The Truth of Restoration
We all want our hearts to be healed.
But once you’ve been traumatized you just can’t bear the thought that it could happen again. Everything in you tells you to hunker down, to cut your losses, to settle for a little bit of happiness. That’s when you need to act counter-intuitively, pick up your life again and move on down the road.
You need to choose the work of restoration.
There are times when I’d rather do almost anything other than the hard work of restoration and recovery. And what is that work? It’s the equivalent of ordering timber and bricks and starting to build the walls of hope again in our lives.
It means being willing to release the life we planned to embrace the life that is waiting for us.
Here are just a few things it has entailed in my life:
- The work of hope—which means being willing to say you need restoration and actually asking for the help you need.
- The work of waiting on the Lord—quieting down my life so I can hear...trusting his timing...staying in curiosity and out of judgment as to what God is doing.
- The work of honesty and transparency. In the aftermath of trauma, that could mean shouting at God and telling him how you feel. It can mean refusing to put on a happy face and insisting that everything is all right. There are certainly times when you need to control your feelings for the sake of others. But your restoration absolutely depends on finding a place to confess your honest thoughts and feelings—at very least, in prayer, in a journal, or with a few friends who are close to you.
- The work of “controlling the wild horses.” I love the way my friend Emily describes this. She’s referring to that tendency we all have, but trauma victims have more than most, to let our “vain imaginations” run away with us. If we give in just a little to fear, panic and worry, those emotions can quickly take control of our lives. So while we need to be honest with our feelings, we also need to be alert to the ways our thoughts can run away with us and learn to short-circuit the runaway thoughts. In the process, as the apostle Paul describes, we move toward being ‘transformed by the renewing of our minds.'
- The work of obedience instead of instinct. Our instincts can serve us well in the early moments of trauma. A “fight or flight” response could actually save our lives in an accident. But as we move from survival toward restoration, our instincts can being to get in the way of what God wants to do with our lives. Your instinct may be to pull away and withdraw when you need to press in to relationships…or to hang on too tightly when you need to let people make their own mistakes. I tend to rush in to 'fix' things instead of waiting on God’s timing. But I’m learning obedience sometimes has to trump instinct in this too. We have to act on the light we’re given, do what we know to do. And all this takes both courage and discipline.
- The work of forgiveness. Bill Ritter sums this up beautifully: “Sooner or later, you will have to forgive what you can’t understand. For you may never figure it out. Or even if you do, the conclusions you reach in your head may not necessarily heal what you feel in your heart. The only way out of your pain may be to start splashing forgiveness in every direction…forgiving the one who [caused the trauma]…forgiving yourself for anything you did or didn’t do, just before it happened…forgiving God for allowing it, or not stopping it…and even forgiving circumstances for being so damn hard and weighted against you.” [1]
- The work of gratitude. This is simply looking for signs of God’s presence in our lives and resolving, by choosing to “give thanks in all things.”
- The work of modeling faith and integrity. This does not mean faking a faith, covering up our doubts, or sacrificing our integrity to our witness. In fact, it means the exact opposite. As God walks us toward restoration, it’s good to realize that others—our children especially—are watching the way we walk, and how we live into our own restoration can have a powerful impact on their relationship to God. The more honestly and trustingly we can walk, the more integrity we manage, the more we confess our mistakes but accept forgiveness…the more others will be blessed and helped.
I cannot tell you how the work of restoration will look in your life. Or how God will grow you though your times of sorrow or loss. But I know He will...He will grow you into healing...He will grow you into wholeness...and He will use your hard work of recovery to bring forth his (amazing might I say) grace.
[1] Bill Ritter, Take the Dimness of My Soul Away: Healing After a Loved One’s Suicide (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 2004), 49.
