An Experience of Entering Into a Healing From Anguish

Depths of experience; that’s what the abundant life is about.

But we shrink from the deeper life when the pain comes. We cannot have the heights if we are not prepared to go to the depths. It’s just the way life is.

So I have learned – against my own will initially – that there is a kind of life experienced at the depths that is immensely valuable!

Even as we bear the pain of anguish we may – in that depth – experience a depth that makes us bigger, better, more compassionate, and able to be touched.

The underpinning truth of this, of course, is the Presence of God provides the purpose of entering in. So actually entering into the abyss is the very way to access the special revelation, and Presence, of God.

An example... a poem, and then a commentary on the poem, from my journal:

Oh wonderful pain,
A thoroughly salubrious lament,
It’s a funny sort of torment,
But, Contentment! Let it reign.

In any old choosing of time,
A grief of experience is enjoyed,
It’s God’s Presence that’s employed,
Oh, how I love You, Divine!

Having just played music that elicits a serene, ethereal emotion almost immediately, looking through visual records of the time when our infant son was lost to us, there is the precious healing practice of inviting the Spirit’s revelation. There’s a hungering after his Presence. Anywhere his Presence is it seems I’m willing to go, but shudder the thought of his Presence departing for any reason. And God said to me as I entered this healing of anguish, “Never shall I ever leave you, never ever will I abandon you.” Walking through the experience of Nathanael Marcus, here and with us physically, again, is such a gift that is immediately accessible any time I want to remember him. What a wonder to partake of healing. I praise God!

This is so meaningful, others who are ailing as I have should know this healing that comes from entering intentionally into, what I call ‘healing’, anguish.

***

Hope transcends all experience of anguish in the knowledge that God goes with us as we tread into healing by entering into pain.

Such a healing can only come, however, when we have debunked all rights to ourselves, which is a Christian’s obedience to their Lord.

God knows the anguish is terrifying, embittering, numbing, and angering. When we go into the anguish with our Lord, though, there is a healing that can be accessed.

God blesses every act of courage to grapple with the truth of our pain. And his is strength in the condition of our weakness that will get us through.

© 2015 S. J. Wickham.