November 2, 2022
Episode #170
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David and Karen Mains discuss the value of seeking God’s help in healing past hurts. Then, they share a process that David has used quite recently to bring healing to past hurts in his own life.
Episode Transcript
Karen: Okay. What I would suggest if people are saying, “Okay, I need to work through some of these wounds from the past, I need healing of the memories.” Start doing a search through scripture on the scriptures that talk about God’s healing power in our life. Or Christ’s healing power in our life.
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David: There’s an interesting phrase in the writings of Jeremiah the prophet that we want to explore this visit.
Karen: As many of us know, Jeremiah is called the weeping prophet because he ministers during a especially dark time of Israel’s history.
David: Specifically, that time is during the days of the literal destruction of his country, Judah.
Karen: So, here’s this interesting phrase, it’s your pain that has no cure.
Intro: Welcome to the Before We Go Podcast featuring Dr. David Mains and his wife noted author Karen Mains. Here’s David and Karen Mains.
David: That’s a very emotional phrase, isn’t it? If you have a pain that has no cure, I’m not sure it’s a good thing.
Karen: Was this a corporate message from the prophet to Israel?
David: Yes, that’s right.
Karen: Yeah, so it was the people that had a pain where there was no cure.
David: And they saw the destruction of that pain, what it was leading to anyway. I had a good week, Karen. It started out very well. It’s continued to be good and at the same time there are struggles that has evoked. I have been seeing a spiritual director for probably it’s getting close to a year now I would guess.
Karen: So, what is a spiritual director for people who maybe don’t have any familiarity with that?
David: It’s someone you trust that you can talk with just about anything and that person has a sense of maturity that’s very satisfying to you.
Karen: And often training as well to be a spiritual director.
David: This person is trained and gives direction not by telling you but by asking questions. I don’t know if that’s what they’re supposed to do but that’s what this gentleman does for me, and I appreciate him immensely.
Karen: So, what, even if I had a topic you’ve been working with this week because of your meetings with your spiritual director, that’s very interesting. What is that topic?
David: There’s pain that comes up from hurts of the past not when I meet with him but come up when I’m under stress, come up at times that I say “Where did that come from all of a sudden?” And then I realize that it’s related to time decades back where we were betrayed, and we were accused falsely. It brought immense problems into our lives.
Karen: We had the national radio broadcast at that time.
David: Well, we lost the program because of false accusations. It was never resolved in my mind. We were never acquitted. Nobody ever said “Okay, we’ve looked at this and there is no credence to what is being said.” You just lived with and then saw your life and ministry falling apart. I don’t want to talk about it anymore than that because I’m trying to find healing so that I don’t bring those things up all the time. Last time I met with my spiritual director he said “You know when we get together next time would you be open to praying for healing and memories?” And I said “Yeah it sounds very good.” He said “Well why don’t we meet sooner than normally would meet.” We meet once a month and so he said “Okay we’ll do it in two weeks.” And I’ve looked forward to that meeting really in anticipation and it turned out to be very good for me.
Karen: So, you’ve had one session with him or meeting with him or you’re doing the healing of the memory work. Does he anticipate you need to do more?
David: I don’t know. In fact, when I came, I thought he was going to do the praying.
Karen: Surprise.
David: And he said “No I want you to do the praying.” That could have gone either way, I guess. There was a sense of the Lord being present that was quite unusual. He always lights a candle just to remind us that…
Karen: Your spiritual director did.
David: Yeah, that we are in the Lord’s presence and it’s not just the two of us. There is a third party who has joined with us who’s very real. I found it extremely satisfying and I’m grateful to him. Those are special visits.
Karen: Now I did some work in healing of the memories decades ago I guess so it was intriguing to me to hear that you were working with your spiritual director in this. I think the first person who ever wrote about healing of the memories was Agnes Sanford.
David: That’s a name you know quite well. I don’t know her as well. I think I’ve never read Agnes Sanford.
Karen: Yeah, her first book was called The Healing Light. And she began to broach the topic that scripturally and with reason that we should be able to be healed because of Christ’s power and His presence in our lives from all the wounds that have occurred in the past in our lives. And many of us know that we carry some of those things maybe on a subjective or a subconscious level or it could be even very, you know when someone’s name is brought up who hurt you or wounded you.
David: You’re surprised by it.
Karen: You’re surprised by the anger?
David: You’re surprised by the emotional response you have.
Karen: Yeah, these are little clues that there’s still work that needs to be done in what we call the topic of the healing of the memories. Then the next person who wrote about it that I know of, and I look these things up today to remind me exactly of the work was work by David Siemens.
David: Yeah, he’s a great, great person.
Karen: He’s a lovely, lovely, he’s a united Methodist minister teacher at Asbury Seminary and the book he wrote was “Healing of the Memories.” Now we actually had time with David Siemens. He had invited us to come down and speak for a minister’s conference. I believe it was at Asbury. What a love of a man you know just absolutely beautiful. But in his book “Healing of the Memories” he goes into this truth that many of us carry wounds from our past. We try to forget them. We try to stuff them down so we’re not living with the reality of them. And then something comes up that reminds us that we were wounded or hurt or betrayed.
David: You become angry, all of a sudden.
Karen: Yeah, I mean you get the same emotions that you had when that thing was fresh. So, what their premise was is that many of these wounds live on in our subjective self. You know I want to get into a whole lot of psychologizing on this because it has become something the psychological community has picked up as far as how to heal the wounds from the past but we’re strictly dealing with those people who have found spiritual solutions for it. One of whom was David Siemens.
David: Anyway, I found that it was quite interesting to me because the prayer that was recommended to me was to go back to those times and see Christ as walking through those situations with you. That brought immense emotion to me because he not only understood because he had gone through the same things and worse but on top of that he wasn’t somewhere off in the distance. He wasn’t ignoring. He knew exactly what was taking place and he was bringing healing in very special ways that in some ways I thought of as coincidence and other ways thought it was answered a prayer. But I never really understood in my mind a picture of him walking with me through those days.
Karen: So, my experience with that has been, and I think this is part of the practice of bringing healing through healing of the memories in the Christian sense, is that you look at the place where you’re wounded. Why am I reacting? And there are thousand questions we can ask. why did that made me so angry?
David: You know when you say because I don’t want it to happen again, I don’t want to see it coming.
Karen: And it brings up this memory of betrayal let’s say. And so, when you have that memory then you go before the Lord in prayer and through the work of his Holy Spirit you ask Christ who is beyond the limitations of time.
David: When you say beyond the limitations of time…
Karen: He’s not bounded by time as the way we are bounded by time.
David: He can go back, and he understands all that.
Karen: He’s eternal. Yeah, whatever however that works its way out. And you ask him I guess through your emotional psychological apparatus to be present in that time.
David: Your sanctified imagination.
Karen: Your sanctified imagination to be present with you so you can actually in your mind see the presence of Christ as you work your way through that pain and you work that way through that pain by forgiving those people who have wounded you; for renouncing the power of the enemy to keep bringing that back up and following up your even your present life. And when I was working in the past more with people as they were going through healing of the memories of course I was on a learning curve myself. It was so amazing to me you could say now here’s the incident that caused your pain. Some of those incidents are horrific. They’re not minor in your imagination. Ask for the presence of Christ to enter into that memory. And it never failed to happen. There was a mechanism in us that allows us to ask Christ to come and be present as we’re working through past pain.
And then what I began to realize I could ask people to do is to say “Does Christ have a word to speak to you at this time of your pain?” And David he always had a word for them. It could be I love you. I am with you. I could not have made up the things that Christ spoke to them. I’m sorry for what they did. I forgive them you know. They had pain in their own past that made them act it out and it wounded me. But I forgive them for that.
Now, these are just truly holy moments. It’s a time when the power of heaven meets the powerlessness of earth. But we know something remarkable has happened.
David: So, when you say the pain that has no cure, there is a cure. There is that bombing ghillie. I would say that this past week when I met with my advisor I experience that. The interesting thing is I believe that I will be ready when those trigger points come in the future, even though the pain comes up at surprising times. But I will say, you know what? That’s being healed.
Karen: Christ is healing that.
David: And it will reflect itself in terms of where I am and that I won’t go on those tirades anymore of just having to somehow regurgitate.
Karen: Of the anger and the hurt.
David: Yeah, the hurt. Not anger as much but hurt.
Karen: Okay. What I would suggest if people are saying, “Okay, I need to work through some of these wounds from the past, I need healing of the memories.” Start doing a search through scripture on the scriptures that talk about God’s healing power in our life. Or Christ’s healing power in our life.
David: Okay, so that’s not going to be the Jeremiah scripture because Jeremiah says this pain has no cure.
Karen: But I think that’s the task of our listener who says, whoops, I need to do some healing of the memory work. So, look at these scriptures. Look them up. Go to a concordance. I have my computer in front of me. I can go on my computer to scriptures on healing and it will bring up a list. So, here’s a verse I found from Isaiah 38 verses 16 and 17. “The Lord most high is the one who gives life to every heart, who gives life to the Spirit. Look, he indeed exchanged my bitterness for wholeness. You yourself have spared my whole being.” That’s redirected to God. “You, yourself have spared my whole being from the pit of destruction because you have cast all my sins behind your back.” He forgets our sins.
David: Well, you’re just making a suggestion then that people go to the scriptures and look for those healing passages.
Karen: And then write them down. And as you’re working through a healing of the memories process, then you read those scriptures to yourself that God is a healer. He is with you in your pain. It truly is like taking medicine, medicine for the soul.
David: Before I even give a sentence, Karen, I want to say that our churches are filled with people who have past hurts that they’re holding on to. Maybe they don’t even want to, but they don’t know how to get rid of them. And that’s to say nothing of all the people who have left church because in some way they’ve been hurt or marred or disappointed. So, this is a huge topic. Now, from that vantage point, let me put into a sentence.
Maybe now is the time for you, listener, to begin thinking about a special prayer that can bring healing from painful memories. So, I’m just suggesting let this be the start where you say, “I’d like that. That sounds good to me.” And then we’ll go back to some of the things we’ve said before. But the sentence is: Maybe now is the time for you to begin thinking about a special prayer that can bring healing from painful memories.
Karen: So, in case you think we’re speaking out of turn, need to understand that David is 86 years of age, and the Lord is doing this work in his life at 86 years of age. And so, you’re not too old to begin to enter into a partnership with God that brings healing into your life and that heals those painful memories. You can experience his presence as you work through those things. Invite Christ to be present. Listen to what he has to speak to your heart. Write it down somewhere.
David: Okay, so let’s go back to what we said before now that we have someone’s attention. That book by David Siemens. The name of that book again is?
Karen: Healing of the Memories.
David: And how does a person get that? Because that was written some years ago.
Karen: Years ago, I went on Thrift Books, which is a website that sells used books at reduced prices. And they had David Siemens Healing of the Memories on Thrift Books, THRIFT books. There are ways to get books that have gone out of print, but you can order through Thrift Books.
David: Okay, so that’s a good suggestion. And when I say “Time for you to begin thinking, begin informing yourself.” You said write down scriptures. So, what specific scriptures are people looking for and where do they find those?
Karen: Well, I just went online and did a search of scriptures that have healing in the scriptures. And there are websites that will toss those up. So just put in the search engine, scriptures on healing. They have a variety of choices as far as where you can go and find those scriptures and then print them off.
David: Yeah, and there are people who know the Bible pretty well. Just from your memory go back and say, “Lord, give me a couple of those scriptures I can hold on to.” And then you begin a process. Maybe you begin a process of saying, “How do I talk this over with a person I respect spiritually?” That’s a beginning point. But don’t think that all of a sudden this is a magic prayer.
Karen: Yeah.
David: Everything’s resolved. I would say, Karen, I’ve been on a journey on this. I will know that healing is mine when those memories don’t come up and I kind of begin talking and telling everybody how painful it was and all that. The truth of the matter is I could repeat those stories over and over and over again and people aren’t going to solve my problem for me. The only person who can solve that is Jesus. And I will know that something special has happened, which I believe it has, but I will know through the experience of life when that doesn’t happen anymore. When I’m not triggered by certain things. Especially memories of people who really were wrong in what they did, and they never said “Forgive me.”
And what do I do? Because I think the Lord is beginning now this process of saying, that’s not the only time you were hurt. There are other times that happen, and you need to let me bring healing to those as well. I want to be a whole person in many ways I am. I’m a healthy spiritual person, but it doesn’t mean that I’m perfect. I’m a long way from perfect. And I’m as human as anybody else. So, I’m just appealing to people and saying, if you identify with these words at all, hear them not as David speaking, because I’m lacking in so many ways and I’m talking about something that is fresh with me now. But I’m wanting to share the good thing that is happening to me and bringing a culmination to all the decades long process I’ve been in.
So anyway, that’s a long process. I think that I prayed a prayer that was very significant when I met with my spiritual director this last time. But I don’t think it’s going to be the last prayer I pray in terms of that, because I think the Lord will continue to reveal things to me. And I will say, “Okay, I’m walking on the path and I’m going to get there. That will be very interesting for me.”
Anyway, that whole thing by Jeremiah, pain that has no cure. Well, he was saying that because he was talking out of his emotion. And I tell you, Judah was destroyed as a nation. People were exiled and it would be years before they would come back and try to rebuild. You can say, you know, as you hear in the news today, is America going to exist as a democracy in the days that are ahead? Or is the great experiment going to come to an end? Well, we’re at the beginning part of people talking the way they were back in the time of Jeremiah. And yet it was far down the road because it was just a matter of eminency at that point.
So, you get a feel of what he’s talking about. And he said, there’s no hope, but there was hope. In fact, even Jeremiah’s own words when you get to Lamentations, where he is lamenting over the fall and the terrible things that have happened to his nation, he says, even so, I have hope. The Lord’s mercy is everlasting.
This is not something new. People have been hurt in the church, hurt by fellow Christians since the beginning of time. We’re just saying the Lord is above all of that. And the Lord is gracious, and the Lord is kind.
Karen: So, we will wait to hear how they’ve experienced that healing in their lives or what they’re doing now to experience.
David: Well, I think they’re taking baby steps. Maybe now is the time for you to begin thinking about. That’s all I said. Just thinking about a special prayer that you can say with someone else, “Lord, this is a special prayer. I’m seeing this as an important prayer in terms of my life. And in a process of learning to know more and more about you and how you’re suffering and you’re the stripes that you have made me whole.”
Join the process. That’s what I wanted to say in terms of where I am and where I want people who are listening to us to be. Say, “I’m holding hands. I’m going on the journey with you.” Okay.
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