'll see. Life with God is all about God loving you, you loving God, and us loving each other. God is about relationship, so everything he does is about relationship.
Before I had this revelation, I knew the truth of it instinctively.
When I became so sick after the birth of my daughter, I clung to God for dear life. Inside of me resided this deep knowing that I would not survive without God. I needed him. More than I needed food, water, or sleep. Having walked through the trial to the other side, I believe it now more than ever.
Holding onto God like that gave me more victory over habitual sin than I had previously experienced. Blood, sweat, and tears stained the battleground, but for the first time in my life, I wasn't losing every fight.
Many of you know the story of my sickness and deliverance. I use the term "deliverance" because that is what it was as much as it was healing.
I suffered tremendously for several years. During that time, God never abandoned me; rather, he wooed me to himself in ways that took my breath away. I had made my bed in hell by neglecting to forgive, but he rolled out a sleeping bag next to mine and made camp (Psalm 139:8).
And then he led me to a group of people who believed him for big things. At the time I met them, they were in the final stages of mobilizing a prayer ministry that would help to bring people into deeper intimacy with God through forgiveness, deliverance, and inner healing.
How's that for timing?
My prayer session jumpstarted my journey from victimhood to victory. With Jesus, I traveled to the darkest moments of my history, one by one. I probably forgave 50 people that night, including every person involved in my experience with childhood sexual abuse and subsequent experimentation. I even forgave myself, which may have been the most difficult forgiveness of all.
As you know, that session jumpstarted my physical healing as well. Forgiveness was the key.
(Don't miss that. Forgiveness was the key to healing. How many of you know that forgiveness is about relationship?)
After forgiveness, physical healing was a six-month process that required relationship to complete. It was all risk and trust--both with God and the new family in which he'd placed me.
I was also completely delivered from a spirit of lust that hasn't plagued me since. The shadow that had followed me since childhood was suddenly gone. The integrity I'd so deeply desired was finally mine.
Oh, the rest.
Despite all the healing that had taken place, there was more work to be done. Because healing isn't about healing; it's about relationship. Specifically, relationship with Jehovah Rapha--the Lord who heals you.
God revealed my lifelong habit of self-protection through supernatural means, which I won't go into here. (Some stories are too precious to offer up to the public for judgment.)
But do you remember Part One in which I told you I didn't feel safe even after I was healed? How I was afraid to give up my glasses and wear makeup again? That should've been a clue.
You see, I'd been protecting myself my whole life. I didn't trust anyone to keep me safe. Not even God.
When I realized that, it broke me. He'd brought me through so much.
Just as I had ditched my glasses, I ditched what remained of my self-protection. I gave God my armor in exchange for his.
For me, it was the ultimate act of trust. It frightened me. But it allowed God to reach the source of my pain--the lies I believed about him (and myself) because of all that had happened.
to be continued...