Dearest Brothers and Sisters,
How I have longed to share with you my heart and story lately! Praise be to God for His boundless Love and desire to spoil all His sons and daughters with anointing oil of healing. I have so much to share with you, and I am writing this to all of you from wintry, snow covered Wisconsin. I am here meeting with trained healing ministers in the Church to prayerfully walk through with me my last year of missions, to address all the difficulties I personally experienced, and to rise towards a restored relationship with the Lord. Y'all...it's....been....hard. But as I am a week away from leaving and returning back to Louisiana to our mission base, every ounce of the journey has been worth it.
It's been three months since I returned to the States from Ecuador and completed my first year there. Many of you saw me return home to my parish, and for all of you who welcomed me with understanding, compassion, and concern, thank you. Thank you to all who prayed healing over me, for all of you who have equally sacrificed in this mission financially. Thank you for all of you who have been praying for me, truthfully the work of God's hands in your prayers have been the glue drawing me back to wholeness. Thank you for not judging me, especially as I have slowly been sharing with others that I am not returning to Ecuador this next year.
I pray my story of my first year of missions and season of inner healing doesn't turn you off to the joy of missions...rather, I pray this story actually blazes within your heart and urges YOU to be courageous in your storytelling. I have prayed a lot with this blog post, and for a long time it's been painstakingly clear that the Lord wants to use the vulnerability of my first year in missions (and the boldness it requires to share), to call you out to do the same right where you are. There is someone either in your very own home, in your parish, in your friend group, in your missionary team, in your workplace, someone around you that is thirsting to know they are not alone and if only they knew your story, the walk of your life, they would be healed themselves. I challenge you to share your story to someone this week including the painful details you like to skip over, to touch someone else's ache. Community, oneness, wholeness, and love are born out of the giving of ourselves...especially our stories (because that's Jesus' story working through you).
As Brené Brown put it in her book Rising Strong, "People who wade into discomfort and vulnerability and tell the truth about their stories are the real bada**es." (Forgive me for being frank)
What's Been Going on with Me
So here’s to me finally wading through the discomfort and vulnerability! With that said, it's taken me 3 months for me to actually sift through these photos of me in Ecuador and to not feel anger boil within me, to not feel my heart crushing under the weight of grief, it's taken me a long time for me to realize that it's okay that I am not returning. It doesn't mean those days don't resurface, in fact, it still hurts to see these photos with dear Mora and I (our next door neighbor)...but as I have been diving into deep inner spiritual healing, I can look at these memories not with hate towards God or that He ripped love away from me, but rather, looking at them (knowing these were times I personally felt I had experienced the depths of Hell and back) and now being in awe, actually left contemplating the mystery and wonders of God that even in all of that "Hell" I still somehow managed to love, to serve, to bury the dead, to hike through the jungle and bring the healing nourishment of Jesus' body to others. Clearly, I had all of your prayers and the power of Heaven interceding for me as proof of this.
So what's the story, you might be asking? Here's to real talk...
January of 2019 a team of us three girls were sent to Ecuador, joined a missionary family in the jungle, and helped collectively as well as separately to bring Jesus in the Eucharist to many in the remote jungle. Our year consisted of leading various mission trips from the States, building projects, helping flood territories, ministering Communion Services to both Spanish speaking communities as well as Kichwa indigenous communities, distributing Ashes and services during Lent, journeying with the village girls of different ages and help them understand their preciousness and dignity, helping with praise and worship nights through Adoration, home visits, and mostly, just living ourselves in the jungle and building authentic relationships with our community and neighbors. I am forever marked with blessings for the Lord choosing me to love them.
But our year also consisted in physical sicknesses…trials would come, dysfunction would surface, unhealthy rhythms on a day to day persisted, a teammate of ours was physically assaulted and left our team, skin infections plagued, anxiety attacks and PTSD developed for me, isolation increased, the rats scurried in our house every night (it’s still hard to burn that memory out), my desperation to be "saved" and "defended" by God spiraled, and being barricaded because of rioting for two weeks leaving us trapped with the possibility of no running water, sustainable food, or clean living situations (because the trash trucks at that point were not being serviced) escalated my body to heights of survival mode I had never reached before. At the time, I was truly carried by unspeakable graces and your prayers to live through that.
When the skin rashes infested my body, a few months before leaving to come home, I received a pretty graphic depiction of what it felt like I had been living inside of me. I felt like I was a soldier who excitedly went to the frontlines of the battle field, but in a blink of an eye bodies are being dropped all around me, missiles are being flown from every direction, and then the bomb set off next to me and now I was a soldier with two decapitated legs crawling in the thick, unsanitary, blood stained mud to safety (not pretty and comfortable, right?). But nothing was safe around me. When October came, not even a month later, the rioting in Ecuador began, we were trapped, and then it felt like the soldier that already was crawling over death finally got hit right to the chest…and there I was, dead. I gave up on me at that point. I didn’t understand why all this was happening at the time, so I just believed that it was supposed to. So, I also believed in the greatest lie I’ve ever believed in my life…that I just didn’t matter anymore. I must not matter to God.
It was in November when at first seemed like indifference towards my own self and whether I really mattered to God, turned horribly into anger. I was back in the States in “safety” (yet everything within me still felt like it was surviving) and it was after it had become official I would not be returning the following year, and one evening in our chapel late at night I cussed God out and screamed “I HATE YOU! I hate what you did to me!!!” Waves of shame came over me for having had that rooted so deeply inside of me and for having come to a point like that. I didn’t want to hate God, truly I loved Him but the PTSD flashback memories, anxiety attacks where it felt like I wasn’t breathing (yet could hear my normal breathing and feel my heartbeat) were external signs of unresolved pain I knew needed to be addressed. All-time low, I had most definitely tasted the depths of a pit.
Towards Healing
Brené Brown also in her book writes, “People who don’t stay down after they fall or are tripped are often troublemakers. Hard to control. Which is the best kind of dangerous possible. They are the artists, innovators, and change-makers”….I would also like to say they are also the saints. Our model in the Church of real people who probably had every reason to reject God and the pain inflicted on them in their life. They are also our Christian neighbors all around us. The families / moms and dads trying to make it through Mass without bonking their kids upside the head for misbehaving. The missionaries. The ones hoping against hope and still trusting in God even though there are probably valid reasons to give up.
I was advised by my organization that I needed to enter into a season of inner healing, otherwise if I didn’t address the loss of Ecuador, the traumas, the PTSD, the everything, I would suffer even worse. I felt at peace about this, I knew full well how the only way to salvage my love for the Lord would be to walk with other people, safe people from an outside perspective to take hold of my hand and revisit everything with me. I understood what I was saying yes to. I was saying yes to a season of mess. I knew the Lord was going to make a troublemaker out of me and He Himself, the Author of Love and Healing in His own troublemaker way, was going to dig His creating hands into my soul and make a mess of my memories, hurts, and wounds in order to reorder them to restoration.
God's Vision for Me
In December the Lord shared with me that He willed for my healing to take place, that He personally desired it to happen. The “hero’s journey” was already beginning. At the time I was still angry with Him and hearing that didn’t make my heart feel all warm and fuzzy, it felt like an empty promise. Even in my stubbornness He said, “Why wouldn’t I heal you? Of course I desire your healing, of course I choose you to be healed.” Weeks later He still wanted me to know this and led me to Scripture. He brought me to Ezekiel 37, The Vision of the Dry Bones: (If you want to keep reading and skip over this section and look it up later, please take the time to read that passage after!)
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“The hand of the LORD came upon me, and he led me out in the spirit of the LORD and set me in the center of the broad valley. It was filled with bones. He made me walk among them in every direction. So many lay on the surface of the valley! How dry they were! He asked me: Son of man, can these bones come back to life? “Lord GOD,” I answered, “you alone know that.” Then he said to me: Prophesy over these bones, and say to them: Dry bones, hear the word of the LORD! Thus says the Lord GOD to these bones: Listen! I will make breath enter you so you may come to life. I will put sinews on you, make flesh grow over you, cover you with skin, and put breath into you so you may come to life. Then you shall know that I am the LORD. I prophesied as I had been commanded. A sound started up, as I was prophesying, rattling like thunder. The bones came together, bone joining to bone. As I watched, sinews appeared on them, flesh grew over them, skin covered them on top, but there was no breath in them. Then he said to me: Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, son of man! Say to the breath: Thus says the Lord GOD: From the four winds come, O breath, and breathe into these slain that they may come to life. I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath entered them; they came to life and stood on their feet, a vast army. He said to me: Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel! They are saying, “Our bones are dried up, our hope is lost, and we are cut off.” Therefore, prophesy and say to them: Thus says the Lord GOD: Look! I am going to open your graves; I will make you come up out of your graves, my people, and bring you back to the land of Israel. You shall know that I am the LORD, when I open your graves and make you come up out of them, my people! I will put my spirit in you that you may come to life, and I will settle you in your land. Then you shall know that I am the LORD. I have spoken; I will do it—oracle of the LORD.”
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The Lord was waiting in anticipation to open my grave, to grab the dead soldier and command life into being again. I had to will it, I had to want it, and I had to do some inner work to believe I deserved it as well.
Why Therapy is Beautiful & Nothing to Be Ashamed About...
I spent over a month home in California meeting with my former therapist. We made HUGE breakthroughs on conversations surrounding healthy boundaries (I advise you to read the book “Boundaries” by Dr. Henry Cloud & Dr. John Townsend if you haven’t already & if you want to reclaim your life and relationships back). She also introduced to me real tools to practice and to move what I know to be true about my worthiness, dignity, and value in my head and to finally let it seep into my heart. She introduced me to a tool many psychologists have recommended (all in various ways), which is called “The Inner Child Dialogue.”
Explaining "The Inner Child"
It goes a little something like this. Imagine you are still processing grief, anger, frustration with something that happened in your day, or something someone said that triggered you and you walked away feeling less than yourself, maybe even believing in whatever wounds were resurfacing as truth. Imagine yourself at various ages of your life, little you who was 5 years old and innocent (perhaps before or during a trauma), and invite that little you into whatever it is you are believing, thinking, feeling, or hearing that is hurtful. Will you coach your little you through what you’re experiencing? Will you finally look at your little you (or choose any age that fits and needs to hear the words you really needed to hear from a certain someone or in a situation and never received them) and speak those words of love to your own self finally? Will you say “You didn’t deserve this, these people were supposed to love you, and I am sorry they didn’t love you how you needed it…but I love you, I see you and what we are going to do now is healthily enforce a boundary, and let ourselves say no and walk away from this toxic environment.”
However something is affecting you, it looks different in all cases, but rather than waiting on others to affirm your worth to you (which the people we want it from the most usually are the ones it’s hardest to reconcile that gap with), how much more powerful it is if you’re the one speaking words of love to YOU. My therapist shared, “Foundationally this tool and practice is Christian. You’ll come to a point after practicing it and you’ll start to ask yourself…’Is this my voice or God’s?’”
Onward...to Wisconsin!
Receiving a hands-on tool was so crucial for me. But it wasn’t everything. My anger and detachment from God was still strong. Leading up to leaving for Wisconsin the devil did NOT want me to come. Heck, I didn’t even want to come! When I arrived, the car situation originally set up for me fell through. But the Lord was quite literally carrying me through the journey, stomping the devil, and making a way for this healing season to happen. Praise God there was a backup car plan!
Now, I am still at a loss for words to describe my inner healing experience and transformation. Three weeks ago I hated God and believed I was a poor excuse as a missionary to want to serve Him while being mad at Him. Now, I no longer have one ounce of anger in my body. Now, we are moving past God being my abuser and reconciling with the natural way of the world’s original fallenness and how hurt people, hurt people…and we are called to forgive.
Shame was one of the final mountains I couldn’t seem to ascend. They prayed away the anger out of me, but shame and unworthiness of God’s mercy was crippling me. I would have images of the mountain of shame in the distance and I was in a desert. I had already buried myself waist-high in the sand. I didn’t want to be seen, I didn’t want to be known, I didn’t feel like I could possibly recover from the lies I had been believing about myself. I would hear Jesus’ voice and His disciples walking in my direction and I would scramble to gather as much sand as I could to bury my whole body in the ground and to hide from them. I guess I’m just realizing I was burying my own body and grave of shame and hiddenness. I truly was dying in deprivation of Jesus’ mercy and acceptance of It.
Anger, Shame, & Nakedness
You’re probably wondering, well how did you just happen to surmount anger and do away with that. My only answer is the Holy Spirit. I have had to grab every skeleton of the past out, address them for what they were, speak my peace out loud in front of these ministers to how those events hurt me, to forgive those events and people prayerfully, and to have them lay hands over me and to rebuke any unwanted spirits from the enemy that had lingered and attached themselves to me in the process. Seems excessive, right? Wrong, I call it intelligent.
The first day they prayed the spirit of terror and trauma would lift off of me, I walked away after and felt weightless. Another day I screamed in front of them I hated God, they laid hands over me in prayer to rebuke those spirits, to address God and speak to Him in my feelings, then to forgive Him (as if He needs to be forgiven, but it is important to do this exercise), and to also beg for His mercy. I walked away that day and I still have not felt one angry bone in my body boil in me. Then, we addressed shame. They noticed I was struggling in our prayer sessions to see Jesus in everything, to invite Him in…so I went home and prayed that Jesus would help me understand why.
I immediately closed my eyes and BOOM, Jesus’ face was nose to nose with mine and He was piercingly staring with love into my eyes. He was uncomfortably close, like in…my….bubble. I usually am not bothered by personal space, but in that moment, I wanted to get Him off of me and not once could I meet my eyes with His. I was squirming in His embrace, writhing my head around, literally doing anything and everything to NOT let Him see me. But He wouldn’t let go of me, and He still let me fight Him. It was clear to me that it actually wasn’t hard for me to see Jesus, it was seeing myself that I couldn’t bear to face. So, we brought this image to a session and uncovered memories of real shame. Memories where I chose to invite difficult situations into my life. It was the shame of knowing I made mistakes and I hated that I messed up, that the last thing I could understand or fathom was that God actually delights in seeing them (*newsflash, I’m only NOW just learning how to not be surprised by my own sins, and to be okay with running to Confession after them).
I felt so naked and vulnerable and as the healing ministers laid hands over me, I saw myself in all my past sin and shame, super vulnerable and unclothed in this image…and Jesus, on the Way to Calvary with His Cross sees me in my shame and the lies I believed about myself that “I can no longer be wanted by God because of this…” and He stripped off His garment, wrapped me in it, and clothed me instead.
1 Peter 2:24 was real to me in that encounter, “He himself bore our sins in his body upon the cross, so that, free from sin, we might live for righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.”
After that session, and still a week later, I have felt the incredible and noticeable difference of breaking the bonds of shame. Is it an every day process and still am I hit by lies or the tactics of the enemy????….you best believe it! Is it defining my identity and story now, no.
Why We Have a Duty to Heal in the Name of Jesus
Before missions, and even during it, I really didn’t grasp the depth and weight of the Holy Spirit in my life...especially God’s desire for healing. I have been growing in this greater understanding that GOD HEALS, and more than that, He can do it RIGHT NOW in your life. He is not a Healing Physician of the past, but the Holy Spirit is a Living Person that glides through souls on earth waiting for their openness to ask for healing. It is actually Biblical that Jesus commanded ALL baptized persons and followers of Him to invoke healing in His name onto others.
“Then he called his twelve disciples together, and gave them power and authority over all devils, and to cure diseases. And he sent them to preach the kingdom of God, and to heal the sick.” (Luke 9:1-2)
and again in the Gospel of Matthew...
“And as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand. Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils: freely ye have received, freely give.” (Matt. 10:7-8)
This was not just a cute speech Jesus gave, He was serious.
Why Healing Concerns the Father
Many of the disciples fanned into flame the power and authority given to them through the name of Jesus to not just make disciples of every nation and share the Good News, but for them to also know they are FREE children of God and their souls matter DEARLY to Him. Pain, sickness, disease, death…all of it affect God deeply. And He is a God of HEALING.
This is proven in Jeremiah 29:11 "'For I Know The Plans I Have For You' Declares the Lord, 'Plans to Prosper You and Not to Harm You, Plans to Give You Hope and a Future.'"
Welfare, literally meaning our health.
But what’s even better is that God’s desire for our well-being and healing of health is not just to experience amazing healing sessions or to be prayed over for knee problems and now the pain is gone (which is beautiful and happens today in our Church, Praise God) just so we encounter Him briefly, momentarily. These healings I am experiencing, and in which you should receive as well, are all means to a deeper relationship with Him. AND, to respond to Jesus’ commission to lay hands over the sick and to heal them is not saying that God only grants certain people these gifts….we ALL should be practicing healing over others in prayer.
Why Healing Should Concern You
The next time someone shares with you their back pain or whatever it is, be bold to ask the Holy Spirit to use you and pray over that person RIGHT THEN. It was a command for every one of us that is baptized. Have faith! Don’t be nervous to pray over someone. Why? Because it’s not you doing the healing, it’s God’s power and He awaits to use earthly vessels, us, to accomplish His mission of healing and restoration so as to adopt more children into His Heavenly Kingdom.
I’ll end with this last note (oops, sorry this is so long…I hope you have stuck out to read this far), not only does God desire your healing…but He is extremely personal. He’s so personal and loves you so much that like me, when I really pondered it, it was almost TOO personal.
Don’t buy Satan’s lies that “He’s too much, and I’m scum of the earth.” Jesus knows your pain, He’s in fact memorized every second of your day, every tear you’ve shed in solitude with the lights off and door closed, He’s studied your laugh and your heart’s wishes. He can repeat to you from the beginning of time every prayer you’ve prayed in detail. He knows you. He also knows what areas in your life would be the most liberating for you if only you were just open to His healing medicine of Love.
The Love of the Son & His Spirit
In the Gospel of Luke 7: 11-17, we hear of the story of an only son dying and being carried out. His mother is a widow and is accompanied by a large crowd as this is happening. It literally said Jesus was moved with pity for her. The mother didn’t even ask for healing, Jesus was MOVED with Love (because He is Love Himself), to do something miraculous. He first tells her, “Do not weep.” When I read that part it almost feels like He was saying “Just pay close attention and do not weep to what is about to happen.”
“He stepped forward and touched the coffin; at this the bearers halted, and he said, “Young man, I tell you, arise!” (vs 14).
Jesus can heal with just a thought. Have you ever considered that Jesus, because He is God, can actually heal without doing anything, showing anything, or saying anything out loud? Because He knows our minds and how we have been created to experience moments physically, with all of our senses, Jesus doesn’t just heal with a thought…He approaches the coffin and shows the mother by His touch that His body is the source of healing. That we need Him…and only liberation, wholeheartedness, and a healed heart could be possible through Jesus’ physical body.
I urge you to run to Mass, to receive the healing of Jesus’ body in the Eucharist. Run to the Sacrament of Confession. Do not be despised of your fallenness and sins, grow so much to the point where when you sin, you run to Love Himself. Run to wherever Jesus is. He will show you time and again what areas He’s going to heal if you do so.
Like mentioned before, be willing to rise from your hard falls; be willing to let Jesus make a mess of your memories for the sake of your wholeness; be willing to dare bravely enough to end chapters of your life where you let others write your story for you or you created false stories about yourself, diminishing your worth and value in the process…be willing to be a troublemaker.
There is no greater place to be than falling into the hands of the Lord.