“Cut off your hair and cast it away; raise a lamentation on the bare heights…” Jeremiah 7:29
Even though I’ve been living in my hometown for a year now, I still run into people at the store or at HS football games who are surprised about my hair. Haha. I tell everyone the same thing: I cut it all off because I wanted a new style… the pixie cut fits my personality… it was damaged from too many perms. All are true. But they aren’t the main reason. The only person who caught on, was a Chinese teacher I became good friends with while teaching in China. Over lunch, she asked me, “Kate-tlllln, what caused you so much grief that you cut off all your hair?”
During a year of college, I experienced a lot of loss and trauma in my life. No matter how much I prayed and strived to do what was right, I ended up watching everything I deeply loved fall through my hands. The pain was more than I could bear. It changed me. And I knew I would never be the same person after that, so I cut off the long curly hair that I loved too.
I had no time to grieve though, because I had too many responsibilities and people counting on me. I kept my emotions turned off for months. It wasn’t until I graduated and returned home a year ago, sitting on my bed in complete silence for the first time, that I began to hear the roar of my pain. Honestly, I didn’t know it was there, or maybe I did, but was afraid of facing it. So I called together some ladies from my church to meet and pray over me for freedom and healing. The pain I felt was real but it was increasingly devastated by Satan’s lies. Once God’s truth was clearly presented to me in each situation, I felt the throbbing sadness and despair leave my body. I felt freedom from those ties. I felt filled to overflowing with God’s love for me, His peace, and tangible hope! Still, after that it was war fighting off Satan’s lies and bad memories that would resurface, so I learned to use God’s instructions in Scripture to fight backsliding:
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Hebrews 4:12--Replace lies and bad memories with the truth of God’s word, praise, and thankfulness. -
Romans 12:21--Build a fence with a gate inside rather than impenetrable walls, so I can keep letting the bad out and the good in. -
Romans 8:28--Trust that God is good, He is fighting my battles for me, and He will work things out for the best in the end. -
2 Corinthians 1:3-4--Believe God has purpose through my pain to transform me, so that I can testify to others of His faithfulness through it and once the trial has passed. -
2 Corinthians 12:9--Know the measure of His love for me is not based on my circumstances but on how much of Himself He gives to me—pain doesn’t mean punishment. -
Ephesians 6:12--Satan is the real enemy, not other people.
Grieving is human, but lamenting is Christian. While I grieved over what I’d lost, I also lamented the fall of humanity and this world. Imagine the Garden of Eden in Genesis. We’re supposed to experience intimacy with God, unity and love toward each other, and use our spiritual gifts to serve. But Satan interferes. He tried to separate us from our former glory and our loving Creator. Yet God sent His son Jesus, to reconcile us to Him. Because God the Father wants His children back! Death, in its many forms, reminds us this isn’t Heaven. It allows us to experience the entire Gospel again—our need for Christ, God’s rescuing love, and suffering fuels us with an urgency to pray for Jesus to come back for us.
As a result of these experiences, I became really passionate about helping other people experience healing and freedom. So I took a certification worth of Christian Counseling courses over the summer. I learned about a variety of concerns and topics—depression, abuse, forgiveness, guilt, freedom, marriage, family, divorce, suffering, grief, breaking addictions, stress, anxiety, anger—and how to care for people God’s way by using the Bible to address these topics. That course does not make me a professional counselor, but rather educated me to help people who can’t afford professional counseling or who don’t want to discuss these things with a stranger.
If this resonates with you and you have deep emotional scars, I just want to look you in the eyes and say, “I’m so sorry that you are having to go through this. You are so far from alone in overcoming this. THIS is not the end for you. If you can choose to view this thing as the thing that’s going to launch you into who God created you to be, rather than getting trapped in self-pity and bitterness, then you are going to feel whole again and have the ability to help people just like you in the future. Healing is not about having the strength to, it’s about getting the support from others and the truth from God that you need—THEY will be your strength. You’re literally in the middle of a spiritual war right now, and you do have the power to choose between claiming the pain or finding out what’s on the other side of this new life God has for you. After leaving my past in the past and emerging on the other side of healing—I can tell you that my capacity to feel loved and love others has expanded (maybe if someone did an echocardiogram we could prove my heart has actually been enlarged ; )), and I’ve been granted the privilege to see God’s heart in ways that people who haven’t suffered on this scale do not know.
In 2019, these two were the most insightful and will be timeless books for me: The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren, and Boundaries by Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend. Reading these books WILL NOT HEAL YOU. Please first contact someone to pray over you for freedom and healing, and tell the people who love you about what you are going through so they can stand by you through it. You can also contact me, at [email protected]. Anyone who wants to learn how to pray over people for freedom and healing, I would love to pass on the knowledge I know! Now that I know the truth, I’m going to take that freedom and healing to people all over the world in Jesus’s name, and teach them to use prayer to bring that to other people! I still rock the pixie cut because it reminds me that God IS victorious!
“In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 8:37-39
Author’s note: I view my writing as a conversation. It means a lot to me to hear from you. It doesn’t matter how long ago after it’s been posted—I will be notified, and I will write you back! : )
