Note

Most of this material first appeared in my book,  How I Learned to Let God Find Me in the Good Times and the Bad: A Spiritual Memoir (published 2018).

Introduction

This article series, Parts 1 – 4, makes the assumption that you already know how to experience the Lord’s love directly, firsthand, for yourself, whenever you wish or need it.

 You see, it’s the regular, repeated, firsthand, experience of His love that SUSTAINS, NOURISHES, PROTECTS and HEALS you during your crisis —leading you to true victory that lasts!

If you don’t know how to experience God’s love whenever you wish or need it, please get my FREE Guide which teaches you in 2 clear, simple steps exactly how to do this.

And make sure you also get its extremely popular and encouraging accompaniment, ‘Relax Your Body’.  Pin this resource on your wall where you can easily see it when you need God’s help urgently, or at any time. And please share both resources with anyone you know who needs the Lord’s help, especially during a personal crisis.

 You see, when you go through a steep crisis in your life, simply seeking advice won’t cut the mustard. No. At this point you need to be able to directly experience the Lord’s LOVE whenever you want or need it.

Why?

 Because at the end of the day, it’s only when you KNOW deep, deep inside you that your are LOVED profoundly by the Lord just as you are —warts , crises, sins, weaknesses, negative emotions, and all —that LASTING  healing happens: physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional healing.

 And there’s another reason why this is hugely important: when you open yourself to the Lord’s direct presence and experience His love directly, you and the Lord become deeply bonded. Trust develops. You begin to feel safe enough to let the Lord truly become God for you. You allow Him to take full responsibility for guiding you through your crisis.

The Lord takes full responsibility for guiding you through your crisis and for seeing to it that you emerge from your crisis 

• victorious
• with your mental, spiritual, emotional and physical health intact
• stronger
• freer
• with a far deeper love for the Lord, YOURSELF, and others! 

And there’s one final reason why this is critically important: it’s only when you know how to experience God’s love firsthand for yourself —whenever you want or need to —that  the Lord can start to heal your ‘false self’.

And unless you allow the Lord to heal your false self, all the other problems that your crisis has already brought about will be far more difficult to overcome!   

The Really Good News for You

The really good news is that as you open yourself up repeatedly to God’s love, God himself undertakes the healing of your false self. (You see, your false self is too entrenched and strong for you to heal it yourself.) 

You therefore accomplish 2 things in one: overcoming your crisis constructively AND healing your false self at the same time.

It’s a precious win-win.

During my first steep crisis at the age of 35, in answer to my heartfelt plea for help, the Lord used a holy Christian woman guide to teach me the utter necessity of both things: i. e.

• how to experience directly God’s love firsthand for myself
• the need to allow Him to heal my false self

Note

At the very same time, and using my holy guide again, the Lord provided me with ongoing training in the Enneagram . This development was completely unexpected. In fact, the Lord seemed to have me directly in his sights: He used a co-author of the world’s very first book on the Enneagram (published just a few months before) to teach me this unusually accurate and impactful map of human personality.

The Enneagram was (and remains) a huge help in understanding the genuine giftedness of our ‘true’ selves and the roots, function, and drawbacks of our ‘false’ selves. For 26 years, I have taught the basics of the Enneagram theory to all the Christian women I’ve guided. Each one testifies to its huge help in genuinely understanding themselves for the first time —their false self as well as their true self —and the ways in which their false self influences their life negatively, while their true self influences it positively.

By the time, therefore, that the second steep crisis of my life descended (which is the crisis I cover in this article series), I was able to rely on all 3 of these things to bring me the profound healing and victory that I needed. I can assure you that the ‘signpost’ events I recount in these 4 articles could never have happened without, first, my understanding of the dire need to experience directly God’s love firsthand for myself; second, the need to allow Him to heal my false self; and, third, how to start achieving both these things!   

Understanding the Enneagram made everything even more deeply impactful.

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Part 1

In 1996, my deeply loved husband of 26 years suddenly left our happy and fulfilling marriage. Seven years later God would reveal the reasons for this devastating development in a dramatic way. But until He did, my daughters and I had no way of understanding what was behind it. Naturally, this made our crisis more bewildering and thus far more difficult. To make matters even more unbearable, our crisis was marked by a ruthless, persistent, and well-organized presence of evil. 

First Signpost: God Speaks to Me in Psalm 44

Two months after my husband left our marriage, I spent one week in silent retreat at my spiritual home, St. Benedict’s Monastery in Winnipeg. I did so specifically in order to get the Lord’s perspective on my and my daughters’ soul-destroying situation.

As was my practice while on any kind of retreat, I allotted special time to prayer of the heart. In addition, on most days during the retreat I would join the sisters for their mid-day prayer in the monastery’s beautiful chapel, at which their two choirs pray aloud alternate verses of the psalm appointed for each day.

A day or two after the start of my retreat, I joined the sisters in the chapel in the praying of Psalm 44. When we came to the seventeenth and eighteenth verses, my hair stood on end:

All this happened to us though we had not forgotten you,
though we had not been disloyal to your covenant;
though our hearts had not turned away,
though our steps had not left your path:

Psalm 44:17 - 18 

The Jerusalem Bible, Reader’s Edition

These verses were describing me! They were describing exactly how I felt!

The psalmist was asking the same implicit question that had lain dormant in my unconscious mind: ‘Why this, Lord?’

This was my question.

It echoed my anguish.

And it was now begging for an answer.

All awareness of my immediate physical surroundings rapidly drifted away. It seemed as though God and I were left alone in the chapel having a private to-and-forth.

Could it be, I wondered that the Lord had brought me to the monastery just to hear these verses?

You see, like the psalmist I had loved the Lord since infancy. It was He who had been my life’s compass point. I had tried to let Him guide my life —my thoughts, words and actions. 

I knew for sure that I was by no means perfect. But I also knew with absolute certainty that I had done nothing to deserve the acute pain of rejection and abandonment that I was now suffering. On the contrary, I knew that I had only loved and respected and supported in every way the man I had married and still loved deeply.

 Hence my question: Why, Lord?

It now occurred to me that perhaps the Lord wanted to assure me that my question was a justified and valid one.

For the first time since the start of my troubles, I could feel the first flickers of true life beginning to burn again in my heart and spirit.

The Benedictine sisters pray the psalms in a humble, simple and unhurried manner that somehow allows a person to experience the Lord as they pray. The frenetic speed and stress of the outside world seems to dwindle away. As a result, you are better able to savour and digest the meaning of the words of scripture and, through them, hear the voice of the Lord speaking directly to you.

I believe this was why my question, never posed consciously to the Lord until now, was now finally free to come to the surface. 

Hope arose inside me that God would use these retreat days as I had asked Him to i. e. to shed much needed light on my incomprehensible and profoundly distressing situation.

I was not, however, expecting Him to do so in any great rush, since I knew that He takes His time to reveal to us what He wants us to know.

I knew, too, that the Lord’s process of healing from severe shock and suffering does not occur overnight and that I might in fact have to journey for some time before discovering the Lord’s complete answer to my ‘Why?’

I was therefore extremely taken aback when, within just a few minutes, the Lord gave me His specific and truly surprising answer to my ‘Why?’

 In my heart and spirit: I heard Him say

‘I have chosen you for this suffering’.

Here is how my diary entry for this day records the unfolding of this transforming event:

After praying Psalm 44 in the chapel, Jesus is very present. If my suffering was because I had worshipped another idol, I would have known from you about this, because you know our hearts. But this is not the reason: rather the reason is that you have chosen me for this suffering i. e. it is all for your sake that I am like a sheep ready for slaughter (verse 22).

My diary entry continues:

In the great comfort of this experience (i. e. God’s answer to my ‘why?’), I asked God to give our family —all members —a joyful healing and reunion… I thanked Him ahead of time for all healing and happiness. Once Christ has told me that He has chosen this cross for me, I feel a burden lifted.

After I asked the Lord to heal our family, my spirit experienced an overriding certainty that their healing and mine was now a done deal and that the Lord had granted my request.

Of course I didn’t know when or how He would heal us; only that He would.

It would be this promise and assurance of healing from the Lord that would strengthen me and keep me safe from the devil’s assault through the next seven years of extremely rough passage. 

I left the chapel and made my way slowly to lunch in the private retreatants’ dining room.

For the first time, I experienced a new sense of inner peace and freedom, and the first tiny inklings of joy.

Later that night, however, things began to get rough.

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

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