Today’s journey starts with an unexpected awakening for me.  Last night I was teaching the Celebrate Recovery lesson on “Spiritual Inventory”.  It is all about working through the hurts of your past identifying who was involved in them.  It then takes you into looking at the hurt you caused and identifying who was involved in them.  Last week’s lesson was Inventory and this week is Spiritual Inventory.  For the first few years in CR I didn’t even note the difference in the titles.  For me it was just insight on completing this emotionally labor-intense task.  The key word is Spiritual.  In order to teach last night’s lesson I needed to understand why Spiritual was added to the title.  As I’d been prepping for the lesson I began to understand.

Doing the Inventory in Celebrate Recovery makes one fully exposed–raw.  How else can all that must be exposed to the healing Light of God be cleansed and healed?  However, for anyone to be this honest he must have help and trust.  This is where the Spiritual part comes in.  None of us are that honest on our own.  However, God’s gift–The Holy Spirit–called The Helper, is our intervention piece.  It is with His empowerment and trust that we can be brave enough to take this step of full exposure.  The outcome is always rewarding because the weight of this is gone and the cleansing provided is miraculous.  One also finds “no condemnation” too.  Instead, one finds greater acceptance and love.

So, I taught this last night and it seemed to go well.  No one knew except God that I personally had my one sentence moment of mistrust in the lesson.  The script of the lesson has the teacher thanking God for our past so it can now be used as a Godly tool to help others unravel their own past and find forgiveness and peace.  I can thank God for using my past and at times I have thanked Him for the past.  However, deep down I haven’t thanked Him truly.  I knew this morning that this troublesome area had to do with The Holy Spirit and me.  He is said to be Christ’s gift–God’s Helper to us.  The new creation in me couldn’t respond and I needed help knowing where HE–God’s Helper was in the years of abuse.  So, I asked.

It was amazing to sense the love and compassion that came over me.  He outlined so specifically Who He Is and who I am to Him.  In flesh I felt alone, but in spirit, He was fully with me.  He is healing this wounded area I thought was abandonment due to my worthlessness to Him.  He is assuring me it is quite the contrary.  I never expected to have this conversation with The Holy Spirit but I’m so glad we did.  He Loves Me and I’m more assured than ever this is true.