The Last Part of My Hallway Journey Will be the Hardest…

Fingers to keyboard and the words will just flow…or will they? That is where my head has been for the past week. I have sat so many times with so much wanting to flow, but feeling so much sometimes makes it so hard to write.

I sat in counseling the other day and I am so thankful that I have a counselor who can follow along with me because it was a lot of talking about one thing and feeling the anxiety start to bubble so I deflect into something else…and it becomes a Ferris Wheel. We jump from one cart to the next…sometimes at the top of the wheel and quickly running to the bottom and around and around we go…

Last week I got some personal news that literally stopped me so dead in my tracks. It shook me so deeply because I felt one way and then was told something completely different and I still haven’t been able to process all of it. It caused a huge shift in my plans the past two week and as I type I sit here - thinking about the Ferris Wheel I have been on ever since.

As the second anniversary of my dad’s death looms, I find my anxiety heightened. The void of him feels bigger this year and I have come to really realize that I have a lot more healing I need to do in regards to my relationship with Him and the loss of what can never be, what never was and how all of that ties into my today.

I think that people assume that in forgiveness there is still no pain. I think that in forgiveness you have the ability to actually take the pain and bring it to a place where you can truly heal, work through and find the new…For me, forgiveness has always been the stepping stone to work through what caused the unforgiveness to begin with. In forgiveness I think that the blinders come of because the enemy has no hold on you anymore and the path to healing can be revealed.

Since my experience at Zion, I have felt so much more near to God that I find myself wanting to be free from the bondage of triggers. The bondage of fear and of self-doubt. This is what is holding me back from breaking through the hallway I have been in for so long. He wants me to leave it fully free.

That counseling appointment I mentioned above was so rough. Rough to know how hard I am on myself. Rough to see how much hurt I am carrying. Rough to see that to begin to really address the triggers that hurt the most means talking about things that just hurt.

But I am tired of living in the unhealed.

My soul is healed and lives in the fullness of knowing that one day I will stand in Heaven before the One who created me.

My heart is what isn’t fully healed. The battle scars of trauma and loss and self hatred are threatening to break the stitches and the the layers of the lie that saying “I am okay” I have placed on them. As I sat with my counselor, I realized that I have such a fear of walking through the trauma to get to the place of seeing what it left in my mind, body and spirit that causes triggers to be activated…because who wants to sit in the hurt? Who wants to sit in the place where nothing made sense and all you felt was pain? Who wants to sit in a place of remembering what it felt like to not forgive?

Not me. But that is what is left of my journey in the hallway. To find my way to be able to shake off the triggers. To be able to actually take a completely full deep breath.

I know that for some people this makes no sense. Triggers? I have had someone tell me that if something still hits me “that way” then how can I say there was forgiveness?

I just pray they never have to understand the answer to that question.