Once I was lame...

My friend Rick had his bus diesel engine run away for a while yesterday. They can blow up, and he sounded pretty scared for awhile.

FEAR. What an emotion. It can keep us alive from making stupid decisions, but it can be manufactured from past experiences that we either brought on ourselves or were thrust into.

I tried to remember a time when I was truly in fear. I could only remember being lost in a shopping mall as a kid (3 or 4), and the fear of looking around and not finding my parent. That is a feeling you don't ever forget. Funny but I can still visualize it. Then I remembered being lost in the woods (while fishing) a few times and how Fear brings Panic. It was the same feeling as the shopping mall.

When we say we have been born again. That we have a renewed mind and an enlightened spirit. When we say "all things are new" and "He set me free", does that clean up our past?

Well I found this picture the other day from 1960. It was the day I was taken out of 6 months of isolation in a hospital, and allowed to go home and spend my life in a wheel chair. I remember that day of feeling "set free". Forget a future life in a chair, I was just happy to be able to go outside, let alone go home and see my family. Well a miraculous healing 4 years later would set me free from the wheelchair for life, but I wonder at times what kind of residue those years left on my subconscious thoughts and the way I respond to life.

Our family helped raise upwards of 100 foster children over our lifetime, and I do know that i observed kid after kid with mental, physical and sexual abuse. My history pales in comparison to any of those kids who were broken and abused, and I often see their faces and think of how any of them could live a normal and healthy life or marriage with their pasts. I wonder how many entered marriages with the mountain of hidden problems unknown to their spouses.

Jesus is the only solution for mans eternal salvation. He is the only one who can heal the broken heart, mend the torn and tattered fabrics of our souls. And yet with all that God promises us, I'm broken hearted so often to see believer after believer growing older while carrying heavy baggage for their entire adult lives around on their souls. Never finding release. Born again, Spirit filled and trying their best to "not go to their pasts" but ending up returning to their past sins, addictions or letting them eat and destroy their very joy. Are you there. Still broken, Can't forgive, Can't forget?

Well you have to, if you want to move on.

Like the main character in the new book "The Shack", you come to a place where you have to forgive or you will slowly die from the inside out.

FORGIVENESS is the first step to HEALING.

Scars? Oh yea, they are there. Healing doesn't eliminate scars. Scars are a good thing.

I wrote a song years ago about a father who tells his son about a scar on his leg, and that scars are in our lives to remind us of what we've come through and do not want to repeat again.

Quiet prayer, concentrated prayer, fasting and seeking Gods face to "face" our pasts and let them go is the first step into the inner healing so many of us need. And it's an ongoing process. I believe God helps us deal with our issues a bit at a time so we don't completely freak out.

Lord today bring to mind just one of my unhealed wounds that I might take it to you finally and let it go to, begin that road to healing. Help me to be sensitive to not reproduce my faults into the lives of those I love and look after. Thy Kingom come, Thy will be done....