Amanda Carrasco

I have revisited my life in bits and pieces, exploring manageable chunks at a time. Right now I am going through a season where God is showing me the bigger picture and I am looking back at it all, at once. I have commented a few times that if I were to tell someone my whole life story, no one would believe so many of the things that have happened could have happened to one person – well for sure not to one person and still be reasonably sane (hopefully I am).

I shared this same concern with my counselor Tom; he is amazing, both as a person and as godly counsel. We started wrestling with the ideas of being thankful to God for what we went through and we landed on the story of Job. Job is significant because God was bragging about him and that actually was the sources of his troubles (BIG TROUBLES). Tom shared his perspective when he hits difficult times – that God must have been bragging about him to Satan and now Satan is trying to tear him down. I don’t think this might always be the case, but two truths are: even if God isn’t bragging about us as the cause of our trouble, it’s still a great view of how God sees us and also that so much of what happens in our lives isn’t about us, but it’s about whats going on in the heavenly realm.

The next stop on our wrestling tour took us to Luke 17, where Jesus healed ten lepers but only one returned to glorify God, and that one was made whole. Tom explained that there was a difference between healing and wholeness. See, lepers lost body parts and had all kinds of gross things happen to their body, but when they were healed they no longer had the disease of leprosy. The one who returned was made whole, so he no longer had the disease but also any body parts he lost grew back, any hard skin was made soft and and physical deformities would be gone. It was as though he had never even had leprosy.

Tom said that he believes I am at a stage where God isn’t about just healing me anymore – He wants me to be whole, to be restored to be like before anything ever happened. It was then that I realized that I now have a deep desire that if and when I tell people any part of my story, let alone the whole thing, I HOPE they don’t believe me! What if when people looked at me they saw such freedom that they could never believe I had been through those things? I would be ok with that, because I could point them to my Savior and tell them that those things did happen to me, but He has made me whole.