She believes that God has punished her with a heart attack for her wrong sexual thoughts.
His father brutally rejected him, it was never resolved. He now believes that you can’t work through conflict with anyone.
She thinks she can’t leave her philandering, alcoholic, abusive husband because some religious people have told her she shouldn’t.
Each of these people think things that aren’t true. They need truth, the kind of truth that sets frees.
Truth spoken to us is particularly powerful. A person, really any person, speaking truth, modeling truth, being truth is super powerful in freeing other people. Rules and doctrines don’t free people; truth incarnate, truth living in another person, that frees us. A person can say to another person,”I don’t believe that your stroke is a punishment from God,” and that can set in motion a new and healing movement of the heart.
A person can say to another harmed person, “Your father was wrong to reject you. Your father had a problem. He did the wrong thing. He should have loved you. You are worthy of being loved.”
A person can say to an abused wife, “Leave him. Leave your husband. He has rejected you for other women, and you need to set up boundaries and protect yourself from any more harm.”
A person, really any person, can judge a particular situation and give freedom-making counsel. Therapists, pastors, parents, friends do this all the time, and it makes a universe of difference. Therapy is nothing less than truth that unslaves. Counseling is nothing less than an empowering relationship that helps us see ourselves more accurately.
Here is the deal. We all have something to overcome. It is this: Was is! What was, the past, dominates what is, the present.
The past is a despot over the present. Past addiction, failures and broken relationship tend to rule our present ones. Too many of us live with one eye spun to the back of our heads, cycloptic we go forward ever peering past-ward. We crash through the present staring wildly into the past from one ever back-gazing, was-dominant, memory tortured eye. Like this we stumble.
Such deep compassion is needed for we us. We all need truth. We need help reinterpreting our pasts so that that they don’t wreck the present.
We can, as we ourselves learn and change, provide counsel to others, and we can seek out trained therapists, to help us make much needed identity shifts. We can be taught to tell ourselves: “I am not what other people have said I am. I am not the sum of my past decisions. I am not the past. I can be, I am now free to be who I decide to be, who God, who loves me, can help me be.”
Was may be is, but is can also change was, and is is what we help people determine it to be by their present moment choices. Is, with truth in it, actually can change how we see was. The truth can free us from was.
This is powerful stuff, good stuff; truth sets free, and if we become free, then we really can live radically, beautifully and amazingly free lives.
Thrive! 