Article

A Recovering Community of Faith

Editors View

In the Journey to Wholeness group which I attend, we recently reflected on our experience together as we meet from week to week. Someone commented that our group is like a small church community. As we are vulnerable and transparent with one another about our hurts, habits and hang-ups, we experience the safety of the group and find healing. In the now famous Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study, one finding was that telling a person’s story in a safe environment gives the equivalent of a year’s worth of benefit in protecting against harmful physical and emotional behaviors and self-destructive emotions. We watch each other grow as we let go of the lie that we can manage our own lives.

In our group, we worked through the first three steps in the first Journey to Wholeness workbook. However, we decided that we wanted to work through these steps again. We did not think that we were ready to move on. We are currently working on Step 2 “Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” We are finding that this step is foundational to the healing journey. We are coming to know that what we believe about God in our heads is not what we believe in our hearts. In Romans 10:10, we learn “For with the heart one believes unto righteousness.” Integrating head knowledge with heart knowledge is one of the greatest tasks on the journey of faith. As we talk together about the many ways that the enemy has used to erode or destroy our faith, we encourage and support one another with the reality of a God who truly can be trusted and who is willing to demonstrate again today his personal love and care for his broken and hurting children.

One of the things we have found to be helpful is that we pray for one another. Not only do we do the Serenity Prayer as a part of our opening and the Lord’s Prayer at the closing, but we often pray for specific concerns that arise during the meeting. This draws us closer to one another. This is an example of the type of support that JoAnn Palmer writes about in her feature article in this edition of Journey to Life. I pray that you will enjoy and be blessed as you read.