For those of us who grew up in high control religions, we were taught about the concept of sanctification. Sanctification is this process of “working out” your salvation…it’s the day to day stuff that you are supposed to do and change into, in order to be more christ-like. I was taught that to pray the “sinner’s prayer” (also known as “asking Jesus into your heart” or becoming “born again”) was not enough. You had to pray the prayer AND __________. The fill-in-the-blank part was the sanctification part: read your Bible, pray, be discipled, disciple others, engage in spiritual practices like fasting and tithing, be a part of a local church community, submit yourself to spiritual authorities…the list went on. 

There were many problems with this process of sanctification but most notably was the elusiveness of it and the ongoing nature of it. There were always more things you could be doing–and these things were often determined by outside sources. Pastors, leaders, books, sermons, conferences, the most relevant spiritual trends…all of this determined what we were supposed to be doing in order to become more Christlike. And this often depended on who your influences were, what was happening in the culture at the time, and where you lived in the country. 

Then there was the ongoing nature of it: it was never-ending. And it was designed to be that way. We were to keep refining ourselves, dying to ourselves, enslaving ourselves to Christ for the totality of our lives. To do any less would be like tossing away the gift of salvation. The thought behind this was that it was preparing us for life in Heaven…but come to think of it, I don’t really know what that means!

Wasn’t heaven supposed to be the place where we were made perfect? So why the need to try and achieve that on earth? I could get on board with the idea that if you are sold out for a person or a cause you might change some of the tenants of how you live your life, but if you were guaranteed that in the next life that person or cause would make you the exact type of person you were striving on earth to be, why not just wait until then? 

I digress. 

For me, the process of sanctification was exhausting. And to be honest, it was this process that eventually was a huge factor in leaving the church and religion altogether. 

I spent every moment of every day seeking for ways to change myself and make myself more Christlike. I prayed without ceasing. I read my bible, cover-to-cover, over three dozen times, I memorized scripture. I gave my time, energy, and resources to the church. I served other people in my community and across the world; I was careful to make sure what I watched, listened to, how I dressed, who I hung out with, and every facet of my life was subjected to Christ. I took to heart the admonishment and discipline that was issued to me by those older and wiser than me when I did something that was deemed sinful or getting too close to sin. 

This was my life. Every moment. Every day. For years. For decades. Until I just couldn’t handle it anymore. And I stopped. 

It was the week after Easter over a decade ago; I had led worship every week the previous four months without breaks, without pay, and without even being asked if it was something I wanted to do. On that Sunday, I cracked. After the second service, I left and texted the pastor–my (now) ex’s brother-in-law –and said I needed a break–indefinitely. 

Originally I didn’t plan to not go back to church. I planned to take a month off while I studied for my national (therapy) licensing exam. But the exam came and went and I noticed that my anxiety was decreasing and the thought of going back to church made me physically ill. So I gave myself more time off. I don’t know that I ever formally made the decision to stop going to church–I just got tired and then never got un-tired of not going. 

It won’t come as a surprise to you that “quitting” church was the first step in creating a sense of safety that I had never experienced before. Of course, I didn’t know it as that, at first. I was in an abusive relationship at the time, so even though I did experience relief from anxiety as it pertained to church and religion, there was still a lot happening in my relationship that needed attending to. But I was on my way to taking care of business. Three months after quitting church, I kicked my (ex) partner out of our home. Three months after that is when I sat on my couch in disbelief as I read my journals, unable to distinguish “who said what?”--my abusive partner or my abusive God?

Cognitive clarity about what had happened led to the unlocking of many physiological symptoms and no idea how to navigate it. No one in my life–including the many therapists I had personal and professional relationships with…even including myself–recognized this as trauma, let alone complex trauma. So instead, for years I dove into many different therapies, detoxes, cleanses, regimens, healing modalities, interventions, eastern medicine, western medicine…everything you could think of–all with varying levels of unsuccess. 

My process of healing is one that is detailed in many other places, but I was often struck with how familiar that process felt to the process of sanctification. It was this grueling, all encompassing thing that I woke up and did every day. Like sanctification, I had an end goal. It wasn’t heaven this time; it was a particular life, body, demeanor, and attitude that would demonstrate I had finished healing. 

I cannot say that all I did was in vain or didn’t produce change in me. I am thankful for the tenacity I had to keep going despite no answers and what felt like getting further and further away from the end goal. However, like sanctification, I reached an end point where I was too exhausted to go on. I couldn’t simply leave my life though, like I had left church. I still had to live life, to inhabit it, and to figure out how to keep moving forward. 

Luckily, as this was happening, I was in the middle of a doctoral academic program and studying the process of healing as a topic for my dissertation. My kind and wise dissertation chair thoughtfully asked me to reconsider the definition of healing and urged me to reflect on the notion that perhaps the definition I had of healing was limiting me from actually healing. 

I grimaced at her suggestion, but there was something in me that knew what she suggested was at least worth exploring. 

I’ll spare you the details of the research, hypothesis, and data and get to the point: she was not wrong to challenge me in my definition of healing. What I came to realize is that my definition of healing was similar to sanctification: grueling, ongoing, specific end goal and unless that end goal is met, nothing else matters. In this way, I was not only limiting healing, I was dismissing all of the healing that was happening right in front of me that I didn’t think “counted” because it wasn’t the end goal. 

I realized I switched out sanctification for healing but I was getting the same results. Constant shame and discouragement that something was wrong with me and because I didn’t meet a prescribed end goal, I was the only one to blame. Always needing to look for what was wrong and what needed to be fixed. Always needing to look forward toward what could be and never being able to be present with what is. Always looking for the reason why something happened, what lesson could be learned, or how I grew from it, rather than walking through something–including pain–so that I could release it from my body and move forward. 

Healing was just as exhausting as sanctification…until I walked away from the old definition of healing. 

Over the past five years, since my dissertation chair challenged me on my definition of healing, I have been embracing the experience of living in a healing body. Not a healed body. A healing body. But what I’ve realized is that a healing body isn’t necessarily or only concerned with an end goal. Sure, there are goals I have for myself and places I want to get to. But it’s not the only thing that matters. I’ve learned that healing happens in small, subtle shifts, in the everyday moments, and overtime. I’ve learned that sometimes when I am working on specific things in my life, there will be more intense focus and other times where I don’t think about it much at all. 

I’ve learned that the actual, ultimate goal of healing is LIVING. 

And that means sometimes we rest, we don’t need to actively seek out things to be working on or changing. It means that healing invites us to be present, to celebrate, to relate, to pause, to reflect, to be compassionate, to slow down, to pursue…to live in the natural ebbs and flows of life. 

Living as a healing being means that not everything is about healing in the sense that we don’t always have to be convicted about something, or actively working on resolving trauma. Sometimes it does. Sometimes we need to be intentional about focusing on an area of life because we see that it’s not conducive to living life in the way we desire to. And after a while, it means we may be able to integrate that into the rest of our life so that we can, once again, live. 

Interestingly, this process sounds nothing like sanctification. And for that, I embrace my experience of living in a healing body.