Tag: healing

The Positioning

If you’re an intuitive person at all, you know what a “gut feeling” means. It is a deep uneasiness. It is a gnawing knowing that something unpleasant is about to happen.


It’s what I was feeling back in September as I saw and heard signs that my employer was having serious issues related to their profitability and positioning. I knew because I was part of the executive team. Still, I was shocked to learn that my name was on the list of people whose positions would be eliminated as part of a RIF (reduction in force) layoff.


While I had only been with that team 2-1/2 years, it was still a gut punch. What I remember most was something I said the day the CEO told me my position was ending – much sooner than what had been described as a possibility at year-end. I said, “well, I guess now I get to experience a layoff!”


That response reflects the deepest mind and thoughts of someone who has faced and survived so. many. losses. And traumas.


This event adds to a long list of perils including: myriad abusive narcissist + empath relationships, divorce, death by suicide of my first-born … and now this. For the first time ever in my employment history, I would lose my main source of income – while my child is at university 3 states away.

In perspective and comparison to some of the more life-threatening things I’ve endured, this is a small thing. However, it stings and it hits all my triggers. My 23-year-old self who came back to NC with a suitcase full of ruined clothes and nothing else to her name, covered in bruises and pregnant was somehow resurrected in this moment. All her fears and feelings of being unsafe, unprotected, and unsupported were screaming in the background.

Meanwhile, my current self has plenty of resources and support. I have had to console the younger version of myself over and over and over again during this time, reminding her that everything is ok now. It is ok and it will be ok. We aren’t starting from nothing anymore.

I’m still sorting out my next steps and have begun to “position” myself and my career differently. Rather than applying for work as an employee, I am offering my services to clients who need administrative support on a fractional basis. This seems wise to me.

During the course of all this positioning and healing, and reassuring, I painted on top of a piece of art that hung on my wall. I recreated it into a textured, semi-3D scene I titled “Storm Watch.” It represents the feeling, the stinging, the blowing … and the beauty and the power and the hope that will now define this period of my life.

With gratitude, I will, once again, emerge from this injury as a reimagined and repositioned version of myself – more whole, more grateful, more tried and tested, and closer to the woman God created me to be.

When healing doesn’t come

When healing doesn’t come … what do the faithful do?

I think we all have our ideas about how we are supposed to manage our faith. If we have faith in God, then we believe God will do what God promised to do. But, for Jesus followers, did Jesus promise to heal every ailment we pray to have removed? Sometimes, it seems that is exactly what Jesus said: “So I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” Paul might argue the opposite … while Paul pleaded with God to remove “the thorn from his flesh,” God insisted that Paul would experience sufficient grace because God’s strength is made perfect through our weakness.

My mother struggled with healing that did not come for her, as faithful and trusting as she was, and regardless of how many of us agreed in prayer with her for her healing. My son struggled with healing that he was unable to find, regardless of all of the prayers, treatments and lifestyle changes he made. Therein lies the tension that shows up in all things – when do we recognize which direction to adjust our sails? What exactly are we supposed to have faith in if not God’s amazing ability to give us what we ask for, like a magically powerful vending machine?

Many believers crumble under an undue pressure to somehow increase their faith in these times, but the main object of our faith – the target, the goal – is what gets lost. We have to place our faith in God, not in what God can or will or won’t do. We have to trust God in life and in death and in eternity.

I’ve never been more wildly or rudely introduced to a concept before in my entire life. We have to trust God in life and in death and in eternity. I think about all three of those statuses often these days, as I attempt to reconcile the life and loss of my son. I prayed so fervently for him … I and many others. I have to trust that God answered our prayers in ways we may never understand while on earth.

As we dig in this spot, let’s ask a deeper, more difficult question: how do Christ-followers uphold faith in the face of mental illness? What is the distinction between our soul and our spirit and how does our spirit maintain a strong connection with God-inside-us (Holy Spirit) when our soul becomes so sick and broken? How do we reconcile death as a result of mental illness as opposed to physical illness, which seems to be more revered – a more honorable way to die? I believe strongly that the Church is faced today with figuring out how to encourage, embrace, pray for and support its members and community members who are struggling with mental illnesses. If the statistics are correct, about 25% of the population is affected by depression, anxiety, ADHD, bipolar disorder or other personality disorders – which often occur together in the same person. If we’re honest, we know we are surrounded by these hurting, beloved people and we don’t have a clue how to properly support them.

We don’t know how to offer hope, because we don’t often feel hopeful for them or we attribute their words and actions to bad character flaws or bad choices – but if we can’t do anything else, we must offer the hope that is found in Jesus. If Jesus only offered one thing to humanity, and if that one thing was hope, then that is all we need. Hope heals. But if that hope doesn’t keep us on earth longer, then that hope in Jesus will take us into our eternity. The Church must be the source that offers the hope of Jesus to our broken members, communities and world. Healing and restoring a broken world is the mission Jesus initiated in His ministry on earth and it is the work He will bring into completion through eternity. That is also our mission and our hope.