Episode #40 – While Waiting For Healing To Happen?

Transcript

Welcome to Soulish Femme. Soulish Femme is a channel solely dedicated for you where I help focus in prospering body, spirit and soul. Life is a journey and I am glad that you can be a part of mine. As you explore my vlogs and my real talk episodes, I hope you will find inspirations and motivation you are looking for. Remember that life is not going to wait around for you. Therefore, live a life with intentionality and curate the life you’ve always dreamed of. As much as I love to share about my faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, I also would like to showcase my passions in life such as food, travel, fashion, beauty, and many more. To truly be free from the shackles of the systems limitation, you must decide once and for all to live unapologetically and live a life that makes you feel alive and rejuvenated every single day. Perhaps I am a hopelessly romantic person, but I truly believe we are meant to enjoy the wonders and the magnificent beauty the world has to offer. If you are ready to embark on your healing journey from traumatic experiences, feel free to check the link below to enroll in this course through Udemy. I will see you there. Thank you. [Music]

Hello everyone. Welcome back to another podcast. Thank you for tuning in. My name is Glennavelle. I wasn’t really sure of what to title this talk for today. I guess I will title this as what do you do while you have not healed completely. In other words, what are the ways that you can do with your time if healing hasn’t come yet? Because let’s face it, especially when you have been traumatized from your childhood, perhaps in your teenage years, you think that healing is going to be fast, quick, and easy. However, it’s not really the case. Think of your life as a broken glass. You have been shattered. Your life is never the same after the trauma. And so you’re trying to pick the pieces together, trying to rebuild a life that was broken or betrayed by people in your life. And so without lingering on this topic, I think for me it always goes back to your faith.

As Colossians says 1:9, pray without ceasing. You have not been yet healed. Maybe you think that God is going to take away the pain and hopefully by tomorrow you feel much better. However, what really helped me a lot is I prayed a lot. Perhaps that was one of the reasons why I was able to get through the pain because I truly believe that all things work together for good to those whom God called for his purpose and for his glory. That’s in Romans 8. that says that and also in Job when Job was also afflicted by so many pain. Remember the story of Job because Job is really one of the stories in the Bible who have endured a lot of pain. If you want to ask God why do you allow suffering, I want you to study the book of Job. Job was called a man that was a friend of God. So if you think about it, if God truly want you as a friend, why would he allowed pain and suffering in his life and why wasn’t he spared if God is truly love?

And I think if you’re a human being, it’s one of the common question we have is why does God allow suffering? And we forget that when Job prayed for his friends, he started to feel much better. Because for many of us when we are in pain or we are suffering, we usually look inwardly. We do not look upward. We do not really recognize who is the controller of it all. Who is the author of our life? We just thought that we come here coincidentally that there’s really no purpose of our pain. There’s no purpose for our suffering. I used to think that. I thought life is a random life is just something you come in here and you have no purpose. You just somehow have this body experience as some people would call it. But I really think that God did not just create human beings for nothing. I think the one purpose of God to create human being is to worship him and to love him and so that he could also love us back.

Unfortunately, that was broken because of Adam and Eve’s sin that happened in the Garden of Eden. And therefore, the relationship has been distorted the moment they have disobeyed. And so, Jesus Christ had made a way so that we can reconcile back to the father and that we can have this communication openly with the one who created us. I know it’s unfortunate. I’ve also asked this question. Isn’t it unfair that we did not ask God’s direction or we did not volunteer to come onto this earth? We didn’t say, “Hey God, pick me and I want you to create me.” We cannot choose our parents. We did not choose where country we would be born at. We did not choose the kind of life we would have. So when you think about it, it’s really something. It’s out of control. And so perhaps you would probably ask this question. What’s the point of trying anyway when you don’t have any say whatsoever when God just plop you on this earth without your veto or without your v volunteer without your vote.

And so, well God said this is your life. And so I’m the maker. You’re the potter. He’s the potter and the maker. You’re just a clay. So a clay is something that has no say whatsoever. A clay like many of us, we came from an earth, a dust to a dust that we are just going to be molded however God wants us to become. And that’s part of the journey of life. So if you want to be molded into something better, I think suffering is part of that. And so what do you do while you’re waiting for you to be healed is to have your faith and pray always. And also it talks about in James 5:78, “Therefore be patient, brethren, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, waiting patiently for it until it receives the earthly and latter rain.” So God wants us to be patient while waiting to be completely healed because healing is never a straight path. Healing will have detours.

You are going to have so much setbacks. You’re going to have a lot of challenges. You’re going to have bad days and good days. You’re going to cry sometimes and you’re going to laugh sometimes because that’s just how it is. You have to feel every emotion you have. You really have to not ignore what you’re feeling and you have to acknowledge the kinds of emotions are coming in because emotions are the gauge of how you truly are feeling as a person. You cannot suppress your emotion. I think one of the things that I heard people you have to suppress it. You just have to really put on a facade face and pretend like you are strong and resilient and you’re just not going to look at your pain. But it’s going to manifest in one shape or another. When I used to suppress my emotions before, anger issues would just come out naturally. Impatience. I would become so enraged with small little detail. Sometimes I would have all this outrageous anger even the smallest thing.

And you would thought to yourself, wait a minute, it’s a very small thing, but why is it that I would react as if it’s the end of the world? It’s because there is an original, not original, there is an original or the root cause of why you felt that way. So another thing while you’re waiting is that you just have to sit with your pain and you just have to be bored about it. according to Lamentations is 3:26-28 that says it is good that one should hope and wait patiently and let him sit quietly and keep silent. Let him sit alone and qui keep silent. I think sometimes when we get too busy because our tendency is that we are going to entertain ourselves trying to do a lot of things to distract ourselves from our emotions. We try to cover up our pain because no human beings are really willing enough to look at the pain.

Nobody likes to be uncomfortable to sit with their thoughts because our thoughts and our pain are most of us are ugly. It’s uncomfortable. It’s not pleasant to sit with your pain and talk and think about it about among yourself or to yourself about what happened to you in the past. Nobody likes to just interrogate of where did this come from of how did I become like this? But actually, it’s biblical when God said you have to just sit alone and think about it and you have to be patient while God is still doing the work. Because a lot of us, we want a fast, quick, and just a formula that we can hopefully by tomorrow morning I can feel so much better. But it takes time. It’s not something that you can generate. Time is not that you can manufacture that I want this to happen a certain time or at the certain month or year because that’s just unrealistic. Remember that our timetable is not the same thing as God’s timetable. Our pain usually does not manifest the consequences or the result of it after you have gone out of the abuse.

When I got out of the abuse, much of my anger issues and impatience and outbursts of anger manifested later on when I got out of that relationship. Because when you’re in the middle of the abusive relationship, of course, you’re still in the survival mode. you were still trying to think about what you have to do in order for you to survive or how can you get out of this tumultuous environment, but you are still trying to process everything. But the moment you’re out of that relationship and you have escaped from that kind of situation, that’s when your brain is trying to reconfigure everything and making sense of it all. It’s like a puzzle again. you’re trying to, as I said, picking the pieces of your life that was shattered by someone in your life. And so, when you’re waiting to be healed, it’s important that you also really have to understand that your brain is going to be rewired. Your nervous system will be so dysregulated.

That’s why it’s important to slow down. And many people will not tell you this, but part of the healing journey that I have done is that I would allow myself sometimes to just sleep and do nothing. And unfortunately for people would say you’re apathetic in life, you’re depressed and we’re going to medicate you. Hopefully, you’re going to get back into life. But you know what? Sometimes that is your body sending a message to you that you just need to sometimes slow down and take a rest. And you have to honor that. You cannot really buy out of people’s prescription when they don’t know exactly how you’re feeling. That’s what I have always say. You must learn to be attuned to your own body. It’s like you’re coming out of that abusive relationship. You are always in survival mode. You’re always defending yourself.

And by the time you come out of that, of course, your body wants to rest because you’re exhausted. you just want to crash. And you got to be able to not apologize for it when you’re feeling low sometimes. And it’s exactly why you have to learn to be bored and not overly stimulated, not overly busy. And that is one of the things have also helped me a lot to calm me down my nervous system is I allowed myself to not too bus not to get too busy. I was always busy because I was trying to distract myself because I didn’t want to look at my pain. I didn’t want to acknowledge the fact of the things that happened to me. And so there was a point in my life that I was very busy and I was always going to do a lot of things, working in the morning, going to school, partying in the weekends. I just didn’t have time to sit with my pain. But the problem was that eventually later on I would have all of this as I said rage and uncontrollable emotional turmoil that was coming out of out of nowhere. But because I was so good at just trying to suppress those emotions until I was reminded to be still by God.

Be still and know that I am God. There are times in your life that you have to really grieve about what happened and ponder about the things that had happened to you. Write a letter to yourself. I used to do this. I wrote a letter to myself. I apologize and I actually wrote a letter to the person who have done me wrong and people that have done me wrong. But I did not send it to them. I just did this exercise. I typed something about on the computer. This is my releasing of how I felt with that person or journaling about it. You can also try to meditate is to regulate your emotions and to calm your nervous down while waiting for your healing to come is you have to stretch yoga. I know for some people stretching is very good and maybe some Christians would say that yoga is not supposed to be a practice because it’s not a Christian exercise or it’s not a Christian thing to do to do yoga as long as you do not do them. 4

I see yoga as just stretching it is a stretching of your body it releases the tension that you’ve been holding holding on and that is why I see yoga because everything in this world is come coming from God anyway I don’t see everything as just you know compartmentalized this is good and this is not Christian and this is un-Christian in some ways perhaps there are things that we should not entertain or participate in but when it comes to things that are good for our body because our body is the vessel of God it is the temple then we have to do whatever it takes which is exercising, you know, relaxing, listening to the soothing music. You would just lie down on the floor. Sometimes I would do that. Listen to the soothing music that can invoke the emotions. You allow it to appear in your in your memory. Whatever the painful memories you’ve had in the past, you pray about it. to ask God to release any bitterness or resentment that you have been harboring towards that person because you don’t really want to have that unforgiveness into your heart and carry that because that is like a poison a poison.

Unforgiveness, bitterness, resentment are poisoning your heart and your job is to be able to be healed. How can you be healed when you are still carrying this pain and this bitterness towards the person? What Jesus said to Peter when Peter asked how many times should we offer forgiveness to someone? Is it 7×7? Jesus said it’s 70x 7. However, as I always like to preface, forgiveness sometimes doesn’t mean reconciliation. There’s a time to forgive to someone from afar. You can love them from from afar, but there’s also a time that you can forgive someone without reconciliation that you just have to ask God’s for discernment. Whether you need to be reconnected with this person, you have to really have God’s guidance and wisdom because you don’t want to reh harsh or rehash the kind of pain again with the same individual. That’s why you got to have discernment and you have to have God’s leading when it comes to other relationship.

And that’s why when it comes to healing when while waiting for the healing you got to do whatever is best for you. Another thing is of course if you can you need to have a vision you need to have something to do with your life a purpose. Without a purpose without a vision you will perish. Another thing probably that helped me to get through my pain was that I did not allow myself to be always occupied with my thoughts. As I said, there’s always time to think about what happened to you. However, after you have thought about those things, you got to get up and then do something valuable with your time. You can probably allow 2 hours with your thoughts and then think about what happened to you. And then after that, you cannot just waste your time away and doing nothing. And you have to have some kind of a hobby or go back to school perhaps or learn something that is new, a new language, maybe a new recipe, maybe go outside and spend in nature.

But you got to be a always to be moving and aim at something instead of wallowing in self-pity because the devil, the accuser loves for you to just sit there and wallow in self-pity. That is why there’s always going to be an expiration date when God said, “Okay, it’s time for you to get up, pick up your mat, and walk.” Because you cannot just wallow in pity and constantly ponder and dwell on the past. There’s always going to be a point in your life where you just have to get up and do something with your life and do something that is probably you have not done before. That’s why the story in the wilderness is also relatable to many people who have been through the kind of slavery mindset because it is easy to feel sorry for yourself and to be enslaved by your past when you dwell and you think about it over and over again. You’re going to be apathetic in life and you’re going to just get depressed and give up and become complacent.

Study the Exodus where Jesus well God actually said to Moses, “I want you to lead this people out of Egypt. They were in bondage from there.” The reason why God put them in the wilderness was that God was trying to reconstruct and change their mindset. God was asking them to obey him and he was testing, excuse me, whether or not these people would heed his voice. whether or not these people would change their mindset from victimhood into a new mindset because they’re going to another land. Okay, these people were being led to the promised land of overflowing with milk and honey. And God was teaching this people, you cannot take your mindset, your old mindset, a victimhood mindset from Egyptians. You cannot take that poor mindset into this new place that I’m going to take you. And that’s why God had to bring them into the wilderness to reconfigure or recalibrate the thoughts that were that they were thinking that they were a slave. That they were not good for anything. That their mindset was actually just poor mentality. This is it.

This is my life. Woe is me. And that was the kind of exercise that God wanted them to have a new mindset, a shifting of the identity and preparing them to a new place that God was leading them. However, they have failed. And so instead of going from the wilderness into the Jericho for 2 weeks, it took them about 40 years. It’s relatable. When you have been abused and you’re trying to get out of the abusive mindset and you’re going to end up, woe is me. I’m a victim of my circumstance. That’s why God would says, “Pick up your m and walk because he wants you not to dwell in the same mountain over and over again.” That is the analogy that God wants for you and I to really think about that when you dwell and when you stay stagnant in that same mountain and you keep on saying to yourself, “This is what happened to me and I’m such a loser now. No one’s going to love me and my life is over because of what had happened to me.”

That’s exactly why God wants him to go there as fast as they can to get out of that kind of wilderness of that kind of mindset because we have a tendency to really stay and dwell on our past and we feel sorry for ourselves and that’s why for so many people they give up in life and for so many people they take something that can numb their pain. That’s why for so many people they either quit their life and they harm themselves because they can’t take the pain. They cannot bear it because why? Because they do not distract themselves. They do not do something better with their lives. Not a lot of people in the wilderness made it through. Not even Moses. Moses died in the wilderness. Joshua and the new generation of Joshua were the only people that were able to made it through the promised land.

But the older generation Moses time they did not even make it through because of their unfaithfulness because of their grumbling spirit. Another thing that God would say stop grumbling is stop complaining because complaining and grumbling and being ungrateful for what you have is not going to get you far. That’s why despite of all the bad things that happened to you, you got to always have to have a grateful heart, a gratitude spirit. Even though life is difficult or life is unfair, you still have to understand that God wants someone that will be always be grateful for what you have and not grumbling and not blame God for everything. And going back to Job, when Job asked God this question, why did you bring me into this world? You know, might as well never I was never been born in my mother’s womb. And God was actually corrected him and he was chastised by God and saying where were you when I was creating this world?

Do you even know how the world works and how the universe and the end of the universe and the stars and the galaxies were formed? I mean it is such a way that God says you don’t have a you don’t have a say whatsoever. You’re just a clay and I am the potter. you really have no I you have no right to question me whether or not um I would give you this kind of problem because he is God and he’s ultimately the controller of everything. Now I’m not saying that we condone suffering or we condone people to hurt us. What I’m just saying is that perhaps sometimes we try to we we try to make sense we still try to make sense of why does suffering is so hard to understand and and what do we do while we’re still waiting for it to be better. Over time it will get better. I promise you that over time there’s always going to be as cliche as it may sound the light at the end of the tunnel.

Over time, you’re going to understand why God allowed this to happen. There’s always a silver lining in the moment while you’re suffering. Of course, it doesn’t make sense. You don’t you don’t see why God allows such horrible things happen in your life because you’re still in the midst of it. But after you have survived it, you just finally understand that because God was in the midst of it, now you’re stronger and wiser and more capable than you thought that you just end of your life and actually God was preparing you to become a better person. And remember what Paul said, God doesn’t give us any problem when he knows that we cannot endure it. He doesn’t give us any trials and challenges when he knows that we cannot overcome them. He always gives us an exit way out and he always give gives us the breakthrough that despite of all the hardships that we will face in this world, God said, “Count it all with joy.” Well, Paul wrote it.

When you face tribulations because with that tribulation, it’s going to build your character and it’s going to have perseverance and eventually you’re going to have hope and you can comfort those who have also been afflicted later on. You have been comforted by God so that later on with your story, you’re able to comfort other people and able to help them the way that they have seen you overcome your challenges and they are inspired by the stories that you have hoping that they can also follow your route that if you have survived the kinds of pain that you have been through then they can also see in themselves that there must be a strong force that is actually living inside of me, which is the God within you that when you really look closely, he’s always there waiting for you to just tap into him and ask for his guidance.

And while waiting, you can also learn about what not to do and what to do and hopefully that you do not treat people the way that you were treated. the reasons why Joseph was also taught by God and he was 17 years old when he was sold to slavery and he was imprisoned falsely by the wife of po potterer and God was teaching him that when you become a governor someday I want you to understand that you’re not going to treat the same way what people have done to you and sometimes we might really say to ourselves this is unfair God, I don’t like what’s happening right now, but there’s always a purpose. There’s always going to be some lesson that God wants us to learn. And that is why I want you to understand that you can holler at God and you can, you know, put your fist up in heaven all you want, but at the end of the day, we are just nothing but at at his disposal. We are just a clay in a potter’s hand.

And God will do whatever he wants whether we like it or not without our suggestions, without our vote whatsoever because he is God. I will do whatever I want because he is God. He is the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent God that he is. And whether you like it or not, that’s just how God functions. Maybe someday when you are going to face him in heaven, that’s when you ask your questions. But in the meantime, you just have to do whatever we can do in this life is to worship him while waiting and to allow him to really heal us by humbly asking him to intercede on our behalf. And God said in his word in Isaiah that I came to born of your griefs and carried your sorrows. Jesus came so that he can really bind up the wounds that were broken. Jesus did not come to those who are perfect people, but he came to those who are lost. And that was the purpose of the cross. And the reason why Jesus had to die for me and you, the people that are not so perfect, the people that are broken and shattered. And that’s why we have hope because of Jesus.