FORSAKE THE BASIC. PURSUE THE DEEP.

Remember that promise of mine that I often talked about in my previous posts? Well, it turns out I was wrong about that and while God may still have a promise – or promises – in store for me, that particular thing was never one of them. And when I woke up on September 24th and that painful truth was brought to light, I found myself swept up into a whirlwind of confusion, hurt and questions that I’ll probably never get the answer to. I questioned God’s love for me, as I’ve done in the recent past, and I wondered why He couldn’t have revealed that truth to me sooner. What I realized a few weeks later, though, was that even though I was wrong about that thing He was promising me, I was right about the fact that He was doing something within me.

After reading Myles Munroe’s “Single, Married, Separated and Life After Divorce,” I learned that divorce is a traumatic experience, even when you’re the one that initiates it. I also learned that people use different mechanisms to cope with that trauma and sometimes they do so on the subconscious level. One of those mechanisms involves delusion. The man or woman creates an alternate reality for himself or herself, making false connections between unrelated events and drawing conclusions that are wildly inaccurate. What is sad, though, is they don’t realize what they’re doing. This is what happened to me. I had woven together a whole fantasy of what God was about to do in my life and it effectively numbed my pain. So, when I came out of that delusional state, I not only had to face the pain that I had managed to suppress all those months, but I also had to face the pain of reality – that a promise that I had become so emotionally attached to was not for me after all. Talk about a double-whammy. What I know now, though, is that God intended to use that experience to reveal my true condition to me: my brokenness. If I hadn’t gone through that, this very broken woman would have very much believed that she was whole. And it’s really hard, even for God, to fix someone that has no clue that they are in need of fixing.

Solomon once said, “To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven” and then further down in that same chapter he said that there’s “a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up” (Ecclesiastes 3:1, 3). After more than a year of walking around in that state of delusion, I am now in my season of healing. I’ve had enough of brokenness and all of the poor decisions it has caused me to make.

What about you? Are you whole or broken? Is God using a difficult experience to show you you so that He can begin the work that He’s been wanting to do all along? If so, I encourage you to surrender to the process. It is not short in its supply of pain, which will be unearthed as you work through all of your unresolved issues, but the healing and restoration that will be revealed in the end will be well worth all that you’ll have to endure in order to reach it.