Sometimes Healing Sucks

We often talk pleasantly, longingly, about healing, but sometimes we don’t want healing. Because sometimes healing sucks.

Let me explain.

Awhile back, an opportunity was presented to me that was just that: an opportunity. Sounds good, right? The thing is, it came wrapped in a situation that also represented a stark reminder of the betrayal and humiliation I’d walked through five years ago. Most of the time, I’m good with talking about that whole episode of my life – I wrote a blog entry on it for the entire world to see, for crying out loud! But parts of that whole era were never addressed, and the remaining wounds scabbed over enough for me to be functional – more than functional, really – and I would have been content to keep things that way forever.

Ok, I would have been more than content. Way more. I really would have preferred to leave that aspect of things on a shelf and literally never deal with it again. Like that box of God-only-knows-what from the very first time you moved that keeps finding its way onto the moving truck and into the new house but never actually gets unpacked. I really wanted to just keep things packed and shoved into a corner, because the proverbial unpacking was going to hurt, and I just didn’t have the time or space or emotional bandwidth for that. And I wasn’t planning on creating any, either.

Until this…opportunity…came along. It was impossible to ignore, and, almost as bad, it was impossible to fight against. It was literally a Godfather-esque “offer I couldn’t refuse.” And I cried. Oh y’all, I cried some really angry tears. Because I could have been given the opportunity without the painful walk down memory lane, but it wasn’t going to work that way, and I felt like the extra gut punch just wasn’t necessary.

But perhaps necessary is in the eye of the beholder.

From my perspective, gallivanting through a bunch of stuff I’d rather just never think about again seemed like a terrible idea, regardless of how much better I’d be on the other side of it. If I was at the “80% solution” and was in a fairly good place, I was ok with that. Things were moving along, life was good on all fronts, and I didn’t see broken things, which meant nothing needed to be fixed.

I’m pretty sure The Man Upstairs saw something different. I had done a lot of healing, but I wasn’t healed. I had done a lot of forgiving, but I hadn’t completely forgiven. I had pieced my life back together, but there were still places with cracks and missing shards where my heart was unprotected. He saw through all my claims of functionality to the depth of my woundedness, and He couldn’t leave “well enough” alone.

Our Creator God is funny like that. He loves us as the hot messes we are, but He sees bigger, better, more complete things for us. He wants us to be whole. He wants us to be healed. He wants us to be free. And He will lead us on some really weird journeys to get there.

Have you ever broken a bone and had it heal badly? You might still have the use of that appendage, but not as completely as you might have otherwise. So the bone has to be rebroken and reset – so that healing can be complete. The process sucks – it isn’t pleasant at all, but the end is good.

When I wrote about God’s never-ending pursuit of us, I drew a lot from Cory Asbury’s Reckless Love. I still don’t know if this whole opportunity-wrapped-in-pain is a shadow, a mountain, a wall, or a lie that God is doggedly tearing down, but I know He won’t let it go. I really wanted Him to. I really, really wanted to run the other direction as He started pressing on the painful places that I just didn’t want to deal with. I would have settled for broken woundedness over complete wholeness, because while being healed is awesome, the healing sucks sometimes. But God’s not really into settling. He’s into pursuing. And redemption. And restoration.

He’s also into mercy and grace. Mercy, because God let me go five years without forcing a showdown with my pain. Grace, because with every effort to pull away, He kept bringing me back to this.

I’m not through this process yet. Everything about this “opportunity” indicated that it would be a season rather than a quick I-went-to-my-therapist-and-I’m-great-now session. Seasons take awhile; this crummy process is taking its sweet time. Here’s to whatever “healed” looks like on the other side of opportunity.