Experiencing God's Presence in Deep Emotional Wounds

And why the past is always present

“Every emotional rupture demands repair, whether it happened yesterday or fifty years ago. The unaddressed past reaches into the future, and all you see is what happened yesterday…Sometimes the wall you are facing today was actually constructed a long time ago.”

- Terry Wardle, From Broken to Beloved

So many of us long for transformation, but we feel discouraged and defeated by the issues that keep coming up... over and over again.

 We pray, read our Bibles, go to church, worship, and yet still feel stuck. Why is this? Often the tools we’re given within the church leave us wondering if we're missing something or if something is wrong with us. 

Is it us? Is it them? Is it God? Why is lasting change so elusive? 

This is what author, speaker, and founder of Healing Care Ministries Terry Wardle and I talk about in this week’s Faith & Feelings episode. Beautifully blending stories from his own life with modern discoveries in neuroscience, he gently dismantles the common saying, “the past is in the past.” Demonstrating how past experiences impact the wiring of our brains in profound ways, Terry shows us why we need healing experiences with God’s presence in our unresolved emotional wounds. Listen to the episode here:

Or listen to the episode on Spotify or YouTube.

I’ve been reflecting on so much from this time with Terry, but one thing I’ve been thinking about in particular is the power of episodic memory – or the events that have occurred in our lives that caused us to come to certain conclusions about ourselves, others, the world, or God.

In our earliest years, we experience truths about the world that become almost impossible to dislodge by simply memorizing truths from Scripture. Rather, we need healing experiences with God’s presence in these unresolved emotional wounds. To say this another way:

Emotion-filled traumatic experiences have wired our brains for fear, shame, and self-rejection. Only emotion-filled healing experiences of love and safety in the presence of God will dismantle our old neural pathways and truly renew our minds.

I’d invite you to take a moment to reflect. What stirs or surfaces in you as you ponder this? What might it look like to stay with these sensations, emotions, beliefs, or memories, even if only for a moment? What might be God’s invitation here?

Journeying together,

Taylor Joy