awake again. (re-post)

My wonderful friend Leeana wrote an amazing book called Found Art, which I highly recommend. In it, she tells the story of her first year of marriage, which so happened to take place in a foreign country, while her husband was serving in the military. After many years back in the United States, Steve is again stationed in Bahrain, and Leeana is with him again, and this time they have children. In a recent blog post, Leeana quotes her own book, and recounts how she had been walking around, with the lights out in her own soul, and yet in the souq, she felt that she was coming alive. In a souq of all places. It was an unusual place, in a foreign land, that God used to heal her. She had this to say about it: “God has a way of taking the most unsuspecting elements and using them to bind us up. When the miracle happens, when he touches our eyes with these elements and we are able to see, we realize that even dirt and spit contain a beauty all their own. . . .” I think that I allowed a part of me to grow dim some time ago. I realized it last week, about the time that I read Leeana’s blog post, that deep inside, God is healing part of me. I have a tendency to compartmentalize my life, and there are some compartments that have been almost rusted shut. I couldn’t feel anything in those parts of my life, I couldn’t see anything. They were just there, in the background, but not really there at all. Broken, and yet I didn’t spend the emotional energy to ask God to heal them, to allow Him to do work on them, I just journeyed on. I concentrated on what was easier, what wasn’t so broken, and ignored the part of me that felt incapable of emotion. Until recently. Until God just showed me that He has every desire to make me completely whole. That He won’t allow me to live only half alive. He is healing the very part of me where my lights had gone out, in ways that I couldn’t see. He is using unusual things, things foreign to me. I can’t describe it really, I just know that I was driving home one night and realized what it was like to feel something that I didn’t know I ever would again. And I know that ability to feel came from God, from His healing mixture that He placed on the broken parts of my soul. The thing that I can describe is the beauty of it. How as I come to feel alive in every way, how much I love the freedom that comes with it, and how much I long to praise God for it. I can’t believe that He cares so much more then I thought He did, and I can’t believe how wonderful His gifts are. I read somewhere, I can’t remember where, that one day, we will reach a place where the difficulty of our journey will be eclipsed by the joy of what we receive from God, that the difficulties of our journey will be nothing in light of eternity. And in the meantime, I think we should take the time to allow God to heal the parts of us that are dim, or dying. I know He longs to. I know He longs to do it today, long before we reach heaven. I believe that He wants us to start experiencing wholeness here on earth. It won’t be perfect, but it’s a glimpse of heaven. It’s part of living life to the full (John 10:10). Seriously, everyone should go get Leeana’s book. It’s so good.