The good news was that the deep pain caused by my helplessness now propelled me to search harder and in different directions in order to find the God who seemed to elude me.

I was helped also by the fact that throughout my ordeal I never lost the conviction that the Lord had something more for me.

On looking back, I recognize that this conviction was an enormous grace. It saved me from ever giving up, even at those times in the very early days when I was tempted to do so, when the going was excruciatingly tough and the pain still excruciatingly raw.

God gave me another grace. This was my unshakeable conviction, then and now, that we never impress God by denying or hiding from Him our pain or our negative emotions or distressing problems. He knows them anyway. He knew us, after all, even before we were in our mother’s womb:

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you…” 

Jeremiah 1:5 NKJV                                                              

And:

O Lord, you have examined my heart

and know everything about me.

You know when I sit down or stand up.

You know my thoughts even when I’m far away.

You see me when I travel

and when I rest at home.

You know everything I do.

Psalm 139:1 - 3 NLT 

My conversion had to come from accepting, owning, and exploring my pain, not from retreating away from it or hiding it in some kind of ‘respectable’, pious or sentimental brand of so-called ‘Christianity’.

Did not Jesus say that He had come not for those who are well and don’t need a doctor but for those who are sick and do (Mark 2:17)?

Thus it was that in times of special discouragement, I made great strides forward when I reminded myself that the Doctor, the Great Physician, was hiding in my pain —not somewhere outside of it. 

I was also consoled by the knowledge that I had a High Priest who was fully able to experience my weakness because He had been tempted in every way that I was being tempted (Hebrews 4:15).

Moreover, as my High Priest, He knew better than anyone the dire importance of interceding to His Father on my behalf.

Another huge grace was the fact that I knew that deep fear needs deep healing.

What the first pastor had offered me would have merely scratched the surface of my problem, not healed the deep cause of it. 

His counsel would have been merely a spiritual band-aid, serving only to disguise the true source of the problem and so prolong the actual agony. 

In fact, in the long term it would have created the conditions for real disaster.

The Lord gave me the great grace to be able to recognize this.

Because I recognized it, I was motivated to do whatever it took, no matter how painful or radical, to persist until I found the source of my problem and so find the real solution.

This motivation was yet another enormous gift of Grace.

My basic instincts also told me that deep healing requires deep quiet. I understood instinctively that the solutions to our human problems —whatever/Whoever that solution might be —are hiding somewhere deep inside us.

And, that in order to access these solutions, we must enter consciously and deliberately into some degree of silence. 

I decided, therefore, to take quiet time away from my responsibilities and distractions as wife and mother so that I could be just myself in God’s Presence.

This way, I would be better able to hear the still, small voice of God speaking to me. 

I strongly believed that this would be the first step to the ‘something more’ from God for which every sinew of my humanity was now screaming. 

Watch out for Part 2 of this chapter coming in 2 weeks