The Big Shift that Heals

“Is life happening TO you or FOR you?”

When this question was posed to me, it stopped me dead in my tracks.

I had been trying to process the events of the past five years. They were a rough five years, and the recent “emotional inflammation” of world events and some new personal challenges had triggered still unprocessed issues.  It felt important to revisit the traumas of the past several years from the perspective of this question.

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It all started in 2015, with a dental crisis. Then my husband was forcibly retired, and the family lost our medical insurance, not to mention his income. We had to fight his employer to get unemployment insurance.

My son was also laid off at the same time. My husband’s sister, Connie, got cancer and was put on hospice. My husband became her Power of Attorney, and we discovered Connie’s caregiver had been stealing money from her. What was especially painful is the caregiver saw to it that the money Connie was going to send my daughter for her college education was taken, and it was uncertain how my daughter was going to finish college.

My website was hacked and my friend who was helping me abandoned me. Dealing with that whole situation led to a legal issue with a particularly slimy company that lasted for months.

Then Connie died, and her former caregiver caused us more legal issues. We had to settle that estate and sell a house out of state. In the midst of dealing with all that, when we were out of town, our basement flooded. A good friend whom I relied on for support told me that very day that God was punishing me. (Sudden end to friendship.)

We learned months later a mold issue developed after the flood. My beloved cat died of cancer, probably as a result of being in that moldy basement a lot. Our finished basement was gutted, and we lost all the contents (mostly books and our Christmas decorations).

My mother had two strokes, and I lost the close relationship we had finally forged over the prior few years once she couldn’t really communicate after the strokes. On top of that, I was made her Power of Attorney, which caused all kinds of family issues. I realized, after a visit out there in 2017, that there was absolutely no support from those quarters, and there never was. (Reading Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect by Dr. Jonice Webb has helped me understand the dynamics of that situation.)

The worst of  it all was the weekend in May 2018 when two horrendous things happened: I almost lost my entire database (which is any business’s greatest asset), AND my dear friend and neighbor of 20+ years, who was like a big sister to me, was brutally murdered, along with her husband, in her own home. Nancy was like a grandmother to our son; she raised her grandson, who was my son’s best friend, as I raised my son.

This isn’t even all of it, just the lowest of the lowlights. Enough to give you a picture of what we think of as “the tsunami” of unfortunate events. Just as we were beginning to feel like we were “getting back to normal”–the pandemic hit.

I don’t think I would have gotten through all that if it weren’t for The Healing Codes and healing prayer, in particular Immanuel Prayer, and the support of other people. Honestly, I’m still working on some of it, especially the grief of all the losses, Nancy in particular.

Back to the question, “Is life happening TO you or FOR you?”

If life is happening TO me, I will feel like a victim. I will seek to escape things, or try to control what happens. I will live in fear of what may happen. I will remain tethered to the painful things that have already happened, and seek (subconsciously) to avoid anything like it happening again.

But what if I allowed myself to believe that life is happening FOR me? That God has the ability and the will to turn any painful experience into at least a lesson, perhaps even a gift? (Isn’t that what Romans 8:28 states?)

I do not believe, by the way, that somehow my soul “chooses” and attracts terrible things so that I can evolve into a higher state. I remember someone responding to that philosophy very vehemently. She had been raised in an extremely abusive home. “There is no way I will ever believe that I would have chosen those parents and that family! What a cruel philosophy!” I could really see her point.

I believe there is a force in this world that is against all goodness. Call it entropy, sin, or Satan–there is something that works against goodness in the world.

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But there is something else stronger–God–who has committed himself to turning all things for good, who has in fact triumphed over evil in Jesus Christ. So those who align themselves with this God put themselves in the path of that principle working for them. Those who resist this grace fall prey to the forces that pull us down.

If I believe that indeed, God is working all things for my good, then I can be grateful for the lessons I learned. I can feel confident that because of those lessons, I can perhaps avoid similar incidents. Or at least know I’ll be OK if things like it happen again.

I can look for the gifts that can come from the painful and traumatic experiences.

Some of the gifts I see from my “tsunami”: I know now how to settle an estate (which I will need, as I’m my mom’s executor). From the betrayals of others, I learned to assess a person’s capacity for intimacy and trust. Having been duped by Connie’s caregiver and some other con artists I won’t mention, I’m less naive and more discerning. I found better tools for running my business.

God even brought something beautiful out of Nancy’s terrible death: an Immanuel Prayer experience that I lean on every day, especially as evil seems to rear its ugly head with every newscast.

There’s also some gentle irony in some of the lessons. For instance, for years I berated myself for not “decluttering” my office by putting more books in the basement. Yet, had I done so, I would have lost those books as well. I believe that God knew just which of my precious books I actually needed to retain. Here I was, unnecessarily beating myself up for my “procrastination,” while all the time God was preserving something he knew I would need. Perhaps God has a purpose behind even my “weaknesses.”

Yet another gift: In the process of my own healing journey, I’ve developed some new healing approaches that are helping me, and will help others, to face the “tsunamis” of life. (Which of course, with the pandemic and all the fallout of that, everyone is dealing with.)

What about you? Is life happening TO you, or FOR you? How might your life’s narrative shift if you adopted the view that life is happening FOR you, and you began to see the gifts?

If you’d like some personalized help to shift from “life is happening TO me,” to “life is happening FOR me” by healing your heart issues, consider getting some coaching. The Healing Codes, and the tools of my own that I’ve developed, can help you align with your divine design and find the love, joy, peace, purpose and fulfillment you know you were meant to experience.