In the time since I started this blog in 2017, I have traveled through some difficult and uncomfortable places, in my mind, in my heart. This has made it hard for me to share more about the songs on my CD Survivor. I realized that I had to deal with many questions about what I really believe, if I can still stand by what I wrote and sang in my songs.
Before, in 2008 when I first wrote down the lyrics for Your Word, I was involved in the Healing ministry at Church and was struck by the hope and possibilities of the power of our faith in God to affect our lives. I personally had experienced several supernatural (unexplainable) healings.
One experience in particular is clear in my mind to this day: we were living in Bluffton, Ohio and the year was sometime mid-1990s. I was alone at home with my three young children while my husband was away on a business trip. In the middle of cooking a meal I grabbed a cast iron pan from the stove not realizing the burner was very hot. It took a second for me to realize that I was burning my hand. I dropped the pan and called out an earnest prayer that God would heal my hand. As the evening progressed I realized that my hand was perfectly fine, not even a trace on the affected area. I was convinced that God answered my prayer!
In the years after that I prayed regularly for my needs and for the needs of my family and the people I knew. Many amazing things did happen, like the sudden disappearance after ten years of my chronic back pain, even though the pain returned again and again in the years that followed. Still, I was convinced that healing was possible.
At the time of writing the song, Your Word, I was dealing with ever worsening problems with my eyes that ended me up in the hospital for the first time in my life. During this time in the hospital I experienced fears and anxieties that I had never been aware of before. I began to realize deep areas in me that needed healing, emotional healing. For me, trusting and believing that God can heal me has not been enough. In the process of dealing with very hard situations in the years that followed – both physical and emotional pain – I have been learning that there are areas in my life where I need to do “more” than “just trust and believe”. In fact, I have had to discover that in my case I was repeating a victim mentality that I had learned from the beginning of my life. In my case, I needed to learn about this poisonous form of thinking and began an extremely difficult process of identifying the roots of those influences; I began in earnest with therapy.
Now, I believe that God works in my life in supernatural ways, but I also realize how there is a form of “belief” or “trust” that can be a trap and mislead me, to not care for myself, to not even value myself at times. I am aware of the temptation to use “faith” as an excuse to escape from the awareness of uncomfortable and painful things in my life. Jesus said, we are “in this world”, that He does not take us out of it. We have the task, sometimes in the midst of its Pain, to live!
Julie DeTroy 