Forgiveness and Healing
The Importance of Forgiveness and Healing
I am writing this so that everyone can realize the power of forgiveness, especially between husband and wife. God made man and woman in His own image but when the Fall happened in Genesis, we lost our connection with God. Sin entered into us and so did pain and infirmities. We no longer had that unity that God wanted with us due to Adam and Eve’s sins of pride and selfishness.
In 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 it says: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.”
When my husband and I got married 37 years ago, we cherished those words and couldn’t wait to hear them being read at our wedding and following them all the rest of our lives together. But, as you know, life takes over and those big expectations you had of each other seem to drag us down and make us disillusioned and disappointed.
Soon, anger, resentment and many other feelings that are not bad in itself because God made feelings but He didn’t want us to react to them in harmful ways. He wanted us to forgive and move on.
In 2013, I started to get major headaches and teeth pain and had many teeth pulled before I was finally diagnosed with Trigeminal Neuralgia. Trigeminal neuralgia is nicknamed the suicide disease because the pain is so bad and I knew of two people in my support group that committed suicide.
The pain was horrendous and I am writing a book to show the healing power of God as He healed me from this on March 6, 2020. For those of you that are Catholic, you know that First Fridays are designated for the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In our church, we had a beautiful Sacred Heart of Jesus statue that I would just stare at during mass or in Adoration. I didn’t know at the time anything about the Sacred Heart of Jesus devotion. God, in His mercy, used this day to heal me. I was prayed over by a regular person, not even a priest and he just said “In the Name of Jesus, take this trigeminal neuralgia away from Cheryle melt this pain away and send it to your cross. I felt the Holy Spirit enter and my face got hot and the pain that I had for 7 years and I mean debilitating pain felt like it was burned away and was gone!! In an instant!!!
I am telling you this because we came to Retrouvaille in August of 2019, damaged and broken just like all of you were but it gave us hope. We started to slowly change our ways. What we learned was a good foundation, but what really sent us over the top with healing was forgiveness. I have a friend in deliverance ministry. Yes, we say “deliver us from evil” in the Our Father prayer. Evil is real and we need to be delivered from it when we open the door to it. Anyway, she gave me the below steps to pray about and complete. She did mention to me that sometimes when you go through this that people get healed. I thought well maybe some small things like headaches or things like that but this couldn’t happen to me.
I didn’t realize that the more anger, resentment and downright hatred my husband and I had for each other, the more it opened the door to the Evil One. He causes us so much pain internally and externally.
When my husband and I completed the steps to forgiveness, which are:
- Pray to the Holy Spirit to guide you to the people that you have to forgive and write it down on paper. I did this and it really helped me. I ripped it up and my husband burned his after we were done with it.
- Don’t forget yourself. This is the most important one!!! We think for some reason, that we should have never made a mistake in our lives. Boy do we have some high expectations for ourselves!!!
- If you are Catholic, go to confession. If not, just say out loud from your heart to the Lord that you forgive your husband and others and yourself. You will be amazed at what happens afterwards.
My husband and I did this about a month before God healed me!! God healed our marriage first and then He healed me physically. The key to this is that you have to love everyone like God loves them.
It is hard when you think that God loves the serial rapist as much as the victims. It is not what we do, it’s because we are His children. Those of you that have rebellious children know, that even if you don’t like what they do, even if it is really bad like killing someone, you still love them and constantly hope and pray that they change. This is exactly the way God feels but He has a big family, ALL OF US.
I held anger and hatred for my husband for years because he hurt me deeply and he did the same for me. We also were damaged already from previous relationships that were not healed either.
When I started to look at him like a child of God and looked at all the wounds that he had, I was able to forgive him. We are all wounded children and most of the wounds are due to our separation from God.
There is a natural law that both God and the demons go by and most people don’t believe that the enemy exists now. He definitely does. He wants to wound you so that you will never be happy. He wants you to fall into His traps so that you will disconnect from God, don’t believe in Him or think God is the evil one.
Reminds me of how many times my daughter said I hate you when I wouldn’t let her date a 22-year old and she was 14!! We have to have rules in place for our children. Why would you not think that God would not have rules for us because to an Almighty God we are still very small children despite what our age is.
Forgiveness opens the doors to new life. Just look at mine!! I can do so much more than I have been able to do in 7 years.
God Bless you all and be assured of my love and prayers,
Cheryle Miller
