Go

We all see life through our own lenses, don’t we? Everything we see is filtered through our personal experiences, and that’s true of what we see in the Bible too. Sometimes I sit down to read in the morning and God shows me a little snippet of something meaningful. That happened today. I always stop and write it down in a journal because the holes in my 61-year-old colander-of-a-brain are getting bigger all the time and I won’t remember it in three minutes.

Then sometimes I keep reading and the snippet turns into something much bigger, at least in my mind. Or the direction the snippet leads turns out to be way different from where I thought it was going. Maybe I am making too many connections here, but, looking through my lens of trauma and the journey toward healing from it, this is what I saw in the story of Moses leading Israel out of Egypt today.

Israel had been in Egypt 400 years and it was no picnic. The new Pharaoh in Exodus 3 made their lives “bitter with hard bondage.” There were times I thought my life was bitter with all I was going through.

We know they cried out to God because he tells Moses he has “heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters . . .”

He says, “the cry of the children of Israel is come unto me, and I have also seen the oppression wherewith the Egyptians oppress them.”

Then he says, “. . . for I know their sorrows.”

Friend, he knows.

I had to stop reading there and acknowledge that through the worst times in my life when I felt unseen, unheard, abandoned by God, wanting to know why he allowed terrible things to happen, he was still there seeing, hearing, and knowing, even when it didn’t feel like it.

Have you cried out to God? Poured out your distress and your grief? He sees. He hears.

God knows it all—and not just our current sorrows. He knows the past sorrows we drag through life like a heavy suitcase and the future sorrows we can’t even imagine yet.

He is intimately acquainted with all our thoughts, all our triumphs, all our struggles, all our difficulties.

All our traumas.

He knows our sorrows.

God heard the cries of his people Israel and he knew how oppressed they were. He could have snapped his fingers and supernaturally transported the entire nation—a million-plus people—into the Promised Land. Wouldn’t that have been so much easier? Nothing is too hard for God.

But instead, he used a man, one who had no self-confidence, who was full of excuses as to why he couldn’t do this thing, who was not eloquent, “slow of speech and of a slow tongue.” One who begged God to use someone else.

Moses was, from our viewpoint, the unlikeliest man God could have used.

And isn’t that just so typical of us? That we don’t see the potential God sees? We get so stuck in our tunnel vision that we can’t imagine there is any way the Lord’s idea will work.

God could have accomplished the objective the easy way, but he chose the hard way—through a flawed, 80-year-old man—because there were so many lessons to learn. He wouldn’t take Israel through the shortcut because they would have missed so much that he wanted them to see.

And that’s when I made the connection between Israel and me.

When I was in the worst of my struggles with PTSD, all I wanted was for it to NOT BE. I wanted to erase what had happened, yes, but mostly I wanted the long-term effects of the trauma to be gone. Poof. Wave the magic wand and make me normal again.

God could have taken Israel out of Egypt the easy way, but instead he used a man. He could have taken away my trauma with all my anxiety and distress, but instead he used a twenty-something girl named Ellie, a lowly counselor-in-training who wasn’t even fully licensed yet.

Moses asked, “Who am I, that I should do this?” God answered, “Certainly I will be with thee.”

Surely Ellie asked, “How can I do this when I haven’t even finished learning how to be a therapist?” And God’s answer is the same. He was with the medical doctor who treated my concussion, the psychologist who did the neurofeedback, the lawyer who handled my case and suggested the right kind of therapy, and he was definitely with Ellie for the year of weekly visits we had together. Sometimes the thing we are so sure won’t work is exactly what is needed.

God could have healed me instantly, but there were things I needed to learn. Issues I needed to talk through while constantly being pointed back to Jesus.

God tells Moses, “I’m sure the king of Egypt won’t let them go, but keep going back. You’ll feel like it’s not working, like Pharaoh still doesn’t believe I sent you, but you keep going. I will provide what you need. I’ll show you little glimpses of my power each time, little breakthroughs to help you know I am in it and I am working—through you, a frail, needy man.”

Moses still resisted. So God turned his rod into a serpent and then back into a rod. He made Moses’ hand leprous, then clean. He turned the river water into blood. I don’t know if Moses ever gained any confidence, but he continued to do what God said to do.

I did not want to go to therapy. As desperate as I was to be “normal” again, I so badly didn’t want to go bare my soul to some young girl who hadn’t even finished her training yet. Then I started going and didn’t believe it was really helping. I hated it and I wanted to quit.

But God showed me little glimpses of his ability to help me through a girl who knew just enough, and he gave her wisdom and understanding to learn what I needed. Little by little I had fewer panic attacks. I was able to ride in a car if I sat behind the driver and didn’t look. I wasn’t so afraid of spiders. I was less easily startled.

One of Moses’ excuses to God was that he was not eloquent; he was of slow speech and tongue. God responded by asking him, “Who made your mouth? Who made the dumb, the deaf, the seeing, and the blind?”

The obvious answer is that God made them all and he made them with their weaknesses on purpose. If men (and women) were perfect, we wouldn’t need him.

I was reminded that God made my brain with all its frailties. He created it to react to trauma this way on purpose. He knew all about what my brain was doing and why. He was the original designer of it. He owns the patent.

And his answer for my struggles was to use another flawed human, one who had more knowledge than I do, who he could work through to bring me out of my hard place and into a place of rest.

God told Moses “You just do what I say and I’ll send the help you need.” And he sent Aaron, the brother who could speak well. God gave Aaron the expertise that Moses needed to accomplish the goal, just like he gave Ellie the expertise she needed to lead me through healing.

One of the very hardest parts of going to therapy was feeling like I was a failure for not being able to pray or read the Bible or encourage my way out of the effects of trauma. The stigma of mental health struggles—especially among Christians—is very real. It’s something I had been guilty of perpetuating, and now here I was, in the middle of a mental health mess myself.

But despite how hard it would be to get over a million people out from under tyrannical rule in Egypt, God told Moses, “Now therefore go.”

I read that and felt like God was saying it to me too.

Now therefore go.

It’s okay to go to therapy. God can use a counselor to help you heal just like he used an 80-year-old stutterer with no self-confidence to bring an entire nation out of slavery and into peace.