Vine Stories – Prayer and Inner Healing
I came from a family where my parents are both really hurt themselves so I grew up with a lot of wounding from my family of origin. I’ve been seeking inner healing and peace since I was young. It first started as a pursuit to get rid of the pain. When I was a teenager, I tried channelling the pain to sports; I tried overcoming the pain with will power and reasoning; I tried to tell myself, “I don’t care”, in order to cut off the pain; and I tried listening to music that resonates with the pain so that I felt that someone understands. When prayer became part of my life, I started asking God to help me out.
Not knowing the details behind healing and pain when I was younger, one prayer I naturally said would involve me asking God for things that I want because getting things I wanted would make me happy and forget about my pain. For example, I would ask God to help me to do well in sports, studies, and career. Behind this request was the deep scar from my parents’ rejection. Without knowing it, I was subconsciously thinking if I do well, people would appreciate me instead of rejecting me. This is just one type of prayer. There are many other types of prayer I came up with as time progressed. Sometimes, things went in my favour and sometimes they didn’t. Through this prayer journey, I learned about some ways that inner healing works in my life.
“At first, I prayed for worldly success that will prevent the triggering of this pain, because success tends to attract appreciation rather than rejection.”
I’ll share some of the work God did to help me with deep scars concerning the pain of rejection from my parents. At first, I prayed for worldly success that will prevent the triggering of this pain, because success tends to attract appreciation rather than rejection. Later, I started to realise this isn’t really the solution because even with many past successes, I got very stressed out about failure and that stress was often just as difficult as the pain of rejection itself. Then I started pursuing knowledge to deal with the pain and I would pray to God to fix my pain in the way that I thought would work. When things didn’t really work out based on my expectation, my prayers got simpler, I started praying for God to take away the pain. At times, the pain and fear of rejection would be so overwhelming that I would even ask God to take away my life so I wouldn’t live in the pain and the struggles. Fortunately, this prayer is not in line with God’s will!
“The deep work that God has been doing in me usually involves repeated revelations to help me learn the crucial truth about my pain.”
God’s work of healing for me worked in a way I didn’t expect. It’s also an ongoing process. Many little things happened and I don’t recall a particular miracle moment in my life in which healing took place in a dramatic way so that a type of pain disappeared forever. The deep work that God has been doing in me usually involves repeated revelations to help me learn the crucial truth about my pain. This pain is driven by the lie that I need to do everything in the right way to gain acceptance and avoid rejection. One such revelation involved a dream. In the dream, I tried to wash my clothes clean in a toilet bowl. A toilet bowl is inherently not clean so regardless of how hard I try, I cannot make my clothes clean. When I woke up from this disturbing dream, I was reminded how Scripture tells us that since we are corrupted in the flesh, on our own, even our best efforts won’t yield the righteousness that God is looking for. The blood of Jesus, however, can give us clean white robes to wear. Over my pain of rejection, among other things, God answered my prayers by continuously giving me revelations like this to uproot the cause of my pain. It took me a long while to notice how God has been trying to help me in this way. For the longest time, as I asked for something specific and didn’t get what I prayed for and the pain remains, I was discouraged. In hindsight though, I realised that God has been answering my prayers all along, just that since I was looking for a specific way to get rid of my pain, I didn’t notice God’s answer, and God’s answer deals with the root cause of my pain.
“God knew what I need much better than me and He gave me the friends, revelations, and circumstances necessary to help me stay free.”
Talking to God through prayer has been the constant element in this inner healing journey. I prayed over different ways to receive healing though in hindsight, God knew what I need much better than me and He gave me the friends, revelations, and circumstances necessary to help me stay free. My prayer journey has helped me understand myself and God a lot more. This deepening understanding continues to strengthen my relationship with God and help me on my journey of inner healing. I’m very thankful to God and the Spirit of Truth in my prayer life and inner healing journey.
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