Today, my rereading of the Emotional Healthy Spirituality devotional took me to the section on enlarging your soul through grief and loss.
"Not my will Father, but yours." Jesus' prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane
Peter Scazzero says that although most of us want to jump into the life of resurrections and power with Jesus, most of us do not want to follow Him into the Garden.
I've thought often of how I've never known life without the Garden of Gethsemane: the place of suffering. My sister, Asia died when my mom was pregnant with me. Her death, a tragic accident, is no cup any parent would ever want to pick up. My tiny developing body and brain experienced that tragedy within the womb of my mother. In that devastation, God knit me together. I was born into a world latent with loss.
Because I was so small, and my system so underdeveloped to handle the stress of that tragedy, the master physician designed my human body and brain with the ability to cope - to survive. Now, in adulthood I am learning how those coping skills helped me then but do not necessarily help me now.
Today, the therapeutic love of Jesus is what I most need. Jesus' love is powerful medicine. When it didn't feel like anything else I could do would work, He was there to hold me in my pain. Old pain. Pain I'd never lived without. Pain woven into my being.
This life will be filled with losses. We can get by with coping strategies that once helped us survive, or we can reach out to touch the hem of Jesus' garment. And like the woman who bled for years and years and who with reckless abandon reached for Jesus, we can be healed. O Jesus, I surrender myself to you. Take care of everything.
Today is Asia's birthday. She would be 43. Happy birthday to my sister in heaven. She is covered by the medicinal, therapeutic love of Jesus; she is fully healed. She sits at the table with the only one who can heal all of our wounds - Jesus.
