Healing: New Birth

I'm feeling distracted again, and internally focused.

Some stuff has come up in my internal life over the last week or two that is demanding some time and attention.

It's stuff I'd rather not deal with if I'm being honest.  The kind of thing I wish would "just go away."

Healing, it seems, doesn't work like that all that often.

Yes, I had a miraculous experience of healing from depression, and it went, seemingly overnight (quite literally, in fact.)

But a lot of the time, it seems to be a process.

It's a process I've been thinking about a lot this week.

Because of the things going on inside of me.

Because I'm spending hours a day buried in a textbook, studying the intricacies of the body.

Because I'm remembering again various conversations about healing and a powerful dream about healing that I had.

Because I'm spending hours a day studying due to the desire birthed within me to take up nursing as a career.  To spend my life aiding in healing - physically or spiritually, practically or miraculously.

Healing is a process. 

And usually a messy one, if you think about it.

We use the metaphor, sometimes, of birth.  "Something new is being birthed within" as you're being healed.

True.

But have you stopped to think about birth lately?  It's not exactly a tidy and pain free process.

I've been hanging out with friends in nursing, and a friend who is a midwife, and friends who just simply have babies.  Birth is a painful, scary, bloody process that results in new life.

I'm desiring new birth within some areas of my life and heart right now, and I'm terrified of the process and sometimes even making excuses to avoid facing the reality that this is a necessary process to walk through if I truly desire the freedom I say I do.  I'm admitting some ugly realities out loud, and then watching as they echo around me and seem to take on size and life and strength of their own.  And mostly, I want to cower in a corner, or stuff them back where they came from.

I don't particularly feel like facing the fight.

And yet, the distracted days I've been having this week are forcing me to come to terms with the fact that the messy, fighting, painful birthing within of healing might be the only way for something new to emerge.

And yep, I'm scared.

But I'm also forcibly choosing trust.  To believe that if Jesus has led me to this place, he's going to stay and walk through it with me.  That he'll hold my hand and somehow we're going to do this thing together.  And I'll emerge freer, and more whole.  And though the process scares me, I long for it's end results.