“Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.”

Ephesians 5:14

Something changed in her, an innocence lost. As she looked out, the world seemed to be losing color, so she hung her head. The ground seemed to be shaking. She looked around. No one else seemed to notice. To her terror, she realized, she alone felt the tremors of her life falling into darkness. A secret she must keep.

We all have secrets. Those dark hidden places locked up in our hearts that we dare not venture to far into that void. These little reminders of deep agonizing pain fissures through our memories, terrorizing us with the past. Secrets we must keep.

“For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.”

Ephesians 5: 8

In order for healing to come, some stories must be told. Stepping out of denial and into the light of God’s power gives me strength to tell my story of his saving grace. Slowly, it becomes less about my past and more about His rescue of a little wild girl caught between dangerous darkness and vivid fantasies.

I’m working through writing my story down. It’s sad, tough work revisiting painful places, and feeling the shame again is exhausting. Thankfully, I carry the truth that I was once darkness, but now I am light in the Lord with me to the void.  This truth becomes a salve to the fissures of pain in my heart, healing the brokenness, giving me wholeness in the face of my secrets.

I rejoice that healing is not for me alone, but every Friday night I share God’s rescue with hurting people at Celebrate Recovery. The darkness of my past becomes a light for others to find God’s grace in Jesus Christ. Imagine the dark becoming light!

Today, I want to encourage you that no matter how dark your secret, in God’s hands, it becomes light. As He heals our tattered souls, we become a beacon of light.

The first step is the hardest to make. The darkness we’ve known our whole lives feels familiar, safe even. We developed an arsenal of weapons to manage the shaking ground of abuse. We found ways to force our world to feel right, when what was done to us was so, so, so wrong.

Coming into the Light means, we have to let go of what we worked so hard to do. We must stop depending on ourselves and trust someone else. I don’t know about you, but this statement strikes fear to the core of my being. Trust someone else?

The God I knew in my childhood was a demanding tyrant. He was angry at everyone because no one could follow his rules. No matter how hard I tried I could never be good enough to be loved.

But then I meet the real Jesus, and through Him a compassionate Father, who ran to me.

Throwing his arms around my neck, he clothed me in the righteousness of Jesus Christ. I have no need to be jealous of other girls. Now, I am a princess in his kingdom. Gone are my days of envy. Now, I have a heavenly inheritance stored up for me, where moth and dust cannot destroy.

If you are reading this, and think, “I could never tell my secret. I could never trust Jesus to make me whole.” But, maybe you’ve come to the place, where your life seems unmanageable, and anything else is better than this life your living now.Find a Celebrate Recovery. It’s for every hurt, habit, or hang up. CR is place filled with a bunch of really messed up people, who found a real God, who is making them whole again. It’s a safe place to be really messy. It’s a safe place to be inconvenient. I’m a pastor’s wife, and they let me be messy, broken, and inconvenient. I didn’t have to pretend that I was more sanctified than I am. They allowed me to have problems. If you know anything about church, this is unusual. The pastor’s wife must be well-dressed, well-mannered, and darn near perfect to be acceptable. Even the people that said they wanted me to be real, rejected me and used gas-lighting. They said one thing, but then got very mad at me because I wasn’t grieving the exact way they thought I should grieve.

There is hope. Jesus said,

The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
    because he has anointed me
    to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
    and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,

Luke 4:18