As a therapist, I see God do a lot of amazing things. It’s one of the greatest gifts of my job – I have a front row seat to God’s dynamic activity and healing.
I regularly see Jesus heal people in the blink of an eye. My daily experience is that of witnessing God moving in deep and significant ways in the lives of my clients. As the years go on, I’ve noticed a significant trend: people who have an active and healthy relationship with Jesus tend to find healing faster.
Let’s explore a few ways that God joins us in the healing journey…
Your Image of God Can Accelerate Your Healing
Your image of God (how you view God) informs your life with God. Your life with God can help fortify your healing journey.
If you believe God is cold and distant, it would make sense that you might be more than a little suspicious at the thought of Him wanting to help you, speak to you, or heal you.
If you believe God is kind, loving, gentle, and has the very best of intentions for you, you are more likely to give God access to the wounded places within and allow His path for healing to unfold.
As we explore the formative narratives, bad theology, or harmful moments have come to shape the way you see God, a new and truer image of God begins to emerge. We rediscover the Trinity in a ways that feels safe and has a profound impact on your life. This is the essence of secure attachment with God.
Hearing God’s Voice Heals Your Heart
The voice of the Spirit always guides and directs us towards healing and wholeness. If we can hear that voice, we simply follow where it leads.
Learning to explore how to hear and discern God’s voice opens up many new paths for healing. As we attune to the gentle, loving voice of God, we step into brand new territory. When we attune to God’s voice in our healing journey….
- We can ask God about the origins of trauma if they are unknown to us
- God may show us what specific memories need healing
- We can hear Him speak specific words of help in our struggles
- He offers love and reassurance us in the midst of our pain
- We discover deeper levels of God’s presence with us
The Power of Scripture to Heal
God’s Word is alive. It has the power to reorient, to speak to our broken places, and mend our tattered soul. A primary way God joins us on the healing journey is through Scripture. The options for how we engage this are endless! Here are just a few:
- Praying God’s Word over yourself or your situation
- Lectio Divina – seeking God’s personal word to you through His Word
- Contemplative meditation on Scripture
- Using Scripture to push back the evil forces that seek to harm us
- Imaginative prayer through a story in the Bible
- Memorizing Scripture for help navigating moments of confusion and fear
Inner Healing Prayer
In the most basic sense, Inner Healing Prayer is simply inviting the presence of Jesus into our memories.
These memories are usually difficult moments which hold pain, trauma, unhelpful narratives, and false beliefs about ourself. These are usually moments we’ve circled around a few times in therapy. Through memory reconsolidation, we know that it is possible to rewrite memories in a powerful way. Inner Healing Prayer invites Jesus into that process.
Through a gentle, guided experience, we look for Jesus in your past and invite his power to reshape the memory in a way that brings relief and ease. Quite literally, Jesus will usually shine his Light into the darkness and illuminate a new way forward. Some of the most profound moments of healing that I witness in therapy and spiritual direction are the result of God’s action in Inner Healing Prayer.
Contemplative Prayer
Contemplative prayer is a deep realm. Entire books have been written on it and there are many ways to practice contemplative prayer, but at it’s core, it is simply silence, mindful reflection, listening for God’s voice, and paying attention in real-time to the experience of sitting in God’s loving presence. It is a mind-body-soul way of experiencing our time with God vs. praying with our words and minds.
On the surface, not much happens in contemplative prayer. Our minds get distracted, we get annoyed with the silence, we start running through our to-do lists, we fidget, we usually feel like we are doing it wrong – and then we re-center back on our intention of connecting with God in a simple and quiet way. As we do this over time, God works deeply within us and our brains start to change.
There is a lot of new research about the power of contemplative prayer to release GABA, a neurotransmitter, that can calm down the amygdala. Dan Siegel, a psychiatrist and well-known researcher has found that contemplative traditions and mindfulness promote body regulation, empathy, and emotional stability. It also allows for processing to happen within different hemispheres of the brain, which means you are more likely to engage fear-producing thoughts, memories and emotions without dysregulation.
All of these avenues of healing are available to those who are in Christ. God is so creative in how He chooses to heal, I’ve never seen Him to the same thing twice. What matters most is that we are open to receiving His healing, that we invite His participation, and that we stay aware and awake to the ways He is changing us over time.
