My new year has started off with heavy news from multiple friends. One whose husband moved out. Another who lost her job. Another whose sister is heading to a treatment center. Another whose kids lost a friend to suicide. In the midst of all this pain around me, I have been considering interdependent healing.

What role do I have in other people’s healing? I know I can’t cause healing. I know I am not the catalyst for healing. There’s some dynamic relationship between God’s grace and our decisions that enable healing to begin, and I can’t manufacture either one.

Movements of Healing

And yet, the movements that can open me up to healing in my own life are the same as the ones I can offer to my friends. Honesty, humility, and hope guide me in the healing of others just as they do in my own life. 

I practice honesty when I acknowledge the pain, the devastation and fear and loss and grief.

I practice humility when I ask how I can help, knowing that my offering with be only one small part of what is probably a long, slow process.

I practice hope when I keep showing up, day after day or week after week. When I check in and return to that spiral of healing. When I listen to the pain again. When I offer to pray or bring a meal or simply give time and presence. When I share my own stories of pain and of healing.

Interdependent Healing

For ourselves, and for others, we are invited to participate in the honest, humble, hopeful (and the long, slow, messy) work of healing.

More with Amy Julia:

• FREE RESOURCE: Movements of Healing guide
• S4 E13 | Disability, Friendship House, and Interdependent Community with Matt Floding
• Honesty. Humility. Healing.

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