E17 | When Healing Keeps Restarting: What I Learned About Letting Go & Reaching Back

I deleted messages on WhatsApp. More than once. And every time I did, I restarted the clock on my own healing without realizing it. 

If you have ever reached back for something God already moved, if you have ever stood in a room with tears running down your face while worship music played and wondered why it was not getting easier, this episode is for you. 

This is what real healing actually looked like for me. Messy and circular and full of grace I did not earn. And what I found in Isaiah 30 on the night I finally stopped running from the truth.

Transcript

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I deleted messages on WhatsApp more than once. I would type them out and then delete them and hopefully before they were read or write them and never send them or send them an Immediately wished I had not, and every single time I did that, I was restarting the clock on my own healing without realizing it. I didn't know that at the time. I just knew that something in me kept reaching back and I could not seem to stop. if you have ever done that, reach back for something that was clearly already over, already moved on, already behind you. This episode is for you. I want to tell you something I have never said quite this directly out loud. Reaching back was not weakness. It was not failure. It was not even a lack of faith, though. It felt like all three of them at the same time. Reaching back was what happened when my heart had not caught up to what my mind already knew. And here's what I mean by reaching back. It is not just a text message. It is the job you kept applying for that keeps saying no, and you keep applying anyway. The friendship that ended two years ago that you still revisit in your head at 2:00 AM the version of your life you planned. That is not going to happen the way you imagined, but you still catch yourself calculating how it could, how it could work, the thing you laid down at the altar on Sunday. and picked back up on the way to your car. And I've been guilty of that one more, more than once. Every single time I reached back, I was telling God something. I was telling him. I did not trust him to hold what he had already moved, that my grip was safer than his hands, that the thing he had set down needed to be picked back up because I was not ready for it to be gone, and I kept doing it, not because I didn't know any better, because knowing better. Actually doing better are two completely different things, especially when your heart is still living in a chapter. God has already turned the page on. The gap between knowing and doing that is where I lived for a very long time. I want to give you the real picture of what that season looked like, not the version I would've posted. The actual version, I want to say something first to anyone listening who has never been inside a church or who went once and it did not feel like it was for them or who is still figuring out what they believe about any of this. What I am about to describe is my specific experience, but the thing I'm really talking about is something you already know. It is a place where you finally stop holding it together. The place where whatever you have been carrying gets too heavy to keep carrying alone. For me, that place was a row of chairs in a church that have become mine For you, it might be your car, your bathroom floor, a walk you took alone. When everything fell apart, the location does not matter. The reaching does. So taking you back to that day, the worship music made it almost impossible to hold the tears back, oceans, Spanish worship songs that touched something in me that I didn't have words for. CC whining, singing goodness of God, and I was barely holding onto the edge of that truth and trusting God by elevation worship. That one was on repeat, and when I say repeat, I do not mean playlist. Repeat. I mean heart repeat The kind where you are singing the words and crying at the same time, and genuinely asking God whether you actually believe him, and somehow the singing is what keeps you in the room long enough to find out that you do. The dam broke every single time that tears just flowed. I was doing the work therapy, the books, the journaling, the honest conversations with people who loved me enough to tell me hard things, going to church, praying all of it at the same time. And I want to say clearly that none of that was wrong. Therapy was necessary. The books gave me language. I did not have that work was real and it mattered. That work was real and it mattered, and I do not think I could have received what God was doing without it. But here's the thing, I had not done yet. I had not let God into the center of it. I was bringing him to the edges, the Sunday version, the prayer at the end of the day, after I had already tried to manage everything myself. The sessions helped me understand the wound. The books helped me name the patterns, but I was still the one holding everything together. I was still the one gripping the timeline. God was in the mix, but he was not in charge. And that difference, that specific difference is what was keeping the healing circular where it wasn't happening in its entirety. Every time I reached back, I was choosing the familiar ache over the uncomfortable unknown of actually letting him have it real healing. Looked like putting the phone down. Picking it back up again, putting it down, laying something at the altar and picking it back up on the way home and coming back the next week and doing the whole thing again. Messy, circular, full of grace. I did not earn. I could not manufacture. That is what healing actually looked like for me. Not a straight line, not a single breakthrough, a spiral. A complete and utter spiral, the same territory over and over at a slight different altitude each time Until I finally stopped being the one at the center of it. I need to share with you about an instance where I was brought to Isaiah 30 because it was not a peaceful moment. It was not me sitting quietly with my coffee and my Bible feeling close to God. It was a Sunday where I knew God had been telling me not to do something. not with an audible voice, with that specific quiet that you learn to read when you have been walking with him long enough, a closed door, a lack of peace, a silence that was not absent, it was direction. He was not giving me the green light, and I knew it, but I did it anyway. I told myself that silence was not a no, that he had not told me explicitly not to do it, that I could insert myself into the situation justice once and it would be okay. And so I did it. I forced the thing. I reached back in a way I knew I should not, and what I received on the other side of that decision was exactly what God had been trying to protect me from. I hurt my own feelings. I want to say that clearly because it took me a while to be able to say it clearly. I did not get hurt because the other person was wrong. I got hurt because I handed someone the opportunity to hurt me when God had already told me to lay it down. I created the conditions. I chose it with my eyes fully open. Then I cried about it like I had been ambushed. So after that service, after that encounter, I sat at the altar crying, crying, uncontrollable tears, and my mentor was right there beside me, and she was not harsh about it. She was as gentle as she could be, but she told me the truth. She said, you knew. You knew before you did it. And she was right and somehow hearing her say it out loud made it worse and better at the same time, I went home, still crying, cried in the car all the way home, still carrying it. And at some point that afternoon, I picked up my Bible, not because I felt spiritual, because I had nowhere else to put what I was feeling. And I opened up to Isaiah 30 and that, and the chapter begins speaking to rebellious children, to the ones who do not listen, who make plans of their own without consulting God, who go their own way and call it wisdom. And at that very moment, the tears stopped, not because I felt better, Because I could not blame anyone anymore. I sat there with that chapter open in my lap, and I felt God speaking to me the way a father speaks to a child who has made a choice and a decision that they knew was wrong, not with condemnation, but with honesty. You knew you did not listen, and because you did not listen, this is what happened. And here's the part I need you to hear. He was not punishing me. He was not saying, I told you so to be cruel. The consequence was not something he wanted from me. It was something I walked into and I ignored the protection he was trying to give me over and over because we feel like that. We feel like we know better, and if we don't do something about it, it's not gonna get done. I. So I sat with that for, for a long time, for a while because the woman I was in that moment wanted to be angry at someone else, wanted to assign the blame somewhere that was not herself, and Isaiah 30 would not let me do that. It just sat there, patient and honest and said, you chose this. You inserted yourself when I told you to let it go. You forced a thing when I was asking you to trust me, and then the chapter shifts because that is what God does. He corrects you and then he turns toward you with something that sounds almost impossible given what you have just done. Verse 18 says, therefore, the Lord waits to be gracious to you. He exalts himself to show mercy to you. For the Lord is a God of justice. Blessed are all those who wait for him, and after I felt the correction, after I felt the consequence, after I had done exactly what he told me not to do, in his word, he says he wants to be gracious. Not that he's disappointed. Not that he's done with you, not, he's making you earn your way back. He waits already positioned, already leaning toward you with mercy. So much mercy before you have finished sitting with what you did. That wrecked me because the God I expected to find after that Sunday. A version that size, the version that is tired of waiting for me to figure it out. And instead I found the one who was already ready to be gracious the moment I stopped running from the truth of what I had done. And then verse 21, and your ears shall hear a word behind you saying, this is the way walk in it when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left behind you. Not ahead of you, not standing at a distance, watching you fumble behind you close enough to hear, gentle enough to follow, still directing even after I had ignored the direction. And that is God in your healing, the one who corrects because he loves you too much to let you stay comfortable in a choice that is costing you everything. And the one who turns around in that same breath and says, I am still here. I am still for you. Walk with me. He does not want you to suffer. He never wanted the consequence. He was trying to protect you from it. But when we force the thing, when we take his silence as permission and insert ourselves in what he has already asked us to lay down, we sometimes walk ourselves into exactly what he was standing between us and, and even then, even after that, he waits to be gracious. That is a God I found in Isaiah 30 on that afternoon, I hurt my own feelings. I cried myself. To a point of such hurt and could not blame anyone for it, but myself. So as with every moment, you know, I take a pause and it's just to regulate the feelings.'cause even as I speak now. I remember that day and it still sits in the pit of my stomach. I know God has released me from it. He's been, he's been so gracious, but it's just an acknowledgement and accountability that that was me. So with every pause, you know, I go into a sayah moment, and if you've been here before, you know what this means. If this is your first time, Sayah is an ancient word from the Psalms. It means pause, and it is an invitation to stop before you move on and let what what was just said, actually land. I'm going to ask you to do one thing, write one word, one thought, whatever is sitting in your chest right now, and we'll go from there. What have you done that you know God was telling you not to do and what did it cost you? And I'll repeat the question again'cause that's just a teacher in me. What have you done that you knew God was telling you not to do, and what did it cost you? And if you're driving or on a walk. Hold that question with you. Come back to it. Write it down when you can, because this is not a question meant to shame you. It is a question that leads to the most honest place. The place where you finally stop blaming everyone else and sit with your own choice. And from that place, the grace in Isaiah 30 actually lands because naming it is not the same as surrendering it, but naming it is always where surrender begins. And before we leave and we close out this episode, I want you to know that your healing is not disqualified by how messy it is. It is being shaped by it. The reaching back, the restarted clocks, the alter moments, and the parking lot moments, none of that disqualifies you from the grace that is already waiting. He waits to be gracious, not after you get it together. Now in this chapter, that is still a little unresolved in the healing that is still a little incomplete. He waits and that is enough. If this episode opens something in you and you want to keep sitting with it, I write every week over on substack. It is called middle of the Story, and it is where I go longer, slower, and more personal than any algorithm will allow. The link is in the show notes and it is where I go longer, slower, and more personal. In my writing, then any algorithm will allow. I also put together a free guide that goes with everything we talked about today. It is called Five Signs. You are trying to finish a story. God is still writing five honest signs that you might be in the middle without fully recognizing it. The link is in the show notes. It's free. It's my gift to you for being here and when you're ready to go deeper on the page. And before you leave. I want you to absolutely know that you are seen, you are loved, and your story is still being written in God's hands. Until next time, grace and peace,