What are the biggest losses you have experienced in your life? I’m not talking about the time you lost your car keys for good (although I definitely feel the pain and cost of that loss), or the time a twenty-dollar bill blew out of your pocket in the parking lot.
What are the things you feel were stolen from you? The love you should have received in your childhood. Or from your spouse. A safe place to grow up. A best friend in elementary school. The job you worked so hard for, then got fired or rejected. A life without sickness, mental illness, a disability. Your innocence.
We have all suffered from losses in some way, whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and I know this because we live in a broken and sinful world where people hurt us and it doesn’t always get fixed.
For years, I wrestled with God and the world and myself. Why did this aspect of my life have to go this way?! What did I do to deserve this? How am I supposed to heal and move forward and be okay when the person who hurt me and stole from me isn’t even sorry? (I didn’t ask these questions until I acknowledged the loss I had been hit with, by the way. Shoving the pain of your loss down will not get you anywhere, even if it makes it easier for a minute).
Once I started asking these questions, I started getting answers.
Lesson 1: God is not afraid of your lack of understanding or frustration towards the circumstances you have been given. He knows his thoughts are higher than ours. He knows we won’t always understand. There are countless places in the Bible where people cry out to and wrestle with God. He doesn’t just want you to come to him when you think you have it all figured out or have a happy mask slapped over your face.
The answers, quite honestly, were not what I wanted to hear. They were things like “They aren’t sorry, but you still need to forgive them. The way that situation happened was not what you deserved, but it’s how it went and it’s time to let go. Healing is your choice, not theirs. They may never walk up to you and say sorry and fix the deep damage. Only I can do that”.
Not very comforting, huh?
Don’t let that scare you off from asking God the hard questions, though. The answers to those questions put me through another season of frustration and upset, and honestly there are days I still ask them and wish it was different.
Lesson 2 (the one I wanted to write this blog for): You have to let go of the hurt and let yourself be empty. Um, what? Being EMPTY is the alternative for hurt? That doesn’t sound any better… I didn’t think so either. But here’s what happened when I emptied myself:
I took time to process my losses and understand that they were not my fault, nor anything I deserved. I thought about Jesus dying for the person who hurt me. Jesus loving the person who hurt me just as much as he loves me. Jesus seeing what happened to the person who hurt me behind closed doors, seeing things I know nothing about, that caused them to hurt me. God only knows I’ve hurt innocent people because of things in my life they had no idea about. It doesn’t make it right, but I’m not above it. I’ve done it just as the person who hurt me has. Please note: this process was not fun. at all.
Okay, if you’re about to click out because of how depressing this is, IT GETS BETTER RIGHT HERE!
Once I was empty, there was room inside all of the places that used to be full of anger, revenge, hurt, and pride. What was once full of ugliness was now empty…it was ready to be refilled with something. There was room, now, for God to make something beautiful that he could not have if I didn’t empty myself of the past hurts.
Genesis says before God created the world, the earth was formless and EMPTY. Empty. What does he do with emptiness? He puts mountains, oceans, stars, sunsets, trees, thunderstorms, wildflower fields, and… HE BREATHES LIFE INTO IT.
And speaking of breathing life into emptiness, when he breathed his own breath into Adam, He said something he had not said about ANY of creation yet: “It is VERY good”. If God will take the emptiness of a rock we call earth and put the most beautiful nature we can imagine into it, what will he do with the emptiness inside of his beloved children? (That’s you, if you didn’t realize).
Once I let go, he refilled me with so much beauty and life in places that I could have sworn were dead and purposeless for the rest of my life. Here’s something to keep in mind: emptying yourself of the losses will not mean they disappear forever and you never remember them…and I’m actually glad. It would be kind of cool if healing and letting go meant God completely erased the memory from our minds, but because he’s God, what he actually does is even better…
He takes the worst, most hurtful, ugliest thing that happened to you, and makes it something beautiful if you give him the empty space to do it. When he breathed life into the places within me I thought were dead, I saw the things that hurt me the most become ways I could help others. Honestly, the things that hurt me the most became my greatest purpose in life. But I HAD to give him the space to make it that way. I had to empty myself and say “God, I cannot do anything with this. I cannot change what happened to me, and I can’t even make anything good come out of it. Only you can, and I give you this empty space inside of me to do so”.
And when I tell you he put things even more beautiful than wildflower fields inside of me where I used to be critically wounded, I mean it. Isaiah 61:3–“He makes beauty from ashes”.
I tell you all of this to encourage you–no matter where you’re at with your losses–to empty yourself and ask God to breathe his life into those places. If you don’t think you’ve taken any losses, you need to pray and ask God to reveal them to you, because whether they are big or small, I promise you there are things that have happened to you he wants to restore. If you know your losses but can’t seem to forgive or let go, bring that to Him too. Like I said before, he can handle your anger and upset. He can’t do anything with it if you don’t bring it to him.
And, once you’re empty, ask him to breathe his life into you in ways you never would have dreamed. I promise you he will. I promise you will be just as mind-blown as I am. I promise he has a plan for every single part of you, even the parts that are not so pretty.
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