Sometimes you have to get physically broken down to realize what the Lord is showing you, and I’ve experienced this first hand this past month.
The last week in October, only a month into the race, I tore my MCL in my right elbow serving a volleyball. I have been in a cast for almost a month and I still have 3 weeks to go of wearing a sling. This injury brought a lot of tears, a lot of inconvenient situations, and a lot of physical pain. But what it has brought the most of is spiritual pain, things I had no clue I even needed to work on.
As soon as my injury happened I was covered in prayer. My team and hosts were praying healing over my elbow every chance they got. A week after I got hurt we went to debrief, which means my whole squad was together, and there I was covered in even more prayer. We were asking the Lord to heal my elbow, to take away the pain, to fix what had been broken. Every time someone would pray over me, they would look at me when they were done, like they were waiting for my elbow to be better. And every time I would look back at them with an elbow that was still hurting. Even now as I write this there is a small ache.
I wasn’t doubting God’s ability to heal. But I couldn’t help but question why things were the way they were,
It’s the first month of the race.
I’m stuck like this for six+ weeks.
I can’t write, how am I supposed to process?
How am I supposed to pray?
How can I do anything?
WHY can’t I be healed?
I have healing to do for you through the brokenness.
I heard it plain as day. That sentence was so clear when it came into my mind, and there was no doubt on who was speaking it over me. But how was He going to use this and why did he choose to show me these things through a hurt arm? As I pressed into prayer and surrendered myself to the words I heard the Father speak to me, He started revealing areas of my life that I didn’t even know were holding me back from relentlessly pursuing Him.
I was shown how I rely so much on what I know. I feed off of information and I will learn all that I can about a subject or topic that grabs my interest. This fed into the way that I studied scripture. I take a book and dissect it, chapter by chapter, verse by verse. I want to know the history, the context, what happened before and after, and the significance of every single word. My journal is filled with color coded notes of history and context of verses. There’s nothing wrong with diving in to scripture with a thirst to know and learn His word. But my desire was to obtain knowledge, not to meditate and hear His voice.
This revelation didn’t even come until my ability to write out every fact I read was taken from me. I couldn’t move my wrist because I was in a full arm cast and I had no way of studying the Bible like I normally did. I reacted to this in anger, if I couldn’t write then I couldn’t spend time with God, so I just stopped. Empty. That is how I felt. I wasn’t connecting, I wasn’t pressing in.
My desire to pursue vanished the moment something earthly was taken from me.
Paper and pen aren’t eternal; the Lord’s presence is. There isn’t only one way to spend time with God, we are always with Him. He was revealing to me how our whole relationship was starting to become dependent on something that so easily could disappear. Over and over again He was asking me to walk with Him, He was pursuing me telling me He was holding my hand and all I had to do was look at Him. During debrief we did a prayer activity and a letter from the Lord was written to me by a friend, and the sentence that stuck out the most was, “There is no such thing as a long distance relationship with Me, your hand is always in mine.”
He called my name and He showed me how He is here even when earthly things break. When I think I can’t connect with Him, all I have to do is look down at my hand and see that He is holding it tight. We are always together.
He broke me. He challenged me. And through that, He healed me.
