Healing From Church Hurt

Aug 22

In my life, I can admit that in certain seasons I have been both the picker and the picked-on. Goodness, I had no clue I was even being so critical, but God took notice. Though it makes me cringe to think about now, I thought I was better than the people at that new church I found myself in after my last one dumped me. I thought they were boring and religious and long-winded. Looking back now, I can see clearly what the injured person I was at the time could not – that these people were kind, and passionate, and self-less. They were always ready to listen and learn, while I thought I should be teaching them. They were always trying to think of new ways to help the community, while I was so devastatingly preoccupied with myself. I honestly do not think I was a horrible person, though. I was a hurting person. And I truly do not believe there are as many “horrible” people in the world as we think there are, just hurting people. A leader in the church who I deeply admired had picked me apart, and now I was picking away at everyone and everything around me, trying with all of my might to replace that aching desire to belong somewhere and feel purposeful once again. I picked away at those who had what I lost. Pick. Pick. Pick. Pick.

And when I wasn’t mentally assassinating those around me, I was drowning out the sorrow with things I could control – entertainment, busyness, appearing important – attempting to fly like that eagle from Isaiah (40:31) with homemade, flimsy wings of paper and glue. And it wasn’t working out for me one bit, so instead, I threw stones at those soaring overhead.

And this, my friend, brings me to my point – the BIG point God unveiled – the root of church-hurt in all its gory glory: church hurt is caused by hurting people who really have no idea they are hurting people. In my pain, I had no idea that I was mimicking what had been done to me. I couldn’t see it, but I was shrouded in defense mechanisms that made it impossible for others to get to know me, let alone be liked, which is what I yearned for most. What I had wasn’t a “church” problem, but a “people” problem, and I was unloading the hurt that someone else caused right onto kind people who were trying to welcome me in. And in the years since all of this happened, in my prayer time with God, I have often wondered if the pastor’s wife lashed out at me from some wounds of her own.

After the divorce from my childhood church, audaciously zipping through the air on the adventure of a lifetime, after a stressful year of plugging the dam with a host of haphazard things and trying to fly with busted wings – the Lord said something that helped me to stop griping and picking and avoiding and just address the root of my discontent already.

I was at a Monday night prayer meeting in the sanctuary when God interrupted one of my mean little thoughts with a sentence that shut me right up. Those gathered had begun to pray out loud, and I thought the prayer meeting should be handled differently. They were praying, and I was judging them, probably because my own faith was so damaged. I hated that they so easily had what I was fighting for. I had just begun to mentally criticize them for “showing off” with their lengthy prayers when I was interrupted by a baby’s cry.

My eyes opened immediately. There’s a baby here tonight? We’re the only ones in the whole church right now, and no one brings their children with them to prayer. What is going… I didn’t even get to finish my thought, because the Lord cupped my heart in His hands and softly but sternly said to me, “The critical spirit is never mature. It is always a baby, a defiant little child who demands its own way. Say what you really feel. You’re avoiding the real issue. Stop stomping around throwing tantrums and ask Me for what you need.”

I recall thinking to myself, “Wow… God has a sassy side.” Now I know better. God is a Good Father, and good fathers are honest.

As soon as I heard this, I felt like the child I’d been behaving like. However, there was hope in that reprimand, and clarity through the repentance that followed. I had been roaming around trying to deal with all the changes I’d gone through, and this finally gave me a practical idea of what I could do – inviting me to cease in my needless roaming and come, just come to Him, because He not only knew the way through it… but He was the way through it.

God told me to just ask Him already, to say how I really felt. He wanted me to stop trying to figure out if He still heard me, and pray like I knew He did. I had been praying passively, desperately, full of nothing but complaining and without any confidence in Him at all. Now, God was challenging me and calling me out of my pretentiousness and complacency and bitterness, saying, “Stop whining, and pray like you mean it!”

Those who gathered around me for the prayer meeting had not been the ones who were praying wrong. I was. I was the one trying to pretend holy. I had been avoiding church, avoiding prayer because I was afraid of a moment like this one, where God would tell me a tough truth that stung. When that moment came and He spoke over me whether I like it or not, I found that His honesty didn’t condemn me, but surprisingly, it brought me clarity.

In that moment, I closed my eyes, the rabid hounds of my anxiety and anger now lay whimpering at the sound of my Sovereign Papa’s voice. I vividly remember whispering back to the Lord, “I just want to feel comfortable and loved again. Please God, that’s all I want. I’m tired of feeling sad and frightened and angry all the time. Oh God, this is not who I want to be! This is not how I want to spend my life! But I don’t know what to do or how to stop.”

Goodness gracious, did God meet with me right then and there, and with abundantly more compassion and kindness than I deserved or expected! Then, He led me back to this encouraging truth: “Therefore, strengthen your tired hands and weakened knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be dislocated, but healed instead. (Hebrews 12:12-13 CSB)”

I needed God to hold me together. I needed Him to fill my broken heart, my hollow life and critical outlook, with Himself. The Good News was – not only could the Lord do this, He wanted to. However, I would have to stop feeling sorry for myself, release my load of hurts, and get out of the way.

That night, while still in the same prayer meeting I had been criticizing only moments earlier, the Lord wrapped me in a bear hug and gave me a choice. I felt Him speak into my spirit, “Okay, you feel angry. You feel abandoned. But Kelly, if this is not who you want to be, or how you want to feel, you can get up. You can trust Me to use it for your good. The real question is: how do you want to spend your one and only earthly life?”

Though I would not want to go back to that lonely season for anything in the world, or experience heartache like that ever again, I can appreciate the miracle in the lesson it taught me now. For months and months, I had been clinging to the one thing I knew was true, to the one thing I still had left –the call on my life to preach the Word of God. There, in that sanctuary the Lord showed me there’s something that is even more important than pursuing my call to preach, which is: letting the Word preach to me. That’s what the scriptures were there for, after all – lonely, confusing seasons like the one I just described. When every bit of my being spurned the idea of forgiving and wanted to stay angry forever, the Word of God told me to forgive, and the Author of the Word beckoned me to come to Him, to be upfront with Him and ask for help.

In the sanctuary that day, I had to face the truth of my heart’s dilemma: if I couldn’t let God’s Word preach to me, if I couldn’t see beyond my own feelings and listen to what He had to say, then I had no right to preach from the Bible at all.

In the book of Hebrews, it says, “So let us come boldly to the throne of our gracious God. There we will receive his mercy, and we will find grace to help us when we need it most. (Hebrews 4:16 NLT)”

So, I realize that I’m laying out some very unflattering details of my life right now, and honestly, I don’t care one bit. These words are for anyone who is angry with God’s church, with one of His beloved, perhaps someone from your family, or someone you used to know. This is for anyone who has a problem with someone. This is for those of you who have been rejected and overlooked and underestimated and pushed aside and embarrassed within the assembly of God’s chosen by God’s chosen. This is for those of you who were betrayed and abused and blindsided and wounded by someone else’s wounds. While that was wrong and definitely stung, now I lovingly urge you to handle those wrongs in the rightway. Let God take a look at the gashes in your heart, allow Him to take hold of them completely, and receive from Him the strength and grace you need to forgive. I know that when you’re stuck in the midst of your pain, forgiving feels wrong – especially when those who hurt you were supposed to be the ones helping you, but this is absolutely what God wants you to do, and it is the only way you can ever truly move on.

Sweet friend of mine, let’s let the Word preach to us right now.

In the whole of the New Testament, there is only one stipulation Jesus gives us when it comes to this new covenant sealed by His blood, one thing we must do to remain in His grace, and this is to become givers of His grace. There is one thing we have to do in order to stay forgiven – forgive others. That’s it.

“For if you forgive others their trespasses [their reckless and willful sins], your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others [nurturing your hurt and anger with the result that it interferes with your relationship with God], then your Father will not forgive your trespasses.”
- Matthew 6:14-15 AMP

“Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Give, and it will be given to you; a good measure—pressed down, shaken together, and running over—will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you.”
– Luke 6:37-38 CSB

These verses may sting when we read them, especially once devastation, distressed feelings, betrayal, and offense get involved, but these compelling principles do us far more good than we realize. Recently, the Lord woke me up with a truth that is in many ways still convicting my heart: I can know every verse in the Bible that mentions forgiveness, even be able to quote them all word for word, line by line, but I can never be sure I am actively living them out until I practice them when I don’t want to, and when it may even be easier not to.

The year my mother died from cancer taught me many things – the most valuable of these lessons was the importance of living light. I know we have already talked about this subject in chapter one, but I would love to go even deeper into this truth now.

You see friend, I thought I knew what lonely was when my father abused me, when I fled my mother’s house, and when my childhood church kicked me out. I thought I had been to the belly of disappointment, rejection, and disillusionment in the season I just shared with you, but the way losing my mother affected my relationships showed me just how deep and heavy these emotional hurts can be.

My entire family felt the sharp dagger of her death and at once we tried to lean on each other, but we were all trudging through grief and struggling to breathe, so tempers flared instead. My friends didn’t know what to say, and many of them said a lot of the wrong things, or dropped from my life completely. Before I knew it, I was lugging around an armload of anger on top of the grief I already had. It became all too easy to distrust the church again, my family, my friends. The way people reacted as I processed my loss caused me to close myself up completely. Stress on top of stress on top of stress piled on.

Finally, I had enough. One day as I sat at my kitchen table and prayerfully considered my life, the weight of it all set in and along with it, brought panic. No matter who I was around, no matter where I went or what I tried to do, I just never felt an ounce of peace anymore. I didn’t see anyone as trustworthy. Nothing and no one seemed sturdy enough to lean on. I couldn’t breathe. I had to get away, even just for a little while.

“I’ll never forget the trouble, the utter lost-ness, the taste of ashes, the poison I’ve swallowed. I remember it all—oh, how well I remember— the feeling of hitting the bottom. But there’s one other thing I remember, and remembering, I keep a grip on hope: God’s loyal love couldn’t have run out, his merciful love couldn’t have dried up. They’re created new every morning. How great is your faithfulness!
I’m sticking with God (I say it over and over). He’s all I’ve got left. God proves to be good to the man who passionately waits, to the woman who diligently seeks. It’s a good thing to quietly hope, quietly hope for help from God. It’s a good thing when you’re young to stick it out through the hard times. When life is heavy and hard to take, go off by yourself. Enter the silence. Bow in prayer. Don’t ask questions: Wait for hope to appear.
Don’t run from trouble. Take it full-face. The ‘worst’ is never the worst.”
- Lamentations 3:19-30 MSG

Almost as if God were calling me somewhere faraway, I climbed into my car and drove to a park I hadn’t visited in years. It was early spring, which in Georgia means the flowers have begun to bloom but the damp winter weather lingers until March or April. On that February day, the icy rain seemed to kiss my face as I began walking the slick, three-mile trail which circles the lake and winds throughout the surrounding woodland area. Because it was a weekday and the weather was dreary, no one else was there. So, though I was actually praying and walking and processing my thoughts out in the open, it felt like a private, safe place where I could just talk with the Father and listen for what He might want to say to me. For a while, we just walked together as I sang along to worship music softly drifting through my ear buds. As I sang, something began to shift in me – as though my spirit had forgotten what rejoicing felt like – suddenly a gentle sense of peace rolled in with the breeze. I gazed out through the rain and surrounding trees towards the lake that lay so still, glistening, almost smiling at me as it reflected a bit of sunlight in spite of the storm. Something inside of me took a deep breath and my jaw, which is often where all of my tension centers, relaxed.

The hills weren’t any less steep than I remembered them from my childhood, though I somehow thought they would be. My legs were longer now, my frame twice as tall, but even still, some of those slopes left me sweaty and out of breath. On one of the largest hills, as the rain continued to sprinkle down in bigger and bigger drops and my knees were starting to feel the strain of the cold air and the incline, the Lord spoke clear as day, “The stormy, uphill seasons in your life can work wonders if you let them. They require you to sling off what’s heavy before you can advance. Kelly, if you want to make it up this slope and onto the other side, you have to give Me your baggage first.”

As soon as the Father said this, I could almost see it play out like a movie in front of me. There I was, climbing up a monumental mound of grief, the biggest one I had ever seen, trying to lug along offense after offense and picking up even more along the way, no wonder I felt like I weighed a thousand pounds and couldn’t breathe! No wonder I kept emotionally slipping backwards, right into the mud once more!

I needed to lighten my load!

Stunned, stupefied, but mostly grateful, I responded to the Father out loud, “Oh, okay. Lord, show me what I need to let go of so I can breathe again.”

Goodness gracious, it turns out that I was carrying everything, everything - what people had said to me, what they didn’t say but I wished they had, my mother’s daunting medical history, her death and memories of our sometimes very strained relationship because of what my father had done, the pain my family was going through, how my siblings had responded because of that pain, discouragement from still trying to prove myself to my church family, the hard-to-decipher and even-harder-to-control opinions of others, doors which had been slammed in my face and other doors that seemed unfairly bolted shut – everything, just everything. My wings of paper and glue couldn’t lift me anymore. I found myself before the Lord again, lifting up an honest, vulnerable prayer, again – and realized in that moment just how long it had been since the last time I was this surrendered, this open, this willing.

“Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life.I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.’”
- Matthew 11:28-30 MSG

As I hiked up hills and eased down them through the park that day, dropping those burdens one by one at the side of the trail for my Savior to pick up, I remembered the question God had asked me all those years ago: “How do you want to spend your one and only earthly life?”

I began to think of all the living I had been able to do since that clarifying moment in the sanctuary surrounded by people I have since come to greatly admire. That night I had gotten up, feeling light as a feather and took off running to love everyone I could. I had been shown grace, and I wanted to give it. I had been forgiven of my staunch self-righteousness, my pride, and unwillingness to heal and let things go – and through that forgiveness had been able to let my former mentors off the hook.

And then before I knew it, something else happened. Cancer happened. Loss happened. Hurt feelings happened. I felt I was being treated unfairly once again, and again, I was gripping tightly to brier-like offenses that daily sliced me up. Those angry dogs came back for round three. That eagle and his beautiful wings soared off without me. All of those fluffy metaphors I have used weren’t so fluffy at the time; they growled and hissed like nightmare ghouls. But then God called me away, again, woke me up, again. Though I was grateful to have this new encounter with the Lord as I walked and soaked in His love along with the chilly, spring rain, I couldn’t help but notice how up and down, up and down, good and not good, whole and then broken and then whole and then broken, my life had been until that moment. Along with my request to take my burdens once more, I also asked God to show me how to live less turbulently.

I wanted to know how I could forgive quicker and avoid the rage-filled seasons that follow disagreements altogether. I wanted to know how to skip the drama, shorten the time spent in brokenness, and remain in the fold of God’s family even when I felt rejected and misunderstood. Because I could see now that the pain was going to happen no matter what, but the starting over, the uprooting and eventual replanting, the closing down completely and then reopening of my heart… all of that could be avoided.

“Give all your worries and cares to God, for He cares about you.”
-1 Peter 5:7 NLT

“As for us, we have all of these great witnesses who encircle us like clouds. So we must let go of every wound that has pierced us, and the sin we so easily fall into. Then we will be able to run life’s marathon race [or “obstacle course”] with passion and determination, for the path has been already marked out before us.”
- Hebrews 12:1 The Passion Translation

I so often find myself nodding in agreement when I read this, “So we must let go of every wound that has pierced us, and the sin we so easily fall into…”

“So we must let go…”

God wants to help us get into a rhythm of giving Him our heavy things before they get too heavy. Because once those heavy things settle in, down we go… right into the mud, into sins of bitterness, un-forgiveness, and hatred. This verse is key, not just in this passage, but in every single difficult rainy, hilly season we face, “So we must let go of every wound that has pierced us.”

“…Then we will be able to run life’s marathon race [or “obstacle course”] with passion and determination, for the path has already been marked out before us.”
– Hebrews 12:1 TPT (emphasis added)

That day in the park, as I walked and handed over burdens, dropped anger to the wayside, and asked God to grant me both serenity and stability, He showed me something else. Staying light is key, and staying light… depends on me.