God turned me inside out emotionally and spiritually a little over twenty years ago. He took the broken pieces of my life and showed me His unconditional love and His all-encompassing forgiveness. He gave me a freedom to pursue the Christian life and a relationship with Him with passion. But, I had spent the more than twenty years prior to that, crying out to God all by myself. I had learned how to hide from others what was really going on inside me. And then, God gave me a friend, a godly friend who had a heart for me and a heart for Him, and He gave me the courage to stop hiding, and a miracle of grace took place. In reflecting on that miracle, I have come to learn something. We all need to allow someone to know us as close to how much God knows us as possible. God works that way, even though I don’t fully understand it, and it confirms and grows what God Himself is doing.
Brennan Manning tells the story of a 78 year old nun who came to him literally in the middle of the night. She cried as she told her story, a story she had never told anyone before. It had started when she was five years old and her father started crawling in bed with her with no clothes on. At first it was lies and touching. By the time she was 9, he took her virginity. By 12, she knew every sexual perversion you can read about in dirty books. She hated her father, and she hated herself. And then Brennan took her before God and asked for her healing. A year later, she wrote to Brennan and told him of the healing God had brought, the forgiveness she had given to her father, and the peace she now knew. God had used someone else to help bring about the miracle of grace He wanted to give.
I want to make a clarification. Coming before God to find His gift of grace, and allowing someone else who has a heart for us and a heart for God to get to know us almost as well as God does, is not just for the accumulated messes of many years, but it is also for the messes of today – the frustrations, the failures, the hurts, the disappointments, the losses, that continue to show up over a lifetime. The mess that happens when a parent is deteriorating, your child dies, a grandchild is seriously ill, or your prodigal is breaking your heart – or life just gets too busy , too hectic, or too draining. At those times too, God wants us to unveil ourselves before Him and He wants us to unveil ourselves before those few or that one and gain the encouragement He wants to give.
– Bev
(Related Bible reading: 2 Corinthians 1:3-7; 2 Corinthians 7:5-7; Matthew 25:34-40)
