Women in Leadership and Ministry
From Brokenness to Healing
Lisa Hall, TWR Women of Hope International Prayer Coordinator
If we are honest with ourselves, we would admit that there are broken areas within each of our lives that need to be healed. Sometimes the brokenness is obvious to us. But at other times we may not even be aware of it until something happens and we react to a person or circumstance in a way that is uncommon for us. We see this when the pain from something in our past triggers a negative response in our present.
But God doesn’t want us to live this way – remaining in our brokenness. He is our healer, who wants to bring wholeness to our bodies, minds, emotions and spirits. Jesus quoted Isaiah 61:1, saying, “The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners.” And it is the Holy Spirit living within us who reveals our wounds and the lies we believe that keep us in this place of pain.
Recently, God brought about a great healing for a deep heart wound in a broken area of my life. While going through a discipleship book that teaches on the topic, I asked God to reveal to me both the specific brokenness where he wanted to start and its source. God heard that prayer for healing!
Two days later, while discussing with my co-workers a book about women in pain, I responded in an unexpected way to a chapter we discussed. I shared how I had grown up in a family whose members struggled with this very problem. It became obvious that my heart was full of resentment toward my family because of the burden the problem had caused me. Many of my dreams had been disrupted or crushed because I needed to care for their needs.
I have struggled for decades in my Christian life with pride, arrogance and judgmentalism. They were like addictions. No matter how often I repented and asked forgiveness, I would find myself in that involuntary place of committing the same sins.
In that moment of realizing my bitterness and resentment toward my family, God made me aware that this was the root of pride, arrogance and judgmentalism in my life. It may not have been “fair” for me to have to bear such a burden, but I am accountable for my response, and it became sin when I pridefully believed the judgmental lie that I was stronger and more capable than my family members.
In his mercy, God thoroughly convicted me of this sin. In prayer, I sincerely took these sins to the cross in repentance and asked God to uproot these strongholds in my life. His response was to give me a cleansing such as I had not felt since my salvation!
When we come to God in confession and repentance, he cleanses and heals us, and we add another chapter to our testimony. It is the one thing that we bring to the world, a story of how God’s great grace has changed our lives. I praise God for the gifts of confession, repentance and forgiveness – they truly heal our deep heart wounds and set us free to be who God designed us to be.