There are hurts and pains unless you touch them you won’t feel them.
Sometimes you can touch them but don’t feel them because you’ve also blocked that part, or maybe you’re immune to its venom. This reminds me about the Lion Guard Series where Bonga, his name was that right? at my age I do watch cartoons 😊, so Bonga gets bitten by a snake and because Rafiki had told him that he’s immune he goes running around happily singing “Am immune, am immune…” 😀😀😀 it was so funny especially to us who failed to watch much of Scooby doos but watched more Nigerian movies when we were young. Bonga couldn’t sing for long, the venom silenced him…
There’s something about touching your own pain and feeling it and acknowledging it, giving it a name and separating it from yourself each passing day. Watching the wound dry up in the glare of the sun because you have exposed it. You see when you hide it, it begins whispering threats, hopelessness, and shame in the dark corner of your life. That corner is so quiet yet so loud, so loud in the middle of the night when it’s only you and the sheets. So loud when you encounter yourself in another being, your hand runs to touch yours and so feel it again, it
asks you to touch it but you put a brave face and you assume a strong immunity. But for how long!
I have come to learn something, we may want to package our hurts and pains in the best way we know how. But then, God wants the other version of you, the wreckage that you are on the insides, the broken that you are on the insides, the one that wets her pillow at night shaking in hysteria. That’s the one He wants so that He may package the human He wants and not what we know we want in most times.
He wants the one that fears the shame of birthing out of wedlock, yes the one that feels shame of having 4 kids with different dads, the one working extra hard to prove a point that yes she can on her own. The Lord just wants you to fall in His arms just like that with all that you carry the beautiful and the uglies.
He wants you just like that, you who shouted your way out of abuse but now you’re so ashamed to associate with domestic abuse because maybe it now makes you look a little bad in the eyes of your peers and even your circles. When you shouted your way out, you were unknowingly confessing
liberation from bondage and vices that were for submitting under then. Now He wants to you to yield to Him and allow Him access the areas you’re scared facing. Even still as you grieve through divorce or separation or loss, He just wants you like that. Just like that.
Then again I’ve learnt that, when we package and shut our hurts somewhere that we know best, He stealthily checks in and yanks off the bandaids. He strips off all the fig leaves we’ve gathered used as cover and felt comfortable in, even the nice names we’ve acquired and are doing us well, when He wants to package us He strips us off it all. Yaani it’s a journey of submitting to His design and purpose through us.
He’s not interested in the content therein that you’re so ashamed of. He’s interested in discarding it all and give out life right outta your belly, you’re a life giving spirit. He keeps saying so each time He takes away the cover you’re hiding under, each time you pick up another fig leaf He repeats that you’re a life giving Spirit and you can’t hide anymore. You can’t just hide anymore, He yanks it off.
It’s that place of standing in the shower and saying
“scrubb it all away Lord, Even that wound just access it and touch it, yes place my hand on it and let me also touch it and feel it”.
If I can’t touch it I can’t feel it. So it’s a place of surrendering to the packaging and moulding of God.
So the times I’ve found myself jumping around and yapping “am immune …am immune..” like Bongalicious would He peels off the cover and points the exact place I need to heal on and give life through, then I go back to the threshing floor. Where He says, “I’ll be done when am done my daughter”
Even in our brokenness when all we see are our filths, defeatedness, hopelessness and Shame, He sees us as Careers of Life- Life giving spirits. He’s already gathered a whole mass waiting to experience the outpouring of the spirit within us.
So in all capacities that we’re in we can only choose to be the Life Giving Spirits that we are. It’s time we stop suppressing His mission in us with our flesh glazed reasons.
Refining is His, Yielding is mine.
~Omondi Emily