For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works,which God prepared in advance for us to do.
Ephesians 2:10(NIV)
If you have ever experienced the frustration of building a new home or a remodeling project, you know that things never go as smoothly as you might have envisioned. Excitement can quickly fade as the tension rises and roadblocks surface.
When my husband and I were looking for designs for our new arena, one stood out above the rest. We had the blueprints drawn up and the design was complete. Implementing the vision we had created on paper was a little more complicated, however. My husband knew how it was supposed to look, but had never actually built one on his own before. As the process went along, one thing became glaringly obvious. This was going to take way longer than I had hoped. You see I am a planner, and my husband is more of an I’ll deal with it when it comes about kinda man.
So in my head, I had this idea about how it all would go and what it should look like and my husband was just going day by day. My biggest fear was not getting it done in time for our big fall event, he feared doing something wrong and not realizing it till it was too late. His fear often put a wrench in the process, delaying progress. Well, at least according to my timeline it did! What I realized in the end was his willingness to submit to the process no matter how slow, is what allowed the picture to become a beautiful reality.
Healing is a lot like the construction process. Some of us have an idea of how it should go and others would rather ignore the plan and hope it just works itself out. However, there is one thing we must realize. Whether we believe it or not, God has already completed our design- it is now our job to implement it. The problem is we struggle to see God’s vision of us and have a hard time knowing how to get His blueprint to become our reality.
Often we don’t even know where to start. Healing seems so far away and it is hard to know what it would look like. We disconnect more and more from our designer as one painful experience after the next builds up. We learned to define ourselves based on what has happened to us instead of how God sees us. We question, “Who would I even be without this pain?” Then all the sudden we find ourselves no where near where we though we’d be.
The more bad weather we experience, the more God’s blueprint gets blocked from our view.
I get it, some of you are saying, “But you don’t understand my life hasn’t gone as planned. My construction process has had too many bad weather days – too many delays.” I agree, some things are simply out of our control. My clients have shared stories of unbelievable pain and heartache over the years. Bad weather happened that was never their fault nor within their control and it made them question whether God even saw them at all.
Delays and interference are a normal part of the process. The Bible is clear about that. Paul tells us to be alert that there is a real enemy wanting to stop and thwart all of God’s plans for our lives (1 Peter 5:8). Sometimes the interference is in the form of painful experiences beyond our control. Other times it results from people who have hurt us and made us doubt and question God’s plan and vision for us. Sometimes we become the interference when we avoid dealing with our pain. The debris from life storms can take over our heart making us believe we aren’t enough and have been forgotten.
I will go into depth in the weeks to come regarding how healing and the construction process are similar, but for now let’s get a clearer view of the ways we overcome interference:
- Design and construction are an integrated system. You can’t have one without the other. Therefore, in order to overcome interference we have to reconnect with our designer. No matter what we have been through, God’s vision and plan for our lives doesn’t change. He is just waiting for us to team back up with Him!
- Design is God’s job, construction is ours. Construction simply means to implement the designer’s plan. God is not going to design a plan for you and then not give you the tools to implement it. He’s is just not that kind of God. We have to stop questioning that God wants to use us. He already has our unique blueprints drawn up.
- Every job is custom designed and site specific. Your design and construction process will not look like anyone else’s. STOP THE COMPARISON! We all have different experiences and that means we will have different obstacles to overcome.
- Every job requires hard work and a lot of time to complete – always more than expected. We don’t want quick fixes that don’t last. We want real transformation that stands strong even when the bad weather comes.
- Even after the initial building is complete improvements and renovations will always be ongoing . Houses require maintenance and so do we. We need regular heart inspections – continually letting God bring areas to our awareness that need His touch!
I hope this encourages you to reconnect with your designer and get His blueprint for your life. Be sure to stay tuned over the next 4 weeks as we will be discovering where you are in the construction “healing” process. I will be giving you tools and explaining in more detail the 4 building block construction process that we at Shine Healing Ministries use to guide women to healing: Awareness, Revealing, Rebuilding, and Shining!
Be Blessed ~ Be a Light!