“My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message.”
-John 17:20
Grief gave me healing. It shattered my psyche and offered me a choice: Life or Death? It haunted me that God had taken the wrong spouse. In the place where I envisioned my own violent death, I decided to live. I wish I hadn’t had to come that close. It still scares me.
That was where I stopped living in grief and chose to live in healing. It meant spending a lot of time with emotions that I now knew to be deadly. It meant that I had to sit and look at that broken psyche (it hardly seemed like “mine”). Somewhere between visions and visualizations, I found the language to communicate with my brokenness.
It’s an ancient language. I walk with a flickering torch through dark caves covered in moving pictures. It’s an inherited language seasoned with comic book motifs and rock ‘n roll tones. Even those are inherited interests from my father.
It was terrifying to see that my legacy was carved into stone by generations of neglected trauma. I can barely communicate in the language I majored in, how can I address the weight of a seemingly endless past?
The answer is in the torch. The flame gives me access to the cave. It is as magical as anything scrawled on those walls. It is fueled by God’s love. Sometimes that love comes through the memory of my late wife, that was how I first found the flame. Sometimes it radiates through a close relationship or inspiring speech. Sometimes I feel God’s love pouring directly through me, into my arm and hand and torch, and the cave is illuminated in revelation.
Then I can see far back into the pain and a little ways forward into the healing.
Generational trauma runs impossibly deep. Maybe it takes an air of foolishness to want to heal it. Maybe all great endeavors require intentional ignorance to the potential costs of failure.
Christ is a healer and the physical world is beyond healing. To follow in His path, I look to the spiritual world. That is where I can heal my soul with His love and pray that I can radiate for others.
My legacy will not be on Earth, but with Jesus Christ.
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