I spent last weekend participating in the Trauma Healing Training Workshop I mentioned last week. What an experience. Who knew I still had wounds of my own that needed healing? Does it ever end?

I guess it shouldn’t surprise me. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that God knows when we’re ready to receive what we need. He always provides, one way or another, and sometimes, it’s in spite of ourselves, but it’s always according to His Will for us.

In the middle of our work, we received news that one very wonderful and very dear couple that has been a tremendous healing force in so many lives, including my own, had a tree fall on their house in the night, crashing through the roof, destroying the guest room and bath where usually there would be a young man sleeping. But not this past Friday.

They were both safe. Their bedroom, so close to the other room, wasn’t hit.

We took one collective breath and exhaled. Then we prayed.

It made me think about the walls I have built over time, like a house of protection around my heart. God had to break them down, as if to say, “You have stayed in there too long. Let Me in, I can help you with that.”

The timing couldn’t have been more perfect for me to study the structure of a lament. If my notes are accurate, of the 150 Psalms in the Bible, 67 of them are laments. God so deeply understands the grieving and pain of the hurting and brokenhearted.

His Spirit is the great Healer.

Moving away from my seat at the table, I felt a little intimidated when we were instructed to write a lament of our own, but it was just another opportunity for me to get out of the way, and let the Spirit speak to my heart.

“O Lord, my God…” I wrote in my notebook thinking about the great epidemic of loneliness in America and all across the world today. Then hearing the Hymn, “How Great Thou Art” in my head, I began to write…

How long have we wandered in the desert of our grief, not knowing or understanding our True North?

The suppressed rivers of tears held back, as if rising, flooding waters pressed up against the walls of a dam.

But how could You speak, O Lord, when we have turned, and kept turning away, ever seeking, but never settling, until our wandering souls finally forced our knees to bend beneath the weight of it all.

Before I could lift my eyes upward, Your hand was on me, and we stayed there together. You wept with me.

I was overwhelmed with your knowledge of me as You waited there in the silence that followed, until the heavy waters began to crumble down those walls that had for so long held back these tears.

Then, like a soothing spring stream melting beneath the Sun in the winter’s chill, Your Spirit moved within me.

I could feel You, I could even taste the sweetness of Your love. For it entered in, cleansing and drawing out the debris of my wounding and still raw scars, penetrating even the deepest, hidden, darkest places.

How is it that these withheld tears of grief, have turned to tears of joy?

Your love is better than life, and I will praise you all my days. You are my Lord, my Savior, God, my King.

“Then sings my soul, my Savior God to Thee, how great Thou art. How great Thou art.”

This is what the LORD says: “Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you’ll find rest for your souls.” Jeremiah 6:16.