Four years ago in March I got shingles.  My age made this a little surprising.  It came out of nowhere and knocked me off my feet.  If you have ever had shingles you know how very painful it can be.  The actual sores were not even the worst part, the nerve pain that came shortly after the sores felt like I was being zapped by a stun gun over and over.  For weeks the pain was at times unbearable.  My dear husband would just hold me while I slept because I would cry even in my sleep.

While it felt like a lot longer, that intense pain only lasted a few weeks.  The sores formed scabs and the pain decreased in intensity.  As the weeks went by I felt better and better.  That summer I would get reminders of the pain when the sun would touch my skin.  I would briefly feel like I was being burned by a cigarette where the sores had been.  Thankfully, by fall even those reminders were gone.  Now shingles are just something that happened to me and I have moved on.

A couple of years ago when our daughter’s health started to rapidly decline I felt that same knock me off my feet feeling.  While this was emotional pain versus the physical pain I experienced with shingles, this pain was so sharp and so real that it would take my breath away.  Waves of it would hit me when I would least expect it.  It was hard to go to church, go to the grocery store, or sit in bible study during prayer requests and not cry.  My heart was as raw as my skin had been.

Life for us stood still.  That is one strange thing about grief.  It is so consuming that it seems incomprehensible that the world around you keeps moving forward while you feel utterly stuck.  I remember the loneliness and sadness that was present with every breath I took for months.

Like with shingles, as time passed it seemed that my heart started to form a scab over the gaping hole.  We were adjusting to our circumstances and our new normal.  Each day we got up and walked with Jesus through every hard thing we had to do.  And do you know what, it felt less hard.  We found purpose in our pain and that carried us through.

Every so often though, out of no where, the scabs on my heart felt like my skin when the sun would shine on it that first summer after shingles.  It was strange the things that would trigger this reaction.  It could be a running into someone at Target, an Instagram photo of one of her friends, or simply sitting down to dinner and seeing her chair empty because she could no longer eat any solid food anymore.  That searing pain came roaring back to life.

Healing is a process.  You can’t predict how long it will take or what exactly it will look like, but eventually healing does happen.  One day I sat in the sun and my skin no longer burned.  I looked up at the sun and smiled.  I could still remember what it felt like but the pain was no longer present.  This week I experienced another moment like that.  Michelle, Katie and I were getting ready to go to the season opener for our school’s show choir season.  Usually this would have been something that would have tugged at the scab on my heart.  This year I was able to sit and watch with a joyful heart.  Yes, I could remember the pain of saying goodbye to this part of our world, it was one of the hardest things to leave behind.  The pain however had been replaced by peace.  I looked up to the SON and smiled.  Thank you Jesus, thank you for healing.  Thank you for leading me back to joy again.

If your heart is raw, if you feel like your world is standing still while every one else around you is moving on, take a breath….Hold on…..Healing will happen.  One day you will walk into a situation that would have tugged at your scab and it won’t.  You will find with joy that your heart feels whole.  I hope you will look up, smile and thank Jesus too.

“He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.” Psalm 147:3