Safety
Before we get to the next part of the Trauma-Informed Gospel series, we’re going to do a few side quests. Here is side quest #1, originally published December 1st, 2020.
You know what you can’t do?
You can’t out-think your feelings, you can’t out-feel your thoughts, and you can’t outrun either.
Show of hands for who’s tried.
Our thoughts and feelings are essential to us — the soul of our beings. They are vitally important, and both are subject to the Truth. The Truth is what brings our thoughts and feelings into justice and peace.
Important aside, here are my working definitions:
Truth: what God says about who we are, who he is, and who he is to us.
Justice: the movement of all things into alignment; the action of peace.
Peace: wholeness; integration; alignment; justification; or, the perfect fruition of all things in right relationship with each other.
We are safe in the Truth, but lies are not.
There are times, though, when we feel unsafe in the Truth, because it hurts when lies are cut away from us. Oh, it hurts so much... because oftentimes we thought, and felt, that those lies were a real part of us, that they explained who we were, that they were intrinsic to our beings. We believed that they brought value to us somehow, as perverse a value as it may have been; and if we aren’t what those lies said we were, then what are we?
But we are safe. In Truth our thoughts are heard, our feelings are held, and both are justified and purified. And the peace of Truth is big enough for our thoughts and feelings, and welcomes them all without ever being defensive, without ever being reproachful of us, without ever demeaning us, even while it’s transforming them. Even while it’s shattering our walls and loving us into wholeness.
We are safe while we become more of who we really are, and less of who we aren’t.
And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.
Colossians 1:17
Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.
1 John 3:2
For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.
Hebrews 4:12
Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.
Romans 12:2