What is Healing? A Personal Reflection.
From the age of 3 to 5, I was molested by our nanny’s husband. He molested me, along with other men who came to the house and paid to have access to me. I would sit in a back room, and men would come and do what they wanted with my body saying things to me in Spanish so I could not understand them, but I can remember the tone of their voice. I remember knowing that this was wrong and I wasn’t safe. I became sexually curious at a young age. I lived depressed, anxious, and suicidal for most of my childhood.
At 12, I attempted suicide. By this time, I had developed a pornography addiction with a strong attraction to violence. Still, I could not remember being molested, so I never understood why I felt so pulled to these perversions. At 17, I remembered the fact that I had attempted to kill myself, and I began to remember the violence that went on in my household, watching my dad hit my mom, and the own beatings I received, leading my parents to briefly separate when I was 8.
Shortly after God restored their marriage, my dad decided to accept his call, and subsequently our family’s, as a missionary to Cape Town, South Africa. During this transition to South Africa, I moved to 4 different schools within 2 years. We went from being upper-middle class to living off of donations, living in homes that were not ours. I experienced food insecurity and deep anxiety as the neighborhoods we lived in were filled with gun violence.
It was at the age of 8, under the preaching of Bishop Vashti McKenzie, the first female bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, that I would give my life to Christ, my eyes full of tears, my feet seemed to involuntarily move me to the altar. I know, looking back that God kept me. Receiving the Holy Spirit that day kept me through my middle and high school years when demonization and suicidal ideation should have taken my life.
At 18, I was sexually assaulted. This was during a time in my life directly after high school in which I told God, “I was tired.” I didn’t want to be depressed and anxious. Enough was enough. I knew that the self-hate I lived in couldn’t be normal. This can’t be how everyone lives. God filled me, again and again, and again— and then I was sexually assaulted and for the life of me I couldn’t understand, why, after surrendering my life to God again in such a radical way, that He would allow this to happen.
I wrestled with this. Having grown in healing and deliverance ministry over the years, I now know that I needed deliverance. I was spiritually oppressed by the demons incubus and succubus, the highest-ranking sexual spirits that are especially common for rape and molestation victims. While I was free in Christ, no one ever casted these demons out so I could live out the freedom that I had received by faith in Christ. I would finally receive deliverance in 2019 and then again in 2021. However, the suppressed memory of molestation made it so that, even after receiving deliverance, it seemed there was still a torment in my soul that I couldn’t put a finger on.
Beginning in 2020, the memories and details of the molestation began to flood back into my memory. To cope with the pain of these memories, I developed eating disorders: bulimia and binge eating disorder. I didn’t know it at the time, but as I was simultaneously fasting and praying for God to clarify my calling and purpose, I began to develop a disorderly attachment to the weight loss that came from it. I started fasting, saying it was for God when really it was a punishment to myself for being “fat.” I got really thin in the pandemic; I was no longer overweight, but every time I looked in the mirror, all I could see was that I needed to get smaller.
After years of therapy and healing encounters with the Holy Spirit, I can still confidently say that my healing journey has only begun. My own healing journey has caused me to reflect deeply on how we, as the church, define “healing.”
There is a lie in our culture that “healing” is about arriving back to a place of “normality.” It is understood that the journey of healing allows us to live “better quality” lives. While there is no doubt that healing improves our quality of life, it is not a means to an end, nor is it a journey to be idolized. Healing apart from the Father is too, a striving after the wind (Ecclesiastes 1:14). Complete, perfect wholeness in this life does not exist; the journey of healing can only point us to a greater intimacy with God the Father in the Person of Jesus Christ that is to be perfected in the life to come.
So, then, what is healing?
I believe that healing is the recognition and subsequent acceptance of the things which I cannot change in my life. Healing is making peace with each element of my story. Healing is recognizing that trauma does not, and cannot, define me.
Healing is the recognition that I am weak, but I am not broken.
Healing is surrender to a God that is greater than I, trusting that He will redeem all that I’ve lost— known and unknown. Healing is accepting the fact that it’s okay to be afraid. It’s okay to not know what tomorrow is going to look like.
Healing is embracing my weakness; it is refusing to run from a fragility that I cannot hide.
Healing is choosing not to hide from the light anymore. Healing is honoring that the journey won’t be linear and that it does not have any quantitative final destination. There are no coordinates; there is no map. There is only Spirit and surrender to that Holy Spirit in the deep places of the soul. Healing is trusting that all is well, even on the days when it feels that everything has been taken from me. Healing is choosing to have hope in the reality of a better tomorrow, even if that tomorrow and the quality of its “betterness” is more: pain, suffering, quiet, and sorrow.
Healing is coming to the recognition that God did not put me on this earth to be happy, but to be human, to reflect Him and His glory.
Therefore healing is not:
an objective process
a linear process
a simple process
a shallow process
a means to an end
a source or pathway to greater productivity
Healing is sanctification.
Healing is holy.
Healing is Spirit.
Healing is life.
Healing is Christ.
Healing is Jesus.
The journey of healing is the journey of walking with Christ.
I don’t seek to be whole. I seek to walk with the One who is perfectly whole, allowing His light to permeate my darkness and the rotten holes in my soul that darkness has caused. Healing is listening to His leading.
Healing is listening to His call to acknowledge what happened, not to run from it.
“Can we deal with it now?” This is the question the Holy Spirit asked me in 2018 as I entered into a worship service, hands raised, singing songs on the overwhelming faithfulness of God. Perhaps that question was referring to much more than I had the capacity to receive (or I even had conscious knowledge of) at that moment now 5 years ago— “Can we deal with it?”
The Lord says,
“It” refers to your tendency to run from painful memories of your past, piercing your soul, causing a weight in the race you so desperately desire to run.
“It” refers to the tendency to run, ignoring the fact that there are accumulating weights on my back, knees, and ankles, calling it “my cross” when we both know these are weights that He has always desired to deliver me from.
I know now that for me personally…
“It” refers to being molested for three years of my childhood. The memory suppressed for 15 years that has only relatively recently come to the light.
“It” refers to the secret of being molested, which I told to no one, not even myself.
Secrets rot the soul.
It is time for me to come into the light. I am no longer rotting from the inside out; I am coming into the light. Here I am God. Send me. Send me to be a vessel and beacon of light and hope. But first— clean me out, and fill me up with the goodness of My Father, that which I do not and cannot possess apart from you.
I am ready to answer the call.
I will die so you might live (Galatians 2:20-22). I give up my desire to cover the pain that you have always desired to alleviate me from— the secrets of my soul. The sins committed against me that have weighed me down and made me feel that I need to hide because I could never be worthy of your call. Your blood makes me worthy. This is more than enough. You are more than enough. You cover me over and over and over again.
