Some Thoughts on Resurrection

Although I’m an ordained minister, I don’t give sermons (and don’t wish to).
However, this week I’ve been meditating on the message of Easter in my own life, because the topic of resurrection has become very dear to me.
Feeling moved to share what’s on my heart, it’s in the hopes that it may help others as well.

There was a time when I was lost in darkness as a result of personal trauma.
I feared that my life was over – in fact, life as I knew it was indeed over . . .
I had no idea how to go on.
I was trapped in a nightmare, a hollow shell of myself . . . the walking dead.
I no longer knew who I was. I only knew I would never be the same.
Like wildflowers rising from the ashes, I too, needed to find a way to bloom again after the destruction.

During my "dark night of the soul", I didn't just hope that resurrection was real . . . I needed it to be real.
Hanging every ounce of my faith on that belief, I put one foot in front of the other, and started walking my way out of hell.
I became obsessed with studying psychology, and why some people recover from adversity while others never do.

One of the things I’ve learned from my own healing journey is that when we face traumatic experiences, we unwittingly isolate the part of ourselves that we blame for getting ourselves into the situation in the first place.
It’s as if we splinter off from that part of ourselves - we push it down and shun it.
We unknowingly kill off the best parts of ourselves.

In my own case, I felt like I ended up in the situation in which the trauma occurred because I was too trusting, so my first instinct was to kill off, or at least hide the part of myself that was trusting, so that I would never experience that kind of pain again.
I felt that I was too naïve, too kind, too giving – I wished to get rid of those parts of myself so that I’d be able to survive in the future.

Unfortunately when we do this, we end up feeling dead inside.
We don’t know who we have become – we’ve lost the best parts of ourselves.
We’re operating at only a fraction of our power, and we don’t know why.