This past week a friend and I completed her inner healing.  Yes, I get that it sounds strange to say that.  It feels strange to say it.  But it’s true; we have finished, to the best of our knowledge, doing inner healing with her.  Is it possible we missed some small issue somewhere that is still lingering?  I suppose.  But at some point, if we believe inner healing prayer heals things, then it can’t actually last forever, can it? Let me put it another way.  The enemy has a finite set of resources to use in each of our lives.  Usually, demons work to create trauma and pain in our lives to develop strongholds—strategic points inside our hearts where they have carved out a space to live, and from those broken places, expand their reach within a person to cause more problems.  When all inner wounding is healed, and all demons cast out, there simply isn’t anything left to fix.  Since there is a limited amount of inner wounding that people have, and because we are healing it through prayer far faster than new emotional wounds can occur, eventually it all gets fixed. This sounds great, and it is, but what do you do when the inner healing is done?  Once someone is “all better”, what is the next step?

Think about what the Bible says about sin.  It says that because we are in Christ, all sin has been cut off from us.  If we are sin-free, and there isn’t anything to fix, do we suddenly become the wisest, kindest, most self-actualized human beings on the planet?  Of course not!  Inner healing is no different.  Inner healing removes negatives.  It puts an end to old emotional patterns, stops negative cycles of sowing and reaping based on pain, trauma, and abuse, and sets us free from being drawn back in to our past dramas and issues.  But once we are set free, again, we don’t suddenly morph into sages.  After all the healing is done, we still have a growth process ahead of us.  So what does that look like?

Only part of the process of personal growth is past-healing.  That’s the inner healing and deliverance part. The rest are forward-focused, which looks like renewing the mind and growing in wisdom, knowledge, and character.  Another way of thinking about this is that we grow in the fruit of the spirit and in our relationship with God and have our minds transformed to be like His.  Even when we have fixed all the bad stuff, that doesn’t mean we are mature.  However, it does mean that we are free to walk into maturity without hindrances.  Hebrews 12:1-2a says, “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith.”  Inner healing lets us throw off everything that hinders, but it doesn’t mean we are running our race forward.  That’s the next step. This is the part where we learn the things that challenged us before:  how to manage money better, how to have healthy relationships, how to make healthy boundaries, and much more.  So how do we do that? 

There are many ways to facilitate this, including self-help books, life coaching, and more.  My friend Jeremy Mangerchine has written a book, The Table and the Dream, that looks at the question “What do you do now that you’re free?”  I highly recommend this book as a good starting place on the journey forward after inner healing (and it’s still useful even if you’re still on the journey). If you haven’t begun your own inner healing journey, or want ways to move forward in your own process, I recommend you try the following:

• Check out my coauthored book Broken to Whole: Inner Healing for the Fragmented Soul.   Consider using the Fragment Finder” flower essence along with it.
• Praying Medic’s book Emotional Healing in 3 Easy Steps
• Karol Truman’s book Feelings Buried Alive Never Die
• Other blog posts:  Five Steps To Emotional Healing, The Weight of Sorrows, and the Divine Healing That Works series
• Use Flower Essences by Freedom Flowers – designed to help release the negative emotions and make it easier to receive inner healing, there is a free intro course you can sign up for at the bottom of the home page.