The journey towards healing can feel at times like a disjointed rummaging through the cracks of the soul; a seeking out the darker corners in order to let in the warm sunlight of God’s love into all the places of my world.
Healing is sometimes akin to things like beauty, truth and spirituality: ineffable yet quite real and rather than define “it”, it defines us.
In this place, I am able to find meaning in both my scars and my healing, rather than being merely defined by my scars (or my addictions, my pain, my darkness, etc.).
This rag-tag, one foot in the front of the other, one day at a time journey is the journey of a lifetime that occurs in every diminutive detail and every instance. God is present in all of it, at all times, in a myriad of ways.
Sometimes I can’t even define my “healing journey” or necessarily point to specific events or scars that are evidence of healing. Sometimes, the very things I am being healed of have been accrued over a life filled with the paradoxes of poor choices and God’s ever intervening grace, with both being somewhat messy yet always real; undefinable, but still quite real.
In all truth, as I near fifty years of age, a lifetime in and of itself, I am velveteen rabbit-like in my journey. For you see my eyes are popping off, my fur is being rubbed off, my stuffing pulled from my fragile innards, yet I know I am loved…loved by a generous and gracious God. Oddly enough, I even know this at this precise moment when I do not ‘feel’ or sense it.
At this juncture I am peeling away the dried mud of anger and resentment that has splattered me after hitting the proverbial fan. I am not in a tender place, or feeling very forgiving, and I most certainly am not sensing God’s presence.
But none of that matters.
God is faithful even when my feelings are not. God doesn’t give a rat’s ass whether I feel loved or not; God just loves. Period.
God is my constant companion; God is both the Journey and the final destination of this journey towards healing and recovery. And whether I feel it or not, like it or not, or even care about it – my life is the hands of a gracious and loving God. And not that fleshly, feeble, finite love.
No!
No, I’m talking about a love that dangles from a Cross forgiving the murderers who nailed him there; a love that is all consuming, all powerful, all present, all knowing and ever-faithful. And regardless of what friend or foe says to me or about me, THAT truth – that Love – is the motive, the power, the hunger, and the very reason I am even able to write this today; to live another day sober, to walk this path back to a place called Home.
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