Healing: Falling Back Into The Valley

Last year during the Texas cold-snap, I had to abandon my apartment for 4 days for lack of electricity. We were one of the many who awoke that morning to a 50 degree apartment. We tried to wait it out, but by 1pm, it was down to 45 degrees inside with no hint of electricity to break the chill. Knowing we couldn't stay, my roommate and I packed a week's worth of clothes into bags and prepared to leave. As we locked up, I shut all the blinds at the advice of the internet to try and trap as much heat in as possible. Looking back, that seems backwards and incorrect, but at the time, I had no idea it would be Thursday before the world began to thaw and we could go back to our apartment.

Days later, when we unlocked the door, the smell of death poured out as we walked in. It was warm in our apartment now, the heat having been on full blast since the night before when the electricity came back. As soon as we walked in, I could see the source of the foul air was my beloved plants. In the cold and the dark, my indoor plants which I had tried to lovingly foster into flourishing had died. The money tree and new fiddle leaf sapling that framed my bedroom window were both completely withered, their brown leaves hanging limp and sad when I walked in the room. The new Calathea Rufibarba I had bought just the week before, big, bushy, and thriving, was now completely dead.

The four new leaves on my bigger fiddle, my favorite plant, had also died and I wound up having to prune the entire top of the plant off. I prayed over it as I made the diagonal incision on its trunk, begging it to survive. (It certainly did, and the Lord was kind, but cutting away that new growth was no less painful, and there in itself is a metaphor all it's own.)

My ZZ Plant, which I was told was indestructible had turned black and looked past saving.

I salvaged what I could from all of them, pruning carefully, begging the remaining leaves to hang on. Some of my plants were beyond help, no amount of pruning could revive them. The money tree and baby fiddle dropped their remaining leaves within a week, leaving no way for them to turn light into food and recover. Just dry bony stalks sticking out of the dirt.

For a long time, the plants that remained stayed stagnant. They didn't get worse, but they also didn't show signs of life.

How appropriate a picture that seems to me looking back.

I started this series on healing in a different state of mind. I was working through some things, sure. We all are at any given time, but I was doing well. I was not prepared to be suddenly plunged into a season of darkness. Blinds shut. Air cold. Struggling to focus on the Light. All my words about healing suddenly finding themselves frivolous and futile.

How do you write about healing when you find yourself sliding back down the hill? When aching hands grab for a root or a rock to cling to and come up with nothing more than fistfuls of mud?

It felt an impossible task. And I have to admit now, that coming back to the subject after 8 months away is more than a little humbling. When I started the series I made an internal pact to be diligent to finish it. To not let it slip away due to busy-ness or poor planning. I didn't plan on not having the emotional capacity to pull it off. I didn't plan on spaces that once felt healed being torn back open. Then after a while, the shame of a project left unfinished but already launched into the world, kept me from coming back.

But there were things in those once-healed places that still needed to be excavated. Things the Lord still wanted to show me. Ways He still wanted to mold me into more of the image of His beloved Son.  And I'm learning again that healing in some senses, is a life long process and is seldom linear.

So here I am, returning again now that I can feel life in bones again, now that new leaves have begun to bud on the edges of pruned branches. Coincidentally, the ZZ plant I thought was dead sprouted two entirely new stalks, brighter and greener than the ones before it and my large fiddle now has two branches instead of one straight stalk. They still struggle in someways, but they've fought for life and come out on the other side.

We never finish healing this side of heaven.  It's a beautiful, painful, horrible, miraculous life-long process, and as I've said from the beginning it does not bend to time. So if you find yourself on the mountain top, or in the valley, or just plunged back into the depths of a wound that once felt healed, know that you are in process, and that's exactly where the Lord loves to work.