Patrick Weaver and Patrick Weaver Ministries do some great social media healing work from African American and we've-been-there contexts. Their most important work is intended to speak to women and young people experiencing abuse and trauma, I think. Some of it is had to read because it's so real and raw. Please catch up with Patrick Weaver Ministries on Facebook and on the Web if this is something that you need. Most of us do need this at one time or another in our lives and journeys.
Patrick Weaver recently wrote the following:
The hardest part of my trauma healing wasn’t the work, it was managing the depression and the anxiety that would creep up out of nowhere. Always with a vengeance and always leaving me emotionally drained …sometimes for weeks and even months. Whatever progress I had made would be erased, and with each bout came an overwhelming sense of sadness and unexplainable, inaudible grief.
It was an emotional roller coaster ride from hell that lasted for years. After some time, I realized that my determination to be instantly “healed” dishonored and neglected my right to feel, to be OK with just feeling what I felt without having to rush through the process. I realized I had a right to grieve without treating each phase as if it were a speed date. You see, healing isn’t an event, healing is a lifelong process of learning how to honor our story without dishonoring our destiny. Somebody will catch this…Jesus grieved in the garden until it was time to get up and fulfill His purpose, and not one minute before.
Healing isn’t about unseeing or unexperiencing the trauma, it’s about seeing and experiencing the trauma from a place of honor. When I accepted grieving as a necessary and important part of healing, honoring my story gave grieving a purpose, a cleansing purpose, an anointed purpose. If we try to bypass or neglect honoring our story to catch the next “healed” bus that promises to bypass the grieving process, our incomplete grieving will keep showing up in the form of depression and anxiety.
The Apostle Paul put it this way: “But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me” (2 Corinthians 12:9). See, healing doesn’t always mean that the thorn will be removed beloved, sometimes healing means we’re trauma-informed and thorn transformed…so that Christ’s power may rest on you. By honoring our story, we’re able to reconcile our survival with the miracle we are, the incredible purpose we must have, the powerful plan God must have for our life. We cannot give God the glory for a dishonored story beloved.
Our identity in Christ is developed from the story we grieve through, the story we honor. The Bible tells us: “Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us” (Romans 5:1-5).
If you haven’t been traumatized by abuse, relational abuse, complex and compounded trauma, you won’t understand what I’m talking about. You don’t unsee what you saw, unexperience what you’ve experienced, or forget what you’ve been through. You’re not unbecoming what happened to you, you’re becoming the next version of your Christ identity…grief honored, trauma-informed and thorn-transformed. It will happen beloved…honor your story and God will get the glory.
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