Finding hope when healing slows down and God’s work looks different than you expected.
Five years ago, I thought I’d be further ahead in my healing journey.
I had just done a lot of work with a Naturopathic physician and had looked at brain scans with him. I had followed a detox program, I had worked on better/deeper sleep, I had replaced negative emotional and spiritual wiring with positive and scriptural thought processes, I had numerous therapies in place AND the best part of all, I had just had a few years of huge success in healing and moving forward. I was expecting that to continue at that pace. I felt that I had “pretty much arrived”.
What happened to my progress and timeline was something quite different. Everything seemed to slow down to a CRAWL. I mean, I could see that I was moving forward still, but I had to compare yearly… and the progress even month by month just didn’t always appear to be there.
At the time, I assumed something was wrong. I thought my healing had somehow stalled. Looking back now, I think God was simply working on things that I wasn’t measuring.
What God chose to put in my life over the next years was difficult and it certainly impacted my progress. God opened my eyes to deep emotional struggles, most had been lifelong that were still in my life, and he also took my best friend to him, through her cancer struggle. Basically, he took the support that I had been relying on, perhaps just a little too heavily.
And that meant that I had to lean deeper into him in a way that I hadn’t realized I was, and hadn’t realized was even possible. So here I was, dealing with loss, difficult relationships, and people in my life, and I felt like I had no one to talk to. I was becoming discouraged and exhaustion was beginning to show in a very different way.
This was the season where I became tired of waiting. Not because God wasn’t working. Not because I had stopped making progress. But because the progress looked nothing like I expected it to look.
The reality is that God was working deeply on things I didn’t understand existed in my life. He used professional counselors and programs to bring me to him in a way I hadn’t realized was possible. God sees the heart, not just our physical body. And in my life, with many of my diagnoses, no one had really understood that for years.
(And if you are reading this, and you feel that your friends and family simply cannot understand what you are going through… this next part is for you!)
Search me O God and know my heart…
God searches deep inside of us. He isn’t just interested in whether we love him and follow his word. And he wants not just our actions, but our heart worship.
When we are often despairing and despondent with our situations, what we tend to do (at least I did) is to start looking for the next thing that might help. Another piece of information that might finally move us forward.
You know, supplements, sauna, multiple therapies and rest. And all these things have their place, but they can never take over the God part, because they ultimately come from God.
And this is where I think I had it backwards for a while. I was measuring healing by symptoms, energy, sleep and progress. God was measuring something much deeper. He was healing places in my heart that I didn’t even know needed healing.
And he wants us to know that he is healing every part of us… our heart, our mind and our soul.
So if you are tired of waiting today, let me encourage you with this. Just because the timeline feels longer than you hoped doesn’t mean you’ve been forgotten.
Sometimes God is doing a different kind of healing than the one we are measuring.
And sometimes the waiting season isn’t wasted at all.
If waiting has felt especially difficult lately, I’d encourage you to spend a little time in Psalm 139 this week. Read it slowly and pay attention to the verses about God knowing you completely. He sees far more than our symptoms, our timelines, or our frustrations.
And if you need a simple way to create a little calm during difficult seasons, you might also enjoy my free resource, The Daily Calm Practice. It’s a short faith-based exercise that combines prayer, breathing and Scripture to help you reconnect with God’s presence when life feels overwhelming.
Download The Daily Calm Practice here
P.S. One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that creating calm often requires both spiritual and practical support. Recently I’ve also been using CALM as part of my evening routine. I’ll leave a link below if you’d like to learn more about it.