The process of growth is physical, emotional, and spiritual.  Because the spirit man is the real man, the growth of the spirit determines the strength of the physical and emotional growth.  The spiritual rejection a person suffers, within the family environment, is the cause of spiritual wounding.  All of the rejection problems we experience throughout our lives can be traced to a breakdown of the God-given cycle of nurturance and growth that comes from our relationship to our parents.  The original manifestation of spiritual rejection  in  each  life  comes through our failure to securely bond with or completely separate from these parents.  In the durability of that bond lies the security of our person; in the strength of that separation lies the integrity of our identity. 

 

No parents are perfect.  Nor is it their job to protect us from all the vagaries of life on this earth.  It is simply their job to give us the resources to cope with whatever comes against us and the resilience to bounce back from whatever knocks us down.  To say that lives rooted and grounded in Christ provide the surest foundation for accomplishing this great purpose is to provide also the food for spiritual growth that matures the child into the "self-actualized" adult, who practices justice, loves with compassion, and walks humbly with his God (Micah 6:8), and who strives from the center of his being to accomplish the purpose for which he was given life.

 

Where the family system is unhealthy and developmental tasks cannot be accomplished, the body suffers, the will is perverted, emotions go haywire, and the soul is dragged naked through the swamp.  But most of all, the spirit itself suffers, which is the center of our human being, the barometer of physical and emotional health.  When the growth of the spirit is stunted, all maturity stops, and instead malformation begins, leaving gaping wounds.  Christian healing thus must be directed at mending the spiritual rents that stopped or perverted growth.  As we minister healing, God transforms. 

When the body is healed, to all outward appearances, what is broken is mended.  But if we realize that what happens when a body heals is that, in the complex microscopic world of varied bio-chemical reactions, damaged cells are replaced by healthy cells, then we can see that physical healing is actually a transformation.  So it is with spiritual healing.  Through the spiritual process of transformation of the inner man, the outer man is made whole. 

 

Self contempt, the food that makes rejection grow, is the thing that stands out the most in Recovery.  You are brought face to face with a person you despise, and you grow to like that person because of the newly found strength to say "No!" to the easy way out.  True Recovery goes beyond the secession of those things that were killing you, but true Recovery is not in bottling up the past either.  Rather, it's as you discover that you can face rejection without triggering self-destruction that you become aware that you have a future. 

 

That's the most frustrating part of early Recovery, when we acknowledge that we are beaten out of being who we were, but we do not yet know who we are, let alone what role life expects us to play.  Most of us remember those wretched, lonely hours when we first faced ourselves in our nakedness.  What now? we cried.  Many of us awakened to find that everything we had was gone - we sat at the bottom of a long, downhill slide.

As my husband emerged from the darkness, he was a new person. However, even though he was no longer in a state of total war with himself, he was still to a great degree missing in action.  The self-destructive patterns that had fit in so neatly with drunken madness had been chopped off.  But the depravation and torture of his early life, along with the deeds he had done and the seeds he had sown, still strived within his flesh to form his definition of himself.

 

Much of what I have written in these chapters is against the backdrop of my husband's great journey into deliverance.  Echoes of the darkest night, that came before the dawn, invariably permeate these pages.  I have no doubt that if you think back to your own final days of free-fall, you can remember the extreme stress a family goes through, waiting for the end to come.  In fierce clarity I can still see him, poised on the edge of his great pain, unwilling to go forward, yet no longer capable of going back.  In that aggressive, intimidating way characteristic of the borderline personality, an explosion in motion, held in only by the confines of the human form, he tottered on the brink of the abyss. 

 

Until the very end, at least on a natural level, I did not know how it would go, if the inevitable phone call would mean death or deliverance.  As he alternated between a blind rage that tore the shelves off the walls, and an obtuse rationality, in which he claimed the right to be comfortable in his morass, I moved forward, with a faith that struck those closest to me as pure lunacy, to set in motion the events that pushed him beyond endurance.  If you want to know the meaning of faith, I suggest you try it:  launching yourself out with the faith of the bird that climbs the sky not knowing if the air will hold it.  You are both certain and afraid.

 

Of course I saw myself in his suffering.  Who of us was not comfortable, lovers and despisers of self in our own private bondages - until the walls came crashing down, till the chickens, coming home to roost, drove us over the edge?  Maybe we all remember something of that nakedness after the fall, when madness was no longer a viable option, when we became aware that we were a product of the choices we had made - when we became aware that, in fact, we had choices.  Then life, at whatever cost, became the only choice.  Maybe you too have lived your life on the border - too logical to be crazy but too outraged to be sane.  Demon possessed and bound up by rejection - what did you have to go through to get to the point of being merely naked.  Or maybe I know.

 

You probably share some of the characteristics of the borderline personality:  1) a pattern of unstable and intense personal relationships alternating between the extremes of overidealization and devaluation;  2) self destructive impulsiveness in spending, sex, substance abuse, shoplifting, reckless driving, or binge eating;  3) emotional instability, shifting from depression to irritability or anxiety, with moods generally lasting from a few hours to a few days;  4) inappropriate, intense anger, possibly accompanied by recurrent physical fights;  5) suicidal threats or self-mutilating behavior;  6) marked and persistent identity disturbance in any or all areas;  7) chronic feelings of emptiness or boredom;  8) frantic efforts to avoid abandonment. 

Do any of these methods of dealing with the impossible reality of a rejected self sound like you?  It doesn't matter what vehicle you chose to ride on to get to hell; the fact is you ended up there.  Prisons, cults, crackhouses, bars, and bathhouses - they are all filled with people who display one or more of these dis-ease producing behavior patterns.  Rejection rides this border.

 

Borderline personality is almost always found in people from abusive backgrounds.  It exists as a result of the failure to bond with both parents.  A child who cannot bond cannot separate either, to form his own identity.  This child in an adult body is always looking for that reflection of himself in his parents' eyes, hoping to find it in each new relationship, reacting in rejection when this proves impossible.  Borderline personality has been seen as:

 

a consequence of a disruption in the development of the self. . . . In early life [the necessary presence of reverie and underlying symbolic play] depends on a sense of "union" with caregivers, in which they are experienced as extensions of the developing individual's subjective life.  Development is disrupted through repeated "impingements" of the social environment, which have an impact on the child rather like that of a loud noise.  This effect arises through actual . . . abuse of various kinds, through high anxiety, and through responses that do not connect with the child's immediate reality and so seem to come from "outside."^[v]

 

The outside voice of rejection and patterns of response that develop as a result of it are ingrained and controlling, especially when they pre-date verbal abilities.

 

Spiritually, borderline people have retreated from life.  They often realize in the womb that they are unwanted children, becoming conditioned to great confusion by fear, hostility, or lack of nurturing communication, typical between a mother and her unborn child.  Therefore, from birth they are at war with themselves, already adept at striking out.  They come into the world as aliens and enemies, after characteristically difficult births.  Even if, through adoption, life somehow suddenly becomes ideal for them, on a spiritual level chaos still rages.  Since all growth comes from spiritual growth, if the spirit is not free to grow, the identity will suffer.

 

But borderline people, who generally go from bad to worse when they are born, are apt to be welcomed into a life under constant attack.  Such a premium on an unsought existence rarely allows them to do anything but react to circumstances and forces beyond their control.  The child on the border lives and moves in a dark world, in which his spirit can never grow beyond what is necessary for absolute, raw survival.  This is the rejected child, who interprets all stimuli as rejection.  In adulthood as in childhood, those who run the border suffer and create suffering.

 

You probably know from your own experience that the prognosis for happiness when all these barriers inhibit "adjustment" is not good.  Psychology, of course, has answers for every price range.  It abounds in therapies, some complicated, some straight-forward, that sometimes bring some favorable results.  In addition to a proliferation of Twelve Step Programs, there are neo-Freudians, behaviorists, cognitive therapists, emotive/rational therapists, and gestalt therapists.  And, of course, there's Bradshaw.  Like the right mate, there's a right therapist with the right therapy out there waiting for you.  If you choose Recovery, you can actually possess the ability and the tools to cross the border to enter the world of the living - where my husband is starting to find himself, in the world of "normal problems." 

 

But how can this imprisoned spirit get free? 

 

Psychology has no cure for the one big fact of your reality:  that you can't go back and take your life over, to bond securely with and separate joyfully from loving, nurturing parents.  Until you can do that, it is almost impossible to learn to react to rejection with something besides anger, even though you have mastered angry responses; or depression, though you have determined to press on.  Nor can you learn intimacy - to accept love, except as a reward for performance, which you have to keep on working for.  Can a man be born again, to re-live his life the right way?

Most definitely.  Not only can he, but Jesus calls us most specifically to do it: 

 

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.  Do not marvel that I said to you, "You must be born anew." (John 3:7 RSV)

 

Yes, a man can and must be born again.  This rebirth is the greatest miracle.  But also, you must be aware that because the Lord paid so great a price for your rebirth, it could not be His intention for you now to live bearing the wounds of the child of the flesh.  Freedom from the bondages of the past - mistrust, guilt, shame, confusion, and failure - this is the freedom that is the essence of what it means to enter the kingdom of God.  "The kingdom of God is secondarily a place," write the Sandfords.  "It is primarily a way of relating to God and to one another without guile and without shame."^[vi] 

 

God has promised liberty to the captive.  The word liberty, found in Isaiah 61:1, fulfilled in Luke 4:18, can be translated from the Hebrew as a "spontaneous outflowing of freedom."  If we choose, through an act of the will, to be born again, we can also choose to surrender our new spiritual lives to the transforming growth that is the promise of our new identity in God.  That growth, born of incorruptible seed (1 Peter 1:23), is the stuff of healing and the miracle of the second chance.  It is a life freed from the curse of rejection.  And He gives it willingly, compassionately, to all who seek.  All He asks of us is faith.  Says the Lord: I will restore health to you, and I will heal your wounds, because they called you an outcast (Jeremiah 30:17 Amp.).  Child of the King, you're going home.

 

JESUS CHRIST, THE SAME TODAY

 

Jesus is the healer.  Hebrews 13:9 tells us Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.  Jesus heals today just as He healed when He walked the earth.  He can heal anything, anyone, anytime, or anywhere.  Jesus is unbounded by time.  He can go with us back into our past.  In a way that no human counselor but only the Spirit of God can fathom or direct, He heals our wounds and takes away the pain of our memories.  We relive our past with Him in it.  The original therapist, He enables us to strip down and face our darkest shame.  The author of perfection, He heals by the very miracle of His presence, breaking down the walls of time and brushing the events of our lives with the seal of eternity.  Jesus, who owns the end of our road, rewrites our past to take us firmly and securely to it.

 

            Ruth Carter Stapleton writes:

 

Because Jesus can bring His timeless presence into what we call "the past," He can bring the re-creative power of God to bear upon events that have already transpired.  He promises to hear our prayer and answer before we even ask. 

 

Jesus said that he was a part of the historical past in the present:  "Before Abraham was, I am."  Therefore, we can believe that He can travel back with us through our short history. 

 

He can heal painful emotions by bringing His presence into the events formed by imperfect relationships.  There, with infinite compassion, He heals and strengthens our bruised spirits and hurting hearts.  The unique capacity of the mind of Christ is to allow maturity to evolve by providing the foundation of a healed past.^[vii]

 

"Jesus," write the Sandfords, "is able to transcend time and identify with us at any stage of our development to set us free from those dated emotions and expectations which shape the basic structure of our being and hold us in bondage."^[viii]

Jesus was with us in the past.  We just didn't know He was there.  We could not see Him then; we cannot begin to appreciate the depths of His compassion for us as we struggled in the darkness of the abuse and alienation that we suffered.  But now, as we surrender it, He will heal our past.

Healing is only a matter of asking for it and then receiving it.  But He wants all of us.  He will not heal us unless we are willing to surrender every fear and every desire for self-protection.  He will not heal us until we take the journey back with Him to the source of the pain.  As we allow ourself to trust Him, He is there with us, looking at us with compassionate eyes.  Where trial and trauma bent us and bowed us over, He strengthens us and lifts us up.  The transformation manifests:  the broken record of our past becomes our testimony to His Glory.

 

God's inner healing is such that, when we are ready to ask for it, we are ready to receive it.  If you doubt, you cannot ask.  If you believe those who told you that you can't rewrite the past - including your therapist, your pastor, your recovery groups, your spouse, your friends, and your relations - they will be right.  But what do they know about the King of Kings, who makes all things new?  They would have you believe you must forget the past, when you have tried and tried and still can't make it go away.  But Jesus is not restricted by anything but human unbelief.  He is surely not limited by time.  He is timeless and the Creator of time.  He is God.  He can heal anything, infusing our measure of faith with more faith.  He says to us what He told the father of the child with the deaf and dumb spirit: 

 

"All things are possible to him who believes."  Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, "I believe; help my unbelief!"(Mark 9:24 RSV)

 

Believe!  Jesus is God.  He can heal any doubt.  Who are these human creatures to limit Him, who is limitless?  He can heal anything!  Believe what He said, that all things are possible.   He can even heal the deepest pains of the wounded heart:  the ravages of war, the obscenity of incest, the blight of abandonment.  He can heal rejection, of any kind, anywhere.  He takes the pain of the past away.  He gives new life.  Pray now:  Lord, I believe you will heal me.  Help Thou my unbelief.

All healing must begin with the healing of rejection.  No healing can be completed until rejection is dealt with, because the pain will always be waiting there to snare you.  And you are reading this now because you are ready to be healed.  Just ask yourself, right now, if you are ready to get rid of some of the pain.  If you are, right now, stay with me.

Next, you need to make sure there is no unforgiveness in your life that hasn't been dealt with.  You can't go to God for healing with bitterness in your heart.  If you want to be healed, say a prayer of forgiveness, forgiving those who have wounded you the most.

And now I ask you:  Are you ready?  And if you are, then we need to pray.  We utter the Name above all names:  Jesus.  See Him open the door to the throne room, as we center down upon His Presence, as we speak His name:  Jesus.

 

Jesus.  Father God, we come before your throne now, through the power in the Name of your Son.  We come now because you have promised us healing.  You promised that you would make all things new, that the old things would pass away.  You promised us, Jesus, to bind up broken hearts.  We come before you now with a heart that has been broken.  We come for that healing.  We ask you now to enter into our hearts, our lives.  We believe in you, Lord, for the promises you have given are true.  Holy Spirit, we wait on you.  We pray in Jesus' Name.  So be it, amen.

 

In His Presence all is silent.  Then the Anointing comes.  And we are ready. 

 

I ask you now to close your eyes, to remember a scene, to picture it, that scene you connect most with rejection.  We are going to the heart of the matter, not fooling around on the fringes.  Here the Holy Spirit takes over.  He knows the scene well, and so do you.  Fear not:  He will not take you back to where you are not ready to go.  He will heal you layer upon layer.  He knows what you need most today.

 

And so, as your face changes into the look of another time, you are back there.  The old emotions try to come to the surface, but they are of the flesh.  You are in the spirit, under the Anointing of God.  You can see what you were feeling, but you need not feel it.  If I were with you, I would then ask you to describe what you see, steadying you to awareness.  The minister becomes a video screen for this scene in your head, that is so real to you.  You would carefully describe what you see:  in a voice that  might contain scorn or agony, that might be the voice of a child who is afraid or of a person who long ago gave up. 

 

Next I want you to look toward the door.  Can you see it?  I know you can see this door very clearly because everything in this room is familiar. 

Jesus is going to come through that door. 

 

You are going to see the light first, because wherever Jesus is, there is light.  He's going to come through that door, to shine His light upon this familiar scene.  He's going to change it completely and forever.  Can you see it?  Can you see the light? 

 

I know now that your face is changing in anticipation of the miracle that is about to happen.  I know because many times I have listened to people describe for me what they are seeing.  I know the look that comes on a person's face when Jesus opens that prison door, that sudden gasp that comes when the light pours in. 

 

When He enters the room, I step back; it's His show now.  I sit, I listen to you, and I listen to the Holy Spirit.  Jesus comes into the scene.  By His Presence He changes it, making all things new, making false things true.  He touches every memory with the light of His Presence.  You watch Him, talk with Him, experience what He brings you.  As the child you were goes to Him in perfect faith, He reorders the source of your deprivation till your long buried needs are met.  His approving smile transforms your spirit to the very depth of all you are.  He puts your broken heart back together, just as He promised in His Word.

 

We sit for a while.  Oh, sometimes the Holy Spirit prompts me to intervene, if you lose your nerve, to restore your trust, when He wants something for you that you haven't yet received, or if it is necessary for me to get things moving again.  But most of the time, His power is so overwhelming, His grace so easy, His authority so masterful, and His joy so great, that He does what He's going to do, and then it's over.  This scene that so typified all the rejection you suffered in your life loses its ability to hurt you.  And at the end we always cry, because it's so beautiful, and because, in that room in your mind where Satan used to rule, there is now rejoicing and restoration.  Never again will that scene give you pain.  Rejection is bowing its knee to the King of Kings.

 

The rejection in my life centered around my father, whom I had feared and hated, a selfish, critical, unbending man who wanted things his own way and moved to actively crush anyone who tried to upset his well-ordered balance.  It was true I had forgiven him, but when I saw him, in that room in my mind, sitting in his chair, behind his newspaper, it was impossible to describe my feelings for him as love.  When Jesus entered the room in a flood of light, He looked at me sitting there alone, awkward, sullen, and uncomfortable in myself, and He smiled slightly, a bedazzling witness of an inward illumination that brought me to attention.   As Jesus approached him, my father looked up.  He didn't see Jesus but looked at me from where he sat within the circle of the Lord's light.  "I love you," he said to me.  "I've always loved you.  I just didn't know how to let you know." 

 

It was not a long speech for all those years of rejection, but it went to the heart, as I knew it came from the heart.  Suddenly everything changed; my life was rewritten - because I knew my father loved me.  And from that day forward I loved my father, still no easy task, since he hadn't changed.  He didn't know that I had seen inside his prison, in an instant, with an eternal clarity of vision, to the heart of a man who had never learned what love was meant to be.  In the long, dark starvation of his childhood, he had never learned that a child cannot recognize a father's love if it is held inside - and no one had ever showed him how to give it.

 

God wants all His children to be healed, to let Jesus come in so that He can heal the memories that wounded our spirits when we were cast aside and rejected by those we depended on for spiritual life.  When God wanted me healed, He directed my path to healing.  It was soon after I was saved.  Anxious to grow, yet not knowing where to find God, I went looking through the religion section of the public library.  As I was browsing and musing, wondering what I needed to read, Ruth Carter Stapleton's book on inner healing fell off the shelf.  God wanted me to know where healing could be found.  I learned what it meant to let Jesus come in.  God is no respecter of persons; what He does for one, He will do for another.  Believe it:  you wouldn't be reading this now, if God didn't want you healed.  There are no coincidences in the Kingdom of Heaven. 

 

Having ministered this way to many people through these last few years, I find that, especially among women, whose experiences with their fathers are so similar, healing comes in much the same way.  Many people have heard their parents say almost the same words my father said when they moved into the light of the Lord's redemptive purposes.  The problem, it turns out, is not the lack of love at all - but the inability to communicate it.

 

A CREATIVE ART

 

Spiritual healing is true healing, transforming from the inside out.  Healing that does not touch the essential person cannot bring down prison walls.

We are essentially created as a spirit.  It's the real, essential us.  As "our spirit experiences the events of life in our body and reacts,"^[ix] the soul - part nature, part nurture - forms our personality.  Animating the physical and soulish parts of our being, the spirit enables us to fulfill those purposes which give us life beyond existence:  to worship, to rejoice with all creation, and to communicate.  In communication, we are brought to enter into intimate and personal relationship with other people and with God.  But as your spirit became trapped and twisted by the reality of your past existence, you lost your capacity to accomplish those spiritual functions for which the essential you was created.  When the last of these spiritual functions, communication, is not foundational to a child's life, the spirit aches for its loneliness. 

 

Something deep and vital is at work in communication.  Communication forms the identity, since a person can never truly comprehend self except in relation to others.  There is a continual, necessary striving in man to relate, "to reach out across space beyond the body and sometimes beyond the five senses to meet and interact with others."^[x]  The deep, intimate interchange that takes place in human relationships is indefinable except in spiritual terms.  It is in that perfect communication, a spark when iron strikes iron, that a person first learns of love.

 

God divinely ordained communication to be the essence of art.  Even as the Word spoken by God created the perfect beauty that is the substance and structure and glory and whimsy of the natural world, so too man reaches the highest level of communication when, from the depths of his being, he strives to create beauty to which others respond.  The symmetry, the harmony, the pressure bursting out from the center of soul to be caught in form, color, and passion - through the essence of others captured in art, the individual experiences both himself and God.

Prayer, too, is a creative art.  As a character in Agnes Sanford's novel explains:  "One of the laws of creativity is that a person must fix his attention on the thing that he desires to create and believe that it is going to be accomplished."^[xi]  Revisiting a familiar verse, we see that Jesus was saying this very thing:

 

Whoever says to this mountain, "Be taken up and cast into the sea," and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him.(Mark 11:23 RSV)

 

That which you have created in your heart through faith comes to pass.

 

Think of it.  God did not speak creation into being using elaborate blueprints.  Instead, He spoke a Word, and that which had already come to exist in His imagination began.  Similarly, our prayer for healing is not the words we speak; with the eyes of the spirit, we see Jesus.  It is both a picture and a recognition of the love we have always craved, shot from eternity straight to the heart of man.

 

Then the miracle of transformation takes place.  He opens the door in the wall that sin has made around the hearts of those who were damaged before we knew them, and we know their essential selves, made in God's image, which is love.  What was broken is restored.

 

Brenda's healing is coming over many sessions.  In His time, Jesus is taking her through the whole bonding process to restore what was missing from her life.  But it was her spiritual reconciliation with her mother that was both the most moving and the most illustrative of the way in which Jesus takes the imagination to work miracles on the child's behalf.  When Brenda closed her eyes, she saw the place where she had lived as a young child.  Her grandfather had just come in drunk.  She described what she saw:

 

"All the kids are scattering to their hiding places.  We all had our hiding places, but I was the littlest, so the other kids were always taking mine.  Yes, somebody's already in mine, so I'm running around trying to find another one.  He's yelling at my grandmother, swearing at her, telling her to get his dinner.  There, now his pants are falling down again.  I can't believe I'm in this place - it's just the same.  Everybody's really scared of Grampa.  He was a horrible, evil man." 

 

Then, as Brenda narrated, her grandfather sat down to dinner, and Jesus came through the door.  His light came in first, pulling back the shadows that hung over the room.  He was dressed in a brilliant white robe.

 

"Why is He going over to Grampa?" Brenda asked.  "I would think He would want to find us, to comfort us.  Now my Grampa is getting up.  He's hitching up his pants, tucking in his shirt.  Jesus is touching him; he's crying.  My grandfather is crying.  He's asking Jesus to forgive him for everything that he's done.  Now Jesus is putting His hand on his shoulder.  And Grampa is saying, `I believe in you, Lord, please forgive me.'  And Jesus is forgiving him.  This is really incredible.  I've never seen him look like this before; it's like his face has just been untwisted.  Now he's going over to my grandmother.  `Lois,' he's saying, `will you forgive me for all the terrible things I've done to you?'  She says she forgives him.  Now, look, all the kids are beginning to come out of their hiding places.  We're all gathering around them.  Everyone is happy and hugging each other.  This is my family!  Look, we're laughing and wiggling and trying to get up into Jesus' lap.  But nobody's pushing.  There's room for all of us in His arms."

 

"Is your mother there?" I asked.

 

"Yes, she's over in the chair.  Now Jesus is going over to her.  She's taking His hand.  She says that she's always believed in Him.  She's telling Him she's sorry for the way she has acted."

 

"She loves you," I felt moved to say.

 

"My mother?" Brenda shuddered.  "No, she doesn't love me."

 

"Why don't you ask her?"

 

"I can't ask her that.  Oh, Jesus, help me.  I must know.  `Mother, do you love me?'  She says she loves me. `Well, why didn't you ever let me know?  Why didn't you ever show it?'  She's saying she was afraid to."  With that, the darkness of her childhood cracked.  Brenda stopped. 

 

"Could that be it, that she had been so hurt in her life she was afraid to show love?"  She stood up.  "I've got to call my brother," she said. "I've got to find out if my mother is still alive."

 

MAKING CROOKED PATHS STRAIGHT

 

And I will bring the blind by a way that they knew not; I will lead them in the paths that they have not known:  I will make the darkness light before them, and crooked things straight.  These things will I do unto them, and not forsake them. (Isaiah 42:16 KJ)

 

If we want to grow in the spirit, we must allow Jesus to release our identity from the bondages which trapped it in immaturity.  We must grow beyond the capacity of rejection to wound us.  Because no one can physically be born again to live life over, this new growth must be spiritual.

 

We need to be able to walk fearless back with Jesus through the circumstances of our lives, to arrive at an inward understanding of what went wrong.  We need to find those developmental hurdles we plowed into, so that Jesus can now help us sail across them.  As we use creative prayer, He will show us the forces of fear, distrust, and insecurity that prevented our bonding and separation from our natural parents.  Through His intercession - a promise made to all the saints when He ascended into heaven -  Jesus, the perfect man, will become our perfect parent, whose purpose is to instruct us, guide us, catch us when we fall, and teach us to rely on ourselves.  He is the missing father.  He is the role model, the flawless blend of compassion and strength we've long for all our lives.   Be imitators of God, as beloved children, Paul instructs us (Ephesians 5:1).  From His divine vitality, maturity and balance flow into our soul.  As we grow before our spiritual eyes, we see Him acknowledge and rejoice in our perfect true self, and we see in His smiling eyes the affirmation of our identity as a complete, whole man; a complete, beautiful woman. 

 

Our healing comes by the power at work within us, the Spirit of God, that is able to do far more abundantly than all we ask or think (Ephesians 3:20).  The great mystery, the action that springs from faith, frees us to grow into who we were always meant to be.  This process of transforming growth, accomplished by incremental leaps and bounds in God's perfect time, will indeed make all things new.

A condition of halted development, homosexuality is most influenced by an unaffirmed and unaffirming father figure.  The child's identity is fixated in the self-seeking crisis of adolescence.  Agnes Sanford, a pioneer in healing spiritual memories, used creative prayer in the healing of homosexual orientation, by redirecting perverted sexual energy into a "creative flow" from God.  She explained:

 

What we call sexual is only a part of the whole creative flow of God's life within us.  So I think of God's life in us like a river that perhaps has been dammed up at some point.  At any rate, for some reason it has overflowed its banks, has come into an area where it does not belong . . .

And so I lay hands on this person . . . then I pray for His life coming in to look at this river and bring it right back to its normal channel.  I do this very pictorially, and sometimes I say, "Now by faith I dig the channel deep and wide.  In the Name of Jesus Christ I say this creative energy from now on shall flow in its normal channel, and it shall not overflow anymore to the right hand or to the left hand.  I build high dikes on the right hand and on the left hand and in Jesus' Name I command that it shall not overflow to the left hand or the right hand, but it shall flow quietly in its normal channel."  ^[xii]

 

"Agnes," writes Leanne Payne, "though speaking to God, is praying in a picture language that the sufferer's deep mind can grasp.  In this way her prayer does not lay a burden on his beleaguered conscious mind."^[xiii] Agnes asserts:

 

This person cannot cope with this difficulty in the conscious mind . . . .  No use reasoning and arguing . . . the more he worries about it, the worse it gets.  I always tell the man, don't even pray about it; you can't do that; it will be done for you; you just leave it alone.^[xiv]

 

"During this prayer," writes Leanne Payne, "the faith that by-passes the conscious mind is released as the person sees with the eyes of his heart a symbolic picture of his own healing."  Under the Anointing of God that always comes when His faithful servants minister to those whose broken and contrite hearts have brought them before Him, the healing begins.  The sufferer, as he begins to participate in his own deep healing, is set free.  Agnes states simply:

 

It's not hard.  It's an easy kind of prayer.  Just kind of lift it up a bit - there it is, you see, it's God's flow of creativity.  It has just overflowed.  Bring it back, lift it up.^[xv]

 

In a homosexual, no characteristic predominates so much as the way in which all tensions within the unaffirmed identity drift back toward the vortex of a never-satisfied love of self:  the compulsive return to erotic self-stimulation, a narcissistic preoccupation with physical appearance, or an  obsessive lapsing into introspection.  This tragic pain of "dis-relation," a life-long yearning for intimacy from a distant parent, will vanish as through Him all relationships are renewed.

 

Homosexuality, however, is just a severe manifestation of the same identity stunting that we all have suffered from.  The homosexual's inordinate love - the inability to ever love the image of self in another enough to satisfy - is no different from any other co-dependency.   It forms a prison, the strength of which lies in whatever manner demonic forces inform the identity.  The bondage is loved for itself, not only for the rush, but for the comfort of the habit.  It is cherished even though, perhaps even because, the end of these things is death.

 

Healing for each of us comes in the acceptance of self - not of a broken self that finds security and affirmation in the gay lifestyle or that of any other dysfunctional subgroup - but the acceptance of self as a child of God.  The rebuilding of identity cannot be completed without the putting on of Christ, the Son of God and Son of Man.  In putting Him on, writes Leanne Payne

 

every thought of the mind and every picture of the heart is brought into subjection to Christ  - a real "practice of the Presence."  This is no exercise in abstraction, or even of positive thinking (though it is that and more), but a waiting on Him, who is within, without, and all around us, the utter Reality who is capable at any moment of manifesting Himself to the creatures He has fashioned in His own image.  Thus we are "made new in mind and spirit, and put on the new nature of God's creating."

 

Having put Him on, we know that another is Lord, Another is in charge.  Having received Him into ourselves, we know that Another lives through us.  The fruits of His indwelling Presence [love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, and self-control (Ephesians 4:23)] now issue through us to other, and we who are the channels are healed as well as others in their fragrant, wholesome atmosphere.  The gifts of this Presence - the power to know, to say, to act - is ours, and we become the masterpiece of harmony God intended us to be.  The work of our hands is affirmed.  In union and communion with Him, our fragmented souls are drawn together in one harmonious whole even as the pieces of a complex puzzle fall in place under the guidance of a masterful hand. . . .

 

The Presence calls forth the true self, up and out of the hell of the false old self, in what can best be described as a resurrection.  The true self, with one face, no longer repressed, fearful, or unsteady, shakes off the old pseudo-selves with their myriad faces, and comes boldly forward, gathering all that is valid and real in the personality into itself. We are untied within.  It is then we realize the freedom to live out from that center of our being, that place where His Spirit indwells ours, and our will is one with His.  We begin to practice not only His Presence, but the presence of the new man.  We are free from practicing the presence of the old man in whom the principle of death and evil holds sway, and also that of the immature man who is yet under a law.^[xvi]

 

 THE LOST CHILDREN COME HOME

 

I will say to the north, "Give them up!" and to the south, "Do not hold them back!"  Bring my sons from afar, and my daughters from the ends of the earth -

Even every one who is called by My Name:  whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made. (Isaiah 43:6-7 NIV)

 

When we are born of the Spirit, we put on the capacity to choose.  We could not choose our parents.  We did not choose most of the roads rejection pushed us down.  But we chose life when God put that choice before us.  And we choose growth in the spirit so that the old man will be put to death.  In choosing life, we have become the master of choice.

 

But the ministry of reconciliation that began with God in Christ reconciling the world to Himself speaks to the reconciliation of not only spirit.  We who live on this earth are spirit, but we must live in a body and live through a soul.  We might be adopted spiritually into the family of God, but we still bear the imprint of our parents, whose body and soul is replicated in that genetic matter in every cell that makes us who we are.

 

You are your parents and their parents and their parents.  The flesh you have hated and indulged and served - it's their flesh.  The predispositions of soul that you were born wrestling with came from your parents also.  Upon you, through them, fell the sins of many generations.  Jesus, the sin offering, came to destroy the power of the darkness over your body and soul, to break the curse of sin and death in your life.  Your choice to accept His sacrifice and to believe in the power of His resurrection set your spirit free. 

 

As your profession of faith restores you - the lost sheep, the prodigal child - to the Father, your reconciliation becomes the reconciliation of those who came before.  So, the Lord has promised, shall ye reconcile the house (Ezekiel 45:20).  Your reconciliation to God, when it is made perfect and complete, is also the reconciliation of generations in you.

 

Therefore, one last prayer is crucial if the reborn individual is to come into final, complete acceptance of self:  a prayer for the acceptance of your parents.  And so once again we speak His Name:  Jesus.  Come into, practice, His Presence.  Jesus.

 

Father God, I thank you for creating my parents [my father, my mother] in your image.  I have, with all my heart, forgiven them for not becoming all that you created them to be.  I thank you for the healing that I am receiving, the healing that my parents also needed to receive.  I thank you now, Father God, that the healing you have given me is fully manifesting in the life that my parents gave me.  I thank you that you have set me free to go on to become all that I was intended to be. 

 

Father, I now choose to love and accept my parents, because you have enabled me to see that, though our relationships may never change, beyond their bondages they have always loved me.  I accept my parents as they are, as unhealed and needy people.  There but for your grace go I.  Father, I thank you for your grace that has loosed my identity and freed me to grow.  I thank you, Father, for the growth that has now become a part of me. 

 

Through your grace, Father God, I will now see my parents as the people you intended them to be.  Whenever I see them, whether face to face or in my memory, I will see them through the eyes of the spirit that you have opened for me.  I thank you that through their life in me, in every cell in my body, through every imprint in my memory, they are being healed.  Thank you that my spirit is receiving at last the healing that will break the curse of rejection.

 

To you, Father God, be all the glory and all the honor and all the praise.  To you, Jesus, I give all my love, for saving me, for touching me, for making me all that you want me to be, both now and forever.  And to you, Holy Spirit, I give this life, that you might use it to the glory of God.  Your Kingdom come on this earth, Lord.  Your kingdom come in me.  In Jesus' Name, let it be.