Healing Rain

I was listening to the song Healing Rain and the lyrics "healing rain is falling down I'm not afraid" and the "not afraid" part really stood out to me. We don't heal, because we are afraid of the hurt. Any type of healing requires us to walk through pain before we can be totally free and healed. In a physical ailment, we all know things get worse before they get better. Let's use the example of a simple cut. We all know that itchy sensation that comes as part of our body's natural healing process. It's painful, it's irritating, and necessary.

The same is true for our emotional healing. We can't expect a band-aid to work when what we need is full blown open-heart surgery. Our band-aids vary. Some of use use alcohol. Some use approval and acceptance of others. For some of us it's our jobs or our careers. They are all just band-aids. We don't open our hurts to the pain of looking at the root problems. What is it that is driving us? Are we more concerned on our career or what we DO? What is it that is defining us?

Answering these questions might require some pain. It takes pain to think back on what happened when we were 5, 15, or 25 that rocked our worlds. It may be an abusive situation. It may be that person who told you one time or a hundred times that you would never amount to anything. We have sat on those words and either have replayed them in our minds as we lay in our drunken stupor thinking "well, they always told me I would never be anything and they were right." Or we may take the opposite path and we work 70 hours a week at the cost of our loved ones, but we can say "I sure proved them wrong because I AM something now!" But are you really?

Finding out who God made you to be can be painful. It most often means be willing to give up OUR plans for His. God uses the most unlikely of people to show His power because the world notices when a hopeless, helpless, lowest of the low person completely changes their life. It is by no power of their own that it is done. I know it's painful to make change. It's painful to forgive the one who hurt you. It's painful to acknowledge where we have failed. But remember, it's only though pain that we can truly begin to heal.

It's raining healing. Leave the umbrella at home and go play in the rain.