Freedom Takes Time.
We are all “held” by something in our lives and that something often comes in between us and God.
Whether it is our pain, our shame, our fear, our anger . . . unless we truly have experienced full atonement (at one with God), something holds us captive.
For Mack in The Shack it was multiple things.
His shame at what he did to his dad when he was a young boy.
His anger because God did not save Missy’s life.
His guilt at not being able to protect her from the killer.
Baxter Kruger in his book The Shack Revisited talks about when he asked Paul Young what his favorite line was in the book.
Paul responded quickly, “That’s easy: ‘Freedom is an incremental process'” (97).
We want everything to be fixed quickly. But that is not how it works. The freedom of living loved by God is not something that happens overnight!
Hearing the voice of God takes time. Letting go of our JUNK takes time!
We are all so wounded, so weighed down with our baggage, and blind, we bring this into our hearing.
Sometimes letting go of our hurts and wounds feels scarier than holding on because we find comfort in the familiarity of our pain.
Life, history, wars, beatings, abusive parents, evil systems, and our own invisible world of assumptions and prejudices all work against us, shouting at us that God is like Mack’s real dad who abused him.
We begin to believe that God could not possibly be for us. And if God is not FOR us, why would we ever want to hear God call our name? (52).
Far too often our ideas of God have arrived from our wounds. Yet God is so much more than any God our painful wounds can compile.
Young writes, The problem is that many folks try to grasp some sense of who I am by taking the best version of themselves, projecting it to the nth degree, factoring in all the goodness they can perceive, which often isn’t much, and then call that God. And while it may seem like a noble effort, the truth is that it falls pitifully short of who I really am. I’m not merely the best version of you that you can think of. I am far more than that, above and beyond all that you can ask or think. (100)
20-21 God can do anything, you know-far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams! He does it not by pushing us around but by working within us, his Spirit deeply and gently within us.(Ephesians 3)
So today and each day forward, what if we willingly let go our of “stuff” and recognize that God can heal all things? Believe it or not, time also helps heal all things.