It’s Time for Real Healing

What follows, my precious grace brethren, is said in and through Love.  Please hear it as the heartfelt plea of subjective healing that I intend it to be.


When one is delivered out from under a religiously oppressive system, there are countless traumas that, if we are not careful, are carried into the next phase of our respective journeys.  That pain, if left unresolved, distorts our perceptions and pollutes the Living Water with our hurt as we pour Love out to others.  It permeates our conversation, prefacing the articulation of our beliefs more so on what we DO NOT belief than on what we DO belief.  Exhausted by the us-vs-them attitude that saturated the religion we fled, we have at times functioned with the same sense of false superiority and elitism of the very systems we escaped, merely replacing ‘sinners’ for ‘the evangelical church’ in the ‘them’ column.


As an academic, I can appreciate the importance of words and debate in articulating ideas and theological concepts.  The restoration of the true Gospel message necessitates it.  But what I have at times observed as I peruse the grace wing of social media, far more frequently than I can number, is unresolved trauma wearing a false mask of freedom.


This us-vs-them mindset isn’t limited to grace vs religion either.  It also expresses itself in the drawing of fictive lines in and among the grace community too.  Again, I know distinctions are necessary.  But when those distinctions intended to take down walls result in the building of bigger and strong ones, we’re doing the Gospel wrong.


I know the institutional church hurt you.  It has hurt everyone at one time or another.  But let’s not lose sight of the purpose of our freedom: to free others from the veil clouding their awareness of their true identity.  We have all been objectively healed through Jesus Christ.  Let’s now commit to living subjectively healed too.


I love you.



 

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