It is the season for celebrating Christ. It’s a time for coming together to honor and worship our Lord of Lord and King of Kings.

And I’m thinking there is no better time to highlight the true saving grace of Jesus. He came, after all, to make everything different. He came to heal and to make whole. He came to save us in the deepest places of our hearts and minds.

My last post was about the stuck places of our lives. Of emotions frozen in time, of maturity stalled in place, and of perspectives chronically that of a child’s way of thinking.

I’ve witnessed and experienced time and again the healing of Jesus in the very deepest parts of our beings. But while I’ve witnessed many miracles I’ve also witnessed many tragedies.

There are not many things as tragic as individuals aging with frozen thoughts, hardened emotions, little empathy and certainly no grace. Entire lifetimes, decade upon decade, given over to lies and bitterness’ multiplied over and over.

The most horrible thing with the stuck places (you know how we used to call a record that would skip and skip on the same spot a broken record), when they are not healed there are grooves of negative and damaging thought trenched into our minds and hearts.

Like giant ruts in an exceptionally muddy road that dries and hardens, we cannot leave the ruts if we tried.

We simply continue in well-worn habits of thoughts and judgments and condemnations.

While all of it can be healed and we can be freed to mature and find great satisfactions in life many don’t seek healing. Perhaps they don’t know it exists.

I’ve been prayer ministering for some twelve years and in that time I have come to be convinced that prayer actually heals our brains.

That neurological set-points are freed from those trenches. That emotional default settings are transformed. That an individual’s brain is literally rewired into the beautiful and complete original image as created by God.

No longer do we react the same ways. Those buttons that used to send us into emotional high-jackings are simply not there any longer.

The expectations and lenses by which we expected the worst from life are removed and replaced with expectations that lead to life and miracle of all miracles we receive lenses that see the good and gracious of this world.

We are no longer victims to negative emotions but we are rather celebrants able to fully experience and romp in the beauty of every range of emotion. We are free.

Without maturity freed up to continue on its natural course we simply become rigid in our thinking. Our minds literally freeze into place, repeating like broken records the disappointments and the regrets, the losses and the injustices, as though talking about them non-stop will bring restitution. It never does.

The minds that I have personally witnessed that run on old hardened pathways end up in dementia and Alzheimers. Rigidity of thinking, like a record skipping but never rescued, goes on into eternity stuck in one place.

It is one of the saddest things to behold.

Thank-you Jesus that you came to save us from this place. Thank-You that you made a way, thank-you that you are The Way. Only in you are our minds covered in the oil of the lamb that keeps our thinking supple and flexible. Only in you are our hearts justified in our experience of emotions. And only in you are our negative and deadly experiences laid to rest at the cross, that we might get on with life.

Thank-you. We celebrate You this season.

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