I just got back from a men’s healing weekend retreat known as Edge Venture. Spending a weekend with men in that rare place where men feel truly free to express themselves and the pain they’ve experienced and still feel enslaved to is always a refreshing experience for me. The men in attendance outed some of their deepest shame and insecurities with other men who extended their grace and support. There was a significant exploration into the true essence of manhood, and at multiple points on the retreat I was faced with the daunting question “How do you know you’re a man?” The revelations thereof were similar to the insights I gained while reading Wild at Heart earlier this summer. Quite a few of my friends had been through the experience already and I had the added privilege of sharing it with ten of my closest brothers. This really helped me because I found myself engaging emotionally in their processes more than the other men because I knew some of their backstory and love them deeply.
I wish that I personally could have engaged with some of the experiences better, but a good friend of mine who knows me pretty well says that he perceives I have difficulty with it because I have such a strong mind. What he was getting at is that healing from past wounding is best done when a person can engage a present moment when they are clearly responding irrationally or harmfully to a circumstance in their life, feel deeply their current emotions, and then attempt to “feel their way back” to another time when that same emotion had been strongly present. The goal is to then enter into this past event that was deeply wounding (and likely a strong contributing factor to the present difficulties) and allowing God to speak into this event either directly, through Scripture, or through His Church, and potentially even re-experience this event in such a way as to enact this truth. The problem with having a “strong mind” in this case is that I have a lot of trouble feeling my way back, because my natural inclination is to think my way back, which strongly dilutes the emotions involved and largely closes the door to deep emotional healing in the moment. My tendency is to analyze a situation so as to discern the reasons behind my actions rather than knowing through feeling. This sounds smart enough, but I have a wealth of life experience that indicates I do this as a defense mechanism. Regardless, I am secure in knowing that there is grace for me, even if I have trouble getting at deeper things because of past difficulties in my life. It was hard for me to feel that grace at a couple points because I felt some pressure to be “all healed” after some of the deeper processes, but a really godly man there named Rusty came up to me (without knowing anything about me) and said he felt like God was telling him to assure me that it was OK that there’s still a lot of crap in me that isn’t all getting resolved that weekend.
Regardless, I rather enjoyed such a new and different experience. I know that there are Christians who have their objections to such “Inner healing” or “Theophostic prayer” experiences, and they have really good reasons to boot. But I cannot help returning to the Scripture that retorts, “But wisdom is proved right by all her children” (Luke 7:35). In context, Jesus is responding to objections leveled against his lifestyle of entering into the culture of notorious sinners and eating and drinking (alcohol) with them. His implication seems to be that wisdom is shown for what it is by the fruit it produces in the lives of those who live by it. And I guess that would be my response to the critics (of just about anything in the Church). If it consistently and undeniably produces the fruits of the Spirit, can it really be of worldly origin? As Jesus himself reminds us, “A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit.” (Matthew 7:17-18, 12:33, Luke 6:43). In context, the passage is referring to how to discern true prophets from false ones, but I think it can also be used to identify “true ministries” from ”false ministries”. And in this case, the visible fruits of that weekend were courage, freedom, love, joy, power, peace, and self-control in the lives of the men involved, all fruits of the Spirit (Acts 4:8-13, 2 Corinthians 3:17, Galatians 5:22-23, 2 Timothy 1:7). So you be the judge. As for me, I recommend it (and similar experiences) to any man who seeks deeper healing in his life and longs to live by the Spirit rather than feeling captive to demons from his past.
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