This comes from counsel I shared in a private on-line conversation helping a dear friend overcome some reoccurring hurts in the heart.

A lot of this is coming because you are maturing and coming out of denial. You are beginning to see some of the long-term affects of facing deep-seated emotions and being honest about the reality of your past and how it effects your present and that you desire a different future.

The first thing is you need to know is that it is safe to enter into your heart. You need to know it is safe to be real with your real self (which hasn’t been true of you in the past) and that you aren’t going to sabotage your own desires by self-inflicted shame or discouraging guilt.

Secondly, you need to know the same thing about God coming to you as Father, Savior and Comforter…He is not coming into those places of your soul to further shame or blame you, but to reclaim you with healing, love, forgiveness…both for you and for you to give to others.

Third, you need to have a safe, trusted, mature mentor/coach/mother or father in the faith to help lead you through the corridors of your life so that you stay balanced in the approach to having God create in you a clean heart. Someone who knows you, loves you, and whom you trust. Someone who is gifted to hear the Holy Spirit and who knows the Word of God and the heart of God.

There are levels to our life and therefore our pain and memories. Please don’t go at this as a major surgery, but rather as a series of continuous surgeries over a lifetime. There will certainly be major breakthroughs and those are special and needed in order to get your heart back. But relax and commit your heart to the Lord and yourself to his process of redeeming you and your past.

“Most of us simply try to “put things behind us,” get past it, forget the pain as quickly as we can. Really – denial is a favorite method of coping. But not with Jesus. He wants truth in the inmost being, and to get it there he’s got to take us into our inmost being. One way he’ll do this is by bringing up an old memory. You’ll be driving down the road and suddenly remember something from your childhood. Or maybe you’ll have a dream about a long-forgotten person, or event, or place. However he brings it up, go with him there. He has something to say to you.”  -John Eldredge

Bind Up the Broken Hearted

The wounded heart at the right is a project that I had a young lady work on after coming in to see me about her “heart attack”. The work that she did on this project is some of the most transparent and honest work I have ever seen. Since the time of this project she has continued to open up her heart to the Great Physician – Jesus – and the progress that she has made is astounding. Let me encourage you to allow the Holy Spirit to help you draft an initial X-ray of your heart and locate the blockage and the breakthroughs.

My Sermon: Despicable Me:  http://wolc.com/podcast/despicable-me/