5
I Am Healed
Transforming Brokenness into Wholeness
“As a kid,” Lori explained, “I just wanted someone to love me for who I am.”
Lori lived with her single mom and younger sister. “Our home was filled with her boyfriends and husbands and instability. I was four when I was first sexually abused by one of the friends that Mom left me with. I was exposed to pornography and forced to act things out.
“I didn’t have a safe place. I spent most of my childhood trying to protect my younger sister or my mom. It was horrifying watching my mom being beaten and fearing for our lives.
“My mom left me with a Catholic family for a year and a half. In church, they showed us pictures of priests and nuns who had been martyred. I saw the images of these martyred saints and thought, That is how I feel.
“When I was eleven, I opened up to a nun and shared how I had been sexually abused as a child. She called the priest. Then the priest called the family I was living with, who also called my mom. I told them my whole story—and nothing happened. My mom convinced them that I was lying. The priest left and told me not to lie again. I knew the priest was my channel to God. When the priest rejected me, I felt abandoned by God himself.
“I could no longer live with the Catholic family, and my mom didn’t want me because I was so ‘bad.’ I thought something must be horribly wrong with me. I began to run away, steal things, and act out of my wounding. My mom called my father, whom I had never met, and told him I had to live with him when I was twelve.
“One day my dad and stepmom picked me up for dinner. Then they took me home to live with them. Whenever I tried to talk about things that had happened to me, my dad would say, ‘That’s your old life; never speak of it again.’ They were overly strict with me, but it gave me structure.
“I grew up in their home with all my emotions bottled up. When I met my husband, I fell in love with him because he was safe. I knew he wouldn’t hurt me. We were fine until I became pregnant. It triggered my fear of becoming a mother. It was eight years into my marriage and I freaked out. Later I was able to meet their physical needs, but I couldn’t connect emotionally with my husband or my kids.
“My husband and I were having trouble with communication. One day I woke up and said, ‘We should go to church to get help.’
“We didn’t realize that it was God himself that we needed. We went to church to get help, but it all blew up in our faces. I ended up being manipulated and controlled in a toxic relationship with a church member. After a year, we had a short-lived sexual affair. He knew I was wounded and he was using me. I knew he was manipulating me, but I still said yes.
“It was a common theme in my life: thinking that I was going to God for help and getting into a huge mess because of people. I had dreams that I was hanging over a pit by one hand. It was terrifying. I would look up and my hand would disappear into the light.
“My husband and I were both devastated. I left the adulterous relationship. We stayed in church and tried to heal. We were in so much pain we didn’t know what to do.
“I finally surrendered my life to Jesus because I was so hurt. We entered into counseling, and I opened up my emotions. It was the first time my husband heard all the details of what I had gone through.
“A defining moment in my healing process was learning how to listen to God in prayer. I learned to sit and be silent before God and listen for His voice. It was there that I allowed all the memories of what had happened to come to the surface. I spent nine months identifying all the lies that I believed about God and replacing them with the truth of His Word.
“I hadn’t cried over my childhood before, and I sobbed before God. I felt angry and abandoned and left alone in these situations. It was through prayer that I found healing. Without prayer, there is no way to be grounded in the truth about God.
“Without prayer, I didn’t have a compass for my life. I spent most of my life just reacting. There are things that happen in life to this day, and all I can do is pray. I can’t fix it. I can’t change it. But I can pray. We have to pray with a surrendered heart. That’s when we find His healing.
“Early on in my prayer life, I spent time asking God to take the pain away. Now I spend more time meditating on God’s Word and praying for His truth. God is not my Mr. Fix It Band-Aid Dude. God is my Father. He can take all the stuff in my life, and He pours back His unconditional love. Now my prayers are motivated by awe and reverence for who He is.”
The Silent Prayers of the Walking Wounded
When you feel broken inside, how do you pray? If, like Lori, you have been abused, you may find it difficult to come into God’s presence. If you were wounded at your father’s hand, you may have difficulty praying to your Father in heaven.
If you live and breathe on planet earth, you have been scarred by life. You may not have suffered sexual abuse, but at some point in your life your identity has been assaulted. And you may have moments—or years—where you are tempted to blame it on God rather than turn to God.
The Enemy of your soul has a plan for your life. Your adversary sets up bad situations and then blames God for them. Part of the assault is to keep you from turning to God as your only source of hope.
Demonic forces set up recurring situations in your life that make you feel like something is wrong with you. On the outside you may look fine, but every once in a while something touches that wounded place and you sense the deeper emptiness.
It’s in this moment that you have a choice. Will you fill that emptiness with some sort of addiction to medicate your pain? Or will you in your desperation turn to God as your healer?
A Desperate Woman Reflects on Who Jesus Is
She was marked. Everyone knew her as a sinner. Her reputation was ruined. Her identity soiled. Who could she turn to? She carried an alabaster flask 1 (Luke 7:36–50). It carried the precious fragrant oil that was meant for her dowry.
This woman had the audacity to show up uninvited to the garden party of a Pharisee. She felt safe with Jesus. Maybe she had been in the crowd when Jesus cried out, “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).
She was tired. She was weary. She had lost hope. There was no place for her to rest because her soul was tormented. She was hanging on to a rope that didn’t reach the ground. She couldn’t go home. She couldn’t go to the temple. She was an immoral woman, in danger of being stoned to death for her sins. She thought long and hard about who Jesus was before she decided to take a risk.
Jesus was a different sort of man. He didn’t look at women with lust in his eyes. Nor did He look at them with condemnation. His eyes were filled with perceptive hope. It was like He could see a person’s past and future at the same time.
There were many rabbis who taught their male disciples that they were superior to women. A standard prayer was “Blessed are you, Lord, our God, ruler of the universe, who has not created me a woman.”2
But Jesus didn’t treat women like He was superior. He didn’t treat them like they were cursed to forever be inferior. Jesus had a different way of relating to women. He treated them like they were human beings with intelligence and dignity.
As the desperate woman reflected on who Jesus was hope began to stir in her heart. Maybe with Jesus she had a chance for a new beginning. At any rate, it was worth the risk. As she thought about the most precious thing she had, she knew it was the alabaster jar that was her dowry.
Tears came to her eyes as she thought about her lost innocence. No one would marry her now. This alabaster flask was the sweetest thing she owned. She hung on to it as though it represented the pureness of who she was before she fell into sin.
A Desperate Woman Takes Action
She grabbed her alabaster jar and went to the garden where Simon the Pharisee was entertaining Jesus. Others were in the courtyard too, silently listening, cupping their ears to catch the conversation.
She wasn’t able to hear everything they said, but she could capture Simon’s rudeness to Jesus. When Jesus arrived, Simon didn’t even tell a servant to wash Jesus’ feet. He didn’t greet Him with a kiss or anoint His head with oil. It was clear what Simon’s motives were: to exalt himself by neglecting these customary gestures, which amounted to a put-down.
She felt a boldness come on her as the conversation slowed. Silently she came behind Jesus where he lounged on pillows. She couldn’t hold back her emotions any longer. She had seen the woman who was healed of her bleeding and restored to wholeness. In every situation, Jesus met women with mercy, not condemnation.
As she knelt down behind Jesus, He turned and looked at her. Love, forgiveness, mercy, and honor flowed through His gaze. She was truly in God’s presence, and she began to weep. Her tears washed Jesus’ soiled feet. She let down her hair. Yes, she knew that should be reserved for her husband, but truly there was no one who had shown her that much love and gentleness. She took her hair in her hands and she began to dry Jesus’ feet.
Then with love in her eyes and devotion in her heart, the woman broke open the alabaster flask. The fragrant oil flowed forth, a symbol of her love for Jesus. She was willing to sacrifice it all to anoint Him. He was the anointed One.
To Pray Effectively We Need to See Jesus for Who He Is
The woman with the alabaster flask was able to act boldly and transparently because of what she believed about Jesus. She believed that Jesus would receive her. She believed she was safe. She believed He would show both mercy and truth. She understood Jesus’ heart because she had watched His actions.
Our prayer life needs to be undergirded by our biblical knowledge of who Jesus is. If we know that He is safe, we are more likely to run to Him than to an addiction or some other source to comfort ourselves.
To know Jesus intimately, we need to spend time with Him every day. I have grown from reading through the Bible every year, taking a section each day to get to know Him better. If we take time to journal what God is saying to us, we are able to go back and remember His words and apply them anew. Memorizing Scripture makes the Word ours. All of these spiritual disciplines help us grow closer to Jesus.
When we see Jesus for who He is—gentle, loving, merciful, longing to make us whole—we are emboldened to come to Him humbly. We don’t try to hide our brokenness or cower in shame. Instead, we boldly bring our wounds to Him in order to be healed. His truth sets us free.
Don’t Be a Pharisee
This garden party of Simon’s took a definite turn when the immoral woman showed up—but not everyone was able to recognize it. Simon could have seen the beauty of God’s mercy being actively demonstrated through Jesus. Instead, he was blinded by his own judgment.
A Pharisee in the days of Jesus was a set-apart follower of God. They were the ones who were devoted to God’s Word and living it out in their daily lives. But they turned the law into ritualistic rules that made it impossible for real people to have a vibrant relationship with God.
I’m sorry to say that I spent many years of my life as a Pharisee. I had my own check boxes that I marked every day as I read God’s Word and studied it. I got up early in the morning to pray. I fasted. I didn’t think I was a Pharisee. That’s the problem with spiritual pride—it blinds you.
Jesus warned, “Be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy” (Luke 12:1 NIV).
Yeast is something that starts out very small, yet if you give it time and the right conditions it grows. Before you know it, you can be patting yourself on the back for “doing your duty” in prayer. Hypocrisy is living in pretense. It is pretending to have moral standards but missing the main point.
The main point about prayer is relationship, not ritual.
Don’t miss the main point about prayer. Prayer is being real with God. Transparent. At times you may be unglued in your emotions and desperate in your need. At other times you may be quietly grateful.
Prayer is the beauty of being in God’s presence without pretense.
Simon, the Pharisee who had invited Jesus to dinner, did not see the tenderness of the moment. Nor did he sense God’s presence at work bringing healing and devotion. Instead, he became critical, saying to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would know what kind of woman is touching him. She’s a sinner!” (Luke 7:39).
When you get stuck in religiousness, you can think you are completely right about an issue and be totally on the opposite side of Jesus. In your religious pride, you can be like Simon and misjudge a person.
When you misjudge someone, imagine what your prayers are like. The worst thing about the blindness of a Pharisee is how much you can hurt others without intending to. Your intent can be to set things right. But because you are blinded by your own spiritual pride, you end up wounding others with your superior attitude.
Simon, blinded by his own pride, was channeling condemnation. Simon was not only judging the woman in his heart, but wrongly judging Jesus as well. Of course, he didn’t say this out loud to Jesus, but Jesus answered his thoughts:
“Simon,” he said to the Pharisee, “I have something to say to you.”
“Go ahead, Teacher,” Simon replied.
Then Jesus told him this story: “A man loaned money to two people—500 pieces of silver to one and 50 pieces to the other. But neither of them could repay him, so he kindly forgave them both, canceling their debts. Who do you suppose loved him more after that?”
Simon answered, “I suppose the one for whom he canceled the larger debt.”
“That’s right,” Jesus said.
Luke 7:40–43
Notice how prim and proper Simon is acting. He calls Jesus “Teacher,” which in Hebrew is Rabboni–where we get the word rabbi. He was using the term of honor for a Jewish scholar. The word literally means “master” or “great one.”
Then he turned to the woman and said to Simon, “Look at this woman kneeling here. When I entered your home, you didn’t offer me water to wash the dust from my feet, but she has washed them with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You didn’t greet me with a kiss, but from the time I first came in, she has not stopped kissing my feet. You neglected the courtesy of olive oil to anoint my head, but she has anointed my feet with rare perfume.”
Luke 7:44–46
Simon had come to Jesus in pride, and his own sin was publicly revealed. Simon’s rudeness revealed his heart. Jesus went against the social culture of the day to confront religious pride. Jesus didn’t stop there. Jesus was concerned about clarifying the new state of the woman’s redemption publicly. He was confronting others’ views of her as an “immoral” woman. He was restoring her innocence. Jesus said:
“I tell you, her sins—and they are many—have been forgiven, so she has shown me much love. But a person who is forgiven little shows only little love.” Then Jesus said to the woman, “Your sins are forgiven.”
The men at the table said among themselves, “Who is this man, that he goes around forgiving sins?”
And Jesus said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”
Luke 7:47–50
This radical encounter for the woman with the alabaster flask would not have happened unless she was willing to come close to Jesus. She came to Jesus broken, and she left healed and whole. Her sins were forgiven. She had come with faith and found salvation. She left the encounter blessed with peace.
When was the first moment you realized something was broken in your life? I was sitting in health class when I heard the term sexual abuse for the first time. Just hearing it made me cringe. I had words for what happened to me.
I suddenly felt wounded on the inside. Unlike a china doll, which looks fragile on the outside, my broken places were hidden. On the outside I was a talented, straight-A student. I was a tennis and volleyball player, and a cheerleader who always had a smile on her face.
Sitting there in class, I felt dirty . . . ruined . . . soiled. My innocence was ransacked by the exploration of a selfish male. My mind began to think back to the different events that scarred me. I was only eight when I was broken on the inside. The twisted part of sexual abuse is that you sometimes love the person who hurt you. In a perverted way, you want to protect him from harm and exposure.
I was also confused. Was this the “right” way to act? A mixture of anger, dread, and shame swirled around the thoughts in my mind. It was like a hidden black hole was sucking me in.
In my own life, healing from sexual abuse has come gradually as I have brought my brokenness to Jesus to receive His healing. As I have sat with many women and heard their heartbreaking stories, mine would seem slight in comparison. I was never physically penetrated by the abuser, but I was violated. You and I don’t have to compare our scars before coming to Jesus. He receives each one of us just as we are.
I first took my pain to a Christian counselor after I began having a series of dreams in college. These dreams revealed how hurt a little girl’s heart can be when taken advantage of. As I began talking about the specifics of the abuse with the counselor, I realized how angry I was. Something had been stolen from me: my innocence.
At the Christian college I attended, there was a designated spot on campus with quiet rooms to pray. I began to take my Bible and journal there every day. Tears would silently fall down my cheeks as I got in touch with the pain.
I began to write my prayers to God. Then I would silently wait to see if I heard Him say anything back. I was amazed that when I listened, He responded. I filled my journal with healing words from Jesus. I encountered Jesus personally and His truth set me free (John 8:32).
Layer by layer my brokenness was replaced with His wholeness. These were some of the layers that I went through:
- Acknowledging the pain.
- Receiving Jesus’ love and restored innocence.
- Forgiving the one who abused me.
- Setting up boundaries of safety.
- Walking in wholeness.
- Learning intimacy with my husband.
- Raising children in an environment of safety.
Just when I thought the process was complete, I would go through a different stage in my life and find that I needed another layer of healing. I began to think of the process like peeling an onion. Every time the Holy Spirit peeled another layer back there were tears.
At every point of further healing in my life, I encountered Jesus in greater fullness. After being ministered to in prayer by others at a ministry event, I found myself worshiping Jesus with greater freedom. My heart was full of gratitude. I too had been forgiven much. My faith saved me. I could walk in peace and joy.
Healed
You can replace your brokenness with God’s wholeness. Come to Him as you are. In your weakness, He will be your strength. Whatever you have done, or whatever has been done to you, you can bring it to Jesus. He knows. He cares. He heals. He delivers.
Whatever layer you are facing in your healing process, pray this prayer to Jesus.
Jesus, thank you for restoring my stolen innocence. Sin scarred my soul, but your love makes me whole. Sin ransacked the essence of who I am, but you gave me a new identity. Sin stained me, marked me, rejected me, but you have received me. Jesus, in love and adoration I let my tears flow freely. I know you won’t condemn me. You gave your precious blood to redeem me from the sin to cleanse me from my guilt and shame. Jesus, I am free in you. My heart has been made new. Thank you. Amen.