God Uses Time to Heal

Christi Brashler believes that time is God’s gift to us to help us heal when we don’t know how else to do it.

Time is a funny thing.

It goes too fast when life is good and it doesn’t go fast enough when life is bad.

Last year things broke in my life. So many things all at once in such a short amount of time. In a flurry of life issues that hit one after another in rapid succession, I lost my footing, my focus, and my perspective. Time was now about the stress of all things happening so close together and having to manage them all at once.

It was overwhelming and exhausting.

For weeks I felt buried and walking through my days was like walking through mud. For a long time, I felt far away from God. I knew he was still there, God is always there, but I wasn’t looking for God as much as I was looking for His “what.”

What was it about all of these things did God want me to know?

What did He want me to learn?

What was the good from all that He promised? It’s there. The good is always there, but what could it be?

What part of what was happening was for His glory?

I didn’t know.

wheat in a field

But I did know that somewhere in that muck of brokenness was something God wanted me to find.

It was time.

Not time for prayer.

Not time for myself or my family.

Time for Him and with Him.

In silence.

Purposefully sitting with His stillness.

Just Him and me in the kind of silence where time feels like it slows down so much, you might wonder if God took you out of time if only for a moment just to catch your breath. Time helps perspective and maybe that’s the “what” God wanted me to see the most.

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While most things require more time to fix than a moment of silence and stillness, sometimes all we need is that time with God. #catholicmom

Time is a funny thing.

It goes fast and slow. Most days it feels slow until we look back on how fast it’s gone by. The little things seem big. The big things seem little. Only the important things ever stand out in our timeline. The gifts God wants to give us unfold themselves with time, like slowly and purposefully opening up a carefully wrapped gift.

I suspect that time is God’s gift to us to help us heal when we don’t know how else to do it—when we feel like there is just no way to fix what broke. When I look back on most of the harder times in my life, I see those times came with three things:

A “what” that is almost always accompanied by a healing perspective.
The right amount of time I needed to see that “what.”
That the “what” is a path that always leads me back to God.

The truth is, there is nothing that can heal our wounded hearts like God. No matter how wounded we are. He is always the solution, but sometimes we don’t see that until enough time has gone by, or we’ve had enough time to process it, or we’ve had time to change our outlook, or we’ve had time to get past the shock.

sunrise within a cloud

Time, time, time.

And perspective.

They're almost synonymous with each other.

While most things require more time to fix than a moment of silence and stillness, sometimes all we need is that time with God. God who is outside of our time invites our brokenness to sit with His perfection in His stillness so that we fall right into His timelessness if only for a moment just to catch our breath.

Because sometimes, that moment is all He needs to help us begin to heal.