I found out something rather interesting the other day. Due to the severity of my brain injury, I should have been put into a medically induced coma for some time after our accident, but because of the other massive injuries my body suffered they couldn’t. The doctors said my body needed to feel the pain (of the other 20 injuries) to be able to heal. Think about that! My body needed to feel pain in order to heal. Totally amazing, I think.

I know- I know we resist pain. We don’t like pain. We don’t want to experience pain, but could it be- – pain is good? Beneficial? Could it be pain is trying to tell us something?

If God made our physical bodies that way, could it also be that for us to be emotionally and spiritually healthy, we need to allow ourselves to feel pain in order to heal? I’ve been reading and learning a lot. God has made us three part beings. And those three parts work together quite a bit. Meaning when one part of us is not well it affects the other two parts of us as well.

What does it look like to feel emotional pain? Spiritual pain? I have come to believe that our emotional and spiritual health run on the same track, similar to joy and pain. It has been said we will only experience joy to the same level we allow ourselves to feel pain. And in the same way we can only be as spiritually strong as we are emotionally healthy. So what does it look like to allow myself to feel pain emotionally? Spiritually? One thing I’ve learned is that I have to admit I suffer loss, lots of them. We live in a broken world. It was not the way God really wanted us to live. I have to be willing to honestly look at myself, my heart.

We were created with longings, to dream dreams but sometimes life shatters those dreams. What am I going to do when my dreams shatter? Grin and bear it? Or become a tough girl? Or am I going to pick up those pieces of shattered dreams and feel the sharp edges and allow it to penetrate my heart? Allow it to cut my soul? Am I going to allow myself to mourn, to grieve those shattered dreams? Am I going to admit that my dreams shattered? If I never allow myself to have dreams, they can’t shatter. And just as shattered glass can cut your skin as you clean it up, causing pain and bleeding so do shattered dreams.

And my experience has been that not grieving, not mourning is a lot more painful, a lot worse than being honest with God and yourself. Not allowing yourself to feel the pain, the anger, the disappointment, not grieving well the shattered dreams I experience leads to depression. I know; I’ve been there.

And spiritual pain? I have to come to the realization there is not one. single. thing. I can do to fix what’s wrong between God and me. No amount of rules I obey, no amount of good things I do, nothing I do can make me good enough. Jesus has done it for me on the cross; all I can do is accept His gift. And allow my heart to feel the awesomeness, the magnitude of that gift. A. W. Tozer says, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” And I’ve been thinking a lot about that. And I’ve decide it’s the most important thing because I will act out of what I believe about God, who or what I think or perceive God to be.

The truth is I’m still healing physically. When I stop and think about where I was March 31, 2014, more dead than alive, (as my dear children say) and where I was a year ago. I was finishing up therapy and just started driving again, (on the back country roads), so truly, really I have come a long way. It’s just I wanted life to be back to “normal” sooner than it is, yeah, impatient, I know. As I told one friend I’m hanging onto the hope that I will some day feel better than I do now at times. I’m trying to obey my daughter who tells me to be kind to myself but I admit it feels so wrong- – it seems we’ve traded places; she does a majority of the work around the house now. It feels so unfair, she had surgery too and yet she feels so much better than I do a lot of the time. Granted she wasn’t beat up quite like I was. But it is one of my shattered dreams; I was not going to have my girls doing most of the housework, like I did, with my mother’s sickness and death. Yes, I was going to teach them how to do all the stuff she does, I just wanted her to be the helper. Not the one doing most of the work. So what do I do with this shattered dream? How do I see God through this shattered dream?  I do grieve the loss of my ability to work like I used to, some days I cry, sometimes I journal, which are correct response, some days I’m a grump and think how much better I could have done it, had I still been me, which is a sinful response and sometimes I just have a deep, deep longing for heaven. And on my journey I have come to believe, to see God as my perfect Father that He loves me passionately and deeply cares for me. And He wants to be there holding me in this storm if I am willing to allow myself to just be held, to be quiet and rest in Him and not try to be strong and keep it together myself.

I invite you to be aware of your shattered dreams and to allow our Father to hold you as you grieve those shattered dreams.

In my next post, I would like to start exploring how I learned to dance in the storm.