For a long time, I think I confused loving God with being healed.
I love God. I have loved God for years. I pray. I read my Bible. I go to church. I serve. I lead. I pour into other women. I believe God. I trust God.
But I have also had to come to terms with this truth:
I can genuinely love God and still have areas of my life that need healing.
That was freeing for me because sometimes, especially in church, we can make people feel like if you really love God, you shouldn't still be struggling with certain things.
Just pray about it.
Give it to God.
Have faith.
Forgive and move on.
And listen, I believe in every bit of that.
I believe in prayer.
I believe in faith.
I believe in forgiveness.
I believe God can deliver you instantly.
But I also believe there are some things God walks us through.
Some healing happens at the altar, and some healing happens when you get home and have to live out what happened at the altar.
I know what it is to worship God and still be hurting.
I know what it is to encourage somebody else while needing encouragement myself.
I know what it is to have enough faith to believe God for somebody else and then struggle with my own thoughts when it comes to me.
I know what it is to serve God faithfully and still have areas where my thinking, reactions, insecurities, and past experiences needed His attention.
And for a while, I didn't always recognize those things as wounds.
I thought, this is just me.
This is how I am.
This is how I respond.
This is how I protect myself.
This is what I do when I'm hurt.
But the closer I got to God, the more He started showing me that everything I had accepted about myself wasn't necessarily something I was supposed to keep.
Some things were not my personality.
Some things were pain.
Some things were fear.
Some things were insecurity.
Some things were learned behavior.
Some things were survival.
And some things were wounds I had gotten so used to carrying that I stopped recognizing that they still hurt.
That's the thing about becoming.
God will introduce you to you.
And I'm not talking about the version everybody else sees.
I'm talking about you.
The you underneath the titles.
The you underneath the accomplishments.
The you underneath the makeup, the clothes, the business, the ministry, the marriage, the motherhood, and everything else we sometimes use to measure how well we're doing.
God will start dealing with the woman underneath all of that.
And sometimes I didn't like what He showed me.
Because it's easier to point out what somebody else did to you than it is to acknowledge what what they did produced in you.
It's easier to say, “They hurt me,” than to admit, “And because they hurt me, I became guarded.”
It's easier to say, “They abandoned me,” than to admit, “And now I struggle with rejection.”
It's easier to say, “They betrayed me,” than to admit, “And now I have difficulty trusting people who haven't done anything to me.”
It's easier to talk about the offense than it is to deal with the wound.
But I have learned that God loves me too much to heal only the surface.
Psalm 139:23 says, “Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts.”
That's a serious prayer.
Because when you ask God to search you, you have to be prepared for Him to show you some things.
Not to embarrass you.
Not to condemn you.
But to heal you.
There were times I thought God was dealing with somebody else and He turned the mirror toward me.
I wanted Him to change them.
God said, “Let's talk about you.”
I wanted Him to fix the situation.
God wanted to fix something in me.
I wanted an apology.
God wanted me free whether I ever got one or not.
I wanted answers.
God wanted my surrender.
And that kind of healing is different.
Because now I'm not waiting for somebody else to change before I can be whole.
I'm allowing God to do His work in me.
I also had to learn that acknowledging I needed healing did not mean I didn't have faith.
It didn't make me weak.
It didn't mean I wasn't spiritual enough.
And it certainly didn't mean I didn't love God.
It meant I was human.
Jesus said in Matthew 11:28, “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
Notice He didn't say, “Get yourself together and then come.”
He said come.
Come tired.
Come disappointed.
Come confused.
Come angry.
Come with the trust issues.
Come with the childhood wounds.
Come with the rejection.
Come with the grief.
Come with the things you haven't told anybody.
Come with the parts of yourself you don't understand yet.
Just come.
That's the God I have come to know.
The God who doesn't require me to pretend I'm healed in order to be loved by Him.
And the more I understand that, the more honest I can be about my own healing journey.
There are things God has completely delivered me from.
There are things I can look back on now and see tremendous growth.
And then there are areas where I can honestly say, God is still working on me.
And I'm okay saying that.
Because I would rather be honest about where I am than pretend to be somewhere I'm not.
I don't want to look healed.
I want to be healed.
I don't want to learn how to hide my wounds behind Scripture.
I want Scripture to help transform the wounded places.
I don't want to shout over things God is asking me to confront.
I don't want to keep calling dysfunction “just how I am.”
And I don't want to spend my life helping other women become while refusing to allow God to continue His work in me.
As I become, I have to keep becoming.
That's why I have learned to give myself grace without giving myself excuses.
There's a difference.
Grace says, “I'm still growing.”
An excuse says, “This is just how I am, so everybody has to deal with it.”
No.
If my wounds are causing me to wound other people, I have a responsibility to heal.
If my past is controlling my present, I have a responsibility to confront it.
If my reactions are coming from places God is trying to deliver me from, I have a responsibility to surrender them.
And I don't have to do any of that alone.
God is with me in the process.
So if you're reading this and you love God but you know there are still some areas that need healing, I want you to hear me.
There is no shame in that.
You can love God and need healing.
You can be anointed and need healing.
You can be called and need healing.
You can lead and need healing.
You can be the strong friend and need healing.
You can be the mother everybody depends on and need healing.
You can know Scripture and need healing.
You can have been saved for years and still discover something in yourself that God wants to address.
Healing does not disqualify you from becoming.
Healing is part of becoming.
I'm learning that God isn't asking me to present Him with a perfect woman.
He's asking me to give Him access to the real one.
So here I am.
Still loving God.
Still trusting God.
Still serving God.
Still growing.
Still healing.
Still discovering things about myself.
Still surrendering things I thought I had already surrendered.
Still giving God access to places I didn't realize I had closed off.
And still becoming.
Because loving God doesn't mean there is nothing left in me to heal.
Sometimes loving God means trusting Him enough to finally let Him touch the places that still hurt.
And I'm learning to let Him.
Still healing. Still growing. Still becoming.
Becoming Looks Good on Me.