Choose To Heal ~

Choose to Be Healed

Each of us can be healed, Jaynes says, but first we must answer a question. She recalls the story in John 5 of Jesus healing a man who had lived as an invalid for 38 years. Before He healed him, Jesus asked the man, “Do you want to get well?”
Perhaps the reason Jesus asked this, Jaynes says, is because the man’s life would drastically change once he was healed. He would have to learn to walk and get a job, among other things. Our lives, too, will change when we allow Jesus to heal our wounds.
“I think we can be so comfortable with that wound that it almost becomes who we think we are,” Jaynes says. “‘I am a rape victim.’ ‘I am a woman who has been abused.’ ‘I had an abortion, and that’s who I am.’ We can become very comfortable in that and to let go of it and be healed is scary. You take on a whole new life.”
Healing, Jaynes points out, also involves choices about forgiveness. If our wounds are from poor choices that we made, we must ask God to forgive us and accept that His death on the cross is enough to pay for our sins. Then we need to release the guilt and shame that we have felt.
Healing often involves forgiving others as well. “I think that many people believe forgiveness means that we are saying that what they did is okay,” Jaynes explains. “It’s not okay. What it is saying is that I’m not going to let that control me any longer. I’m giving it to God.”
Until a hurting person accepts God’s forgiveness, forgives themselves, and forgives the person who hurt them, Jaynes says, healing can never take place.

Show Your Scars

Once we are healed, the way we allow God to use our scars is by sharing them with others. Too often, Jaynes says, we hide our past hurts from people around us either because we are ashamed or because we fear rejection. Carrying these burdens around – something Jaynes compares to the dust cloud that follows Pigpen around in the Peanuts comic strip -- can limit the ways in which God is able to use us.
“I lost a child a long time ago,” Jaynes says, “and when that happened I didn’t want to talk to anybody except someone who had gone through the same thing I had. I think that is how most people feel when they have gone through a struggle.”
Perhaps the increase in the number of people seeking help from secular support groups supports this idea.
“People are going anywhere and everywhere to find someone who has struggled with the same thing they have struggled with,” Jaynes says, “and it’s a little heartbreaking to think that they are having to go outside the church.”
One reason people are afraid to show their scars is because they feel that their past will disqualify them for ministry. Jaynes believes that this doesn’t happen in churches as often as one may think. And if it does ever happen to anyone, she says, they should seriously reconsider their connection with that body of believers.
“If we are at a place where we share that struggle and people do not rejoice with us and with God for restoring our lives, then we need to go somewhere else,” Jaynes says.
Churches should seek to create safe places, such as Sunday school or small groups, where members can tell their stories. When that happens, Jaynes says, congregations will see a lot of healing take place.

Beauty From Ashes

Often, if we allow Him to, God will use our deepest hurt to develop our greatest ministry. The reason our scars can be beautiful, she says, is because God gives us opportunities to invest in other people because of the struggles we’ve gone through ourselves.
For this reason, we should not despair when we experience painful circumstances. Rather, we should look for how God may want to use those circumstances.
Jaynes says, “I’ve learned over the years to stop saying, ‘Why did this happen to me?’ Instead, I say to God, ‘Okay, what now?’ This is a shattered dream, now what do I do with it? Where do I go from here?”
If we allow God to replace our wounds with scars, and we are willing to use them to help others, He will redeem even our most painful experiences.
As Jaynes writes in her book, Satan wants to use our past to paralyze us. God wants to use our past to propel us. The choice is ours.