The Beginning of Restoration

Editor’s note: Our pasts and our hurts shape us, don’t they? Many of us aren’t strangers to trauma. Kobe Campbell shares with us trauma-informed and Jesus-centered approaches to recover from dysfunctional patterns and lean into Jesus for our healing. Enjoy this excerpt.

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Grieving is the first step of healing and restoration. It’s where we see the full landscape of our pain and bring it to Jesus. Healing is not about forgetting the past; it’s about experiencing the redemption of past moments that traumatize us in the present. It’s about the restoration of our most authentic selves in Christ as we reclaim everything He designed us to experience before we were wounded.

It’s about coming home to Jesus, to ourselves, and to the liberation He died for us to experience.

Before we can be restored, we have to recognize what was lost.

• Feeling and connecting to our emotions gives us the valuable information we need for healing.

It gives us the opportunity to experience the divine comfort of the Holy Spirit. If we’re always consoling ourselves, when does God get a chance to be our comforter? As we let God and others show up for us, we gain the courage to show up for ourselves in the ways we deserved but didn’t experience.

Mourning is the beautiful acknowledgement of how trauma turned our world upside down. It is acknowledging the safety we didn’t get, the love we longed for, the intimacy that we struggled to grasp. It’s a reminder of why the greatest gift Jesus left the entire world was His Spirit, whom He called “the Comforter” (John 14:26 KJV). Our deep wounds need divine presence. Grieving gives us access to that presence. When we pretend our pain isn’t that bad, we forfeit the supernatural comfort God wants to give us. When we lean in to honest presence with Jesus, it reflects the actions we take in faith as we believe that He sees our pain — and that He’ll be moved to do something about it.

When we access our emotions, we access the messages they are trying to tell us.

• Connecting to our emotions allows us to utilize the system of awareness, connection, and appraisal that God has given us to help deal with the hardships of life.

When Akua began to grieve what she had experienced, she created room for new messages and perspectives to settle her heart. She was no longer consumed by sadness. She made space to feel the weight of what she didn’t get and what she should have gotten, so that when she does receive what she needs now, she can do so with joy.

For those of us who’ve spent our lives stuck in patterns of acting, defending, and pretending to be okay while enduring deep pain, the fullness of our grief is where we’ll find the fullness of God’s love for us. When we are at our weakest, when we finally face how broken we really are and how little power we have to be or do anything for ourselves or others, we’re faced with a desperate need that causes us to cry out for more. We want Jesus. The One who is strong in our weakness, the One who has compassion on the brokenhearted, the One who walks up to people and heals them before they do a thing for Him.

I was there in that moment I described at the beginning of this chapter — releasing my rage through psychodrama at Onsite. I needed Jesus then and still do. I couldn’t go on living without Him. The pain of life was too heavy, too complex, too demanding, and I needed rest, but there was none to be found in the flesh. I didn’t need a master to serve. I was the lost sheep. Alone, confused, disoriented, with no sense of direction, with no idea where home was, I needed a shepherd to find me and guide me home. I needed a father running to me with arms wide-open. That’s what I got.

Surrounded by strangers, on the floor of a cold room in Tennessee, I mourned for the first time in years. I opened the door to a part of my heart I had kept locked. The pain was more than I anticipated, the grief was heavier than I could bear. But the tenderness Jesus showed me through those strangers, many of whom were not believers, was and is something that brings me to tears, even as I write this. I had no clue that type of acceptance existed. I screamed as loud as I could and beat an inanimate object with a rage that over- whelmed my body. I was supposed to be shamed, I was supposed to be laughed at, my faith was supposed to be brought into question, my professionality was supposed to be challenged — but instead I was held. Like a child drawn in by a loving parent, I was cradled in the arms of people I didn’t know. And I was reminded of a love I’d forgotten about in Jesus.

• Grieve with Jesus.

Invite Him into your pain through movement, breath prayer, and lamenting. Speak the emotions you feel in your body. Bring your pain to Him and lay it at His feet. Tell Him how you feel; share what breaks your heart. It already breaks His.

As you seek to transform yourself every day and to heal from the trauma of your past, know every emotion you bring to Him can and will be touched by Him. The tenderness that He will give you is what will keep you from running back to the same patterns that draw you away from freedom and into darkness. When we dare to feel and grieve, we gain access to the divine comfort and presence of God.

Excerpted with permission from Why Am I Like This? by Kobe Campbell, copyright Kobe Campbell.

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Your Turn

What do you need to grieve? Jesus wants to restore your heart and your life. What emotions do you need to express to God? He loves you so much and wants access to every secret corner of your heart in order to heal and embrace you. ~ Laurie McClure, Faith.Full