A couple of weeks ago I was ministering to a woman in another church. I will call her Rachel. As I laid hands on her, the word ‘rejection’ came into my mind. I asked Rachel if she felt like this. She nodded and said, “My husband abandoned me and my two small children years ago”. Rachel started to cry.
At this point in the ministry, it would be so easy to just charge ahead and start ministering to all the things that I would imagine someone might be suffering from after having such a terrible thing happen. The important thing is to always go for the “presenting “ issue. What I mean by that, is rather than go through a process of layers of what may ultimately need healing, it is important to be led into what is the immediate layer that needs to be healed or released so that later other areas can rise to the surface. Sometimes there is a prompting from the Holy Spirit to ask Him to show the “root cause” of something but in this case, it seemed to me that there was an important layer to be explored. Into my head came the sense that this woman did not usually display anger that instead she usually got upset and cried. I asked her if this was the case. She replied ...yes it is. Then I asked her if this pattern had happened when she was a child or if it was a recent thing. Rachel explained that when her husband abandoned her she decided that she didn’t want her children to see her angry as she didn’t want them to copy her or be worried or be affected by her anger. At this point, I explained to Rachel that anger is not a bad thing. It is how we express it that is important. To do it in a way that doesn’t hurt someone else. Rachel had suppressed some very big feelings. Sometimes we haven’t had anger modeled in a good way as we were growing up and this can cause us to either be afraid of it or choose to not feel the feeling.
Rachel said she wanted to be able to get in touch with all those big feelings as she sensed not releasing her anger was holding her back.
I laid hands on Rachel again and asked Jesus to visit her and enable her to go on this journey. Rachel then prayed and asked Jesus to show her how to get in touch with her anger.
It seemed appropriate to share with Rachel the name of a good book about anger so that she could work through letting go of it so that she could receive freedom in this area. I sensed that Rachel was going to start on a journey of receiving healing and wholeness from the abandonment that she had experienced. The name of the book I recommended was Healing Life’s Hurts: Let Your Anger Work For You by Graham Bretherick.
Sometimes during prayer ministry times, it seems as if small steps are taken by the Receiver. This is ok. Even though we may sense that there are some big issues that need healing we must always go at the pace that the Receiver will allow. What seems to us small steps may be huge to the one who is receiving prayer ministry.
Thank you, Jesus, that this is YOUR ministry, not ours.