More than all we ask
Than all we seek
All our hopes and dreams
YOU ARE IMMEASURABLY MORE
There’s nothing greater than your love, You are more than we can imagine!
There’s nothing sweeter on this earth, You are more than we can imagine.
OUR HEARTS RESPOND to who You are, it’s you O Lord that we adore
You are more.
You are more.
You are more than we can imagine.
Response. It’s something so beautifully engraved inside of each one of us. But somewhere along the way, hurt can cause us to suppress our ability to respond. Fear can completely paralyze us from the response we once knew and followed so naturally as babies.
Here in Haiti, I’m filled with love for people who express Christ better than I ever could myself. People who don’t seem to suffer from the same fear-driven-independence that we are prone to in America.
Which is why I’ve come to see that healing is not at all what I thought it was. As my team approached a man who had a severe tooth infection, I noticed that my first reaction was to pray, heal him, hug him, and leave. His cheek protruded with a lump bigger than the size of a softball. I watched how content this man was to just sit on his mat- not able to speak, eat, work, or do hardly anything because of the pain. And how content my team was to just sit with him. We prayed over him, but God began showing me again how healing looks so much different to Him than it does to me. We just sat there with him. We sang over him. And we let God be the voice to speak into His heart, not us.
As we made our way back to the bus, a woman caught my eye. But it wasn’t her physical appearance that caught my attention, it was the spirit I could see in her.
I grabbed our translator and headed after her, but she seemed resistant to us.
She kept walking in another direction and wouldn’t make eye contact. I reached out for her but she walked on, dragging her left leg as she went.
I felt God telling me:
“Don’t give up on her, Kerry! Pursue her like I pursued you. I have things to tell and show her!”
I walked up to her and put my hand on her left arm that lay limp at her side, and gave it a squeeze as she stopped and looked at me.
Her name was Marioline, and she was 36 years old. Her entire left side has been paralyzed for the past 2 years. She said she could feel when I touched her, but she was completely unable to move any part of the left side of her body by herself. As we talked, her wandering eyes told me that there was so much more going on in her heart than what we saw in her body.
Though she could feel, she had become numb to responsiveness.
Her body, yes. But also her heart.
Being numb happens either through anesthesia- something injected in your body to numb pain, or through losing feeling temporarily by sitting on something for too long. So which one had Marioline experienced? Was it an injection of lies from the world around her that had numbed her? Or had she sat on some hurt in her life for so long that it caused her to be numb in those areas?
She agreed to let me pray for her, though I didn’t know exactly what to pray for over her.
As I began praying, God began speaking. I had not planned some beautiful prayer, but God just kept speaking truth to His daughter through me and revealing Mariolines heart to me! This daughter of the king has been missing out on full life by only being half-alive. Only allowing half of herself to respond to what she’s feeling.
Isn’t this how we all can be sometimes? Able to feel, but paralyzed too much to respond. Our hearts have responsive dystrophy that resembles muscle dystrophy. When you don’t use your muscles, they become weak. And when you don’t respond to what you feel, we grow numb and apathetic. God made us to feel SO THAT we will respond! He has wired us to FEEL what’s on His heart, and to be moved to action by it.
As I finished praying and began to release her numb hand, her fingers curled and gripped my hand hard like we were about to play a game of thumb war!
Yes, I freaked out!
She had no idea what her hand had done, but I was like “look!” as I held up our hands held tight together to where she could see them.
God reminded me of when I saw this same tendency in myself- to cling to people when they try and pull away, and I was filled with even more compassion for her.
God made us to respond just like a baby- when you put a finger on the palm of their hand, Their hand closes around it. Their reaction to hold is natural and God given! I shared with her that even when she doesn’t physically feel or when she is incapable of responding to the things happening to her, her heart is hard-wired to react. I told her that God wanted to cast away her paralyzing fear that has been robbing her of life! That he wanted to set her free to feel everything, and allow herself to respond naturally- even if that meant appearing weak, hurting, or being angry.
As we walked away to get on the bus and head back to the compound from the village, I felt my hand start to tingle. Exactly where my tattoo is! The letters of the word “eucharisto” engraved on my palm began to tingle as I remembered my palm pressing against her numb hand when we prayed. It was so strange! Then God told me the answer to my question of what caused this paralyzation in her life spiritually: she had sat on so many things for so long that she had been robbed of her joyous freedom. That she, in that moment while we prayed, began to be reawakened by The Lord. Just like when you pull your leg out from sitting on it and begin getting feeling back, it tingles.
She was made to be filled with overflowing, thankful, joy- eucharisto. And as I saw God begin that work in her, it was more than just my hand that felt for her. My whole body was filled with chill bumps in the hot Haitian air.
This woman is me.
It’s like for the longest time, I’ve known that I was hurt. And past that, I’ve known that I’ve sat on these hurts instead of dealing with them. I’ve realized I would rather let those areas of my heart lay limp than have to use them again, because using them again means they may get hurt again. I can even feel again- a big step I thought. But much like Marioline, I still haven’t had the courage to respond to what I feel again. Just like taking your leg out from sitting on it and having it painfully tingle as life flows back into it, God has taken some of those hurt areas of my heart out and allowed them to tingle with life again. But if you know what feeling I’m talking about, it hurts pretty bad at first. And the frustrating thing is that you can’t do anything about that. It has to just hurt through gaining feeling again. No one can help, you can’t speed up to process, and it’s painful. But knowing that it is all taking place for the sake of FULL life again in that limb, in those areas of my life, makes it completely worth it.
This is God beckoning us to awaken and feel.
And when we are open to that, the result will be a response.
I’ve seen response in another big way this month- infection. So a few weeks ago in the Dominican Republic, I got to go horse back riding. Like galloping down the beach for an hour, wearing shorts and no shoes! Which was awesome and such a gift for our day off, but resulted in giant sores on the inside of my legs. I knew it was happening at the time, but it was so much fun and totally worth it so I kept riding. As the weeks passed by, I thought that the sores were healing as they developed a white film covering over the top, but the night after getting to Haiti, I looked at my calf muscles to see that the white sores had turned greenish and slimy. Sorry… It’s gross I know. They took me to the nurse here, Chris, and he told me it was definitely infected. So he began the process of scraping off all of the surface infection of my skin, and it hurt pretty badly. He cleaned it off, cleaned it out, and covered it so it could begin healing the right way.
As soon as I noticed the look on Chris’ face when he saw my infected skin, I realized God was showing me something through this. It was like it finally hit me that my small efforts to cover my wounds and keep them clean had been in vain. That what I thought was healing up on its own, definitely wasn’t. It was actually just becoming more infected! This is exactly how we handle wounds in our hearts. Even when we know something is hurting us at the moment, we think it’s worth it and do it anyway. Then wounds come and we try and just keep moving along, assuming they will just heal on their own.
We don’t like to think about the pain involved, so it’s easier to just keep moving on without treating it properly. Then the whole time, it’s just becoming more and more infected- it’s actually hurting us more! Then God comes in and starts scraping off the outer layers of infection from what we perceived as healing. He removes our facade of healing, cleaning it out and sending us back to square one of the healing process so that the wounds can heal the right way. Though it’s extremely painful and seemingly unnecessary, when I see how bad it was and when I see now a completely healed leg, I remember that letting God heal me the right way is absolutely worth the pain from him scraping away.
Our bodies want to heal, it is their natural response!
Our hearts want to be healed, it is their natural response!
Our hearts respond to who you are.
I’m letting go of all I know.
Because more than all I know, God is more than we can imagine.
