Signs

I am a person who has had much to heal from in my life. Challenges I didn't ask for, brokenness I didn't choose, but here I've been anyway, doing my best to navigate the fallen things and try to find some solid ground on which to put my feet. 

And...healing is real. Healing is possible. Healing is necessary. There are things in our lives that we absolutely can and must heal in the most traditional senses of our understanding of what healing is. 

But, as we've been talking about this week, there are also things we can only cast out. 

As a person who has experienced my fair measure of both in this life, here's what I think the difference is: 

We can heal things that haven't gotten into our hearts yet. We can heal things that haven't changed some fundamental aspect of who we are. We can heal things that are temporary, that have an end in sight, that will respond to the things that we do to try to heal them. 

Infections respond to antibiotics. Coughs respond to therapies. Weak knees can get stronger with rehab. Addictions can break through a series of hard choices made over and over and over again. 

What has to be cast out is that thing that has changed the way our life looks and sounds and breathes. 

Here's what I mean: 

I have had some challenges. Often, they are physical challenges that require physical interventions. I have gone to the doctors, filled the prescriptions, scheduled the therapies, done the exercises, made steady progress, scored some wins, gotten some parts of my life back. This is healing. 

But in the course of a few of these things over the years of my life, including one that I am fighting through right now, something else is going on, too. 

There's a spirit of discouragement sitting over my heart. No matter my progress, my successes, my wins, I cannot shake the feeling that I am still failing. That something is still holding me back. There's a resignation in my spirit that is ready to accept something less than total wholeness because there's part of me that believes that this is as good as it's going to get. 

And then, when I open my mouth, the voice that comes out of it is not mine. 

Remember the guy who was chained in the cemetery? The whole town knew he was crazy as a loon. He was out there cursing and swearing, naked, wandering around in broken chains - broken chains. He should have already been set free; the chains that were holding him weren't attached to anything any more. But he couldn't get out of there. He couldn't stop shouting and screaming. He couldn't keep his clothes on. There was something coming out of him that was still bound to a darkness, even though the chains had already been broken. (And, let's be honest - he'd broken them.) 

Sometimes, we set ourselves free - we do the work, we do all the things, we break the chains - but there's still something holding us there, and the primal screams and the deep cursing that comes out of our mouths keeps scaring everyone away. 

Just the other day, after several days of amazing success in a row, after a great measure of healing and a little bit of release in my heart, I had a little setback. And at the very same moment that I felt that little bit of discouragement and devastation trying to creep back into my heart, I banged my hands against whatever was in front of me in incredible frustration, and I screamed (I promise you, screamed), "Son-of-a-****ing *****."

Yeah, me. 

Or...not me. Because anybody who knows me knows that I don't talk like that. I told myself I was just frustrated. That I was aggravated at having made so much progress, only to have such a hard setback completely out of nowhere. That it was only a natural human reaction to a still-broken life when I have worked so hard to put a little bit of it back together. 

But honestly? There's something else at play here. Something I have felt for awhile, but tried to ignore because, well, because spiritual warfare is messy. 

Yet in the moment that I heard those words come out of my mouth, I knew it. Without a doubt. For absolute certain. 

I've been trying to heal something that can only be cast out.