When God begins a spiritual healing work in your life you may often feel like a headless chicken running around.  We receive our healing but it sometimes takes a while for that fact to sink in and become a reality in our lives.

When a chicken’s head is chopped off it will still run around for a few minutes, spurting blood all over the place until it collapses to the ground dead.

So, it is with many of us who follow Christ.

We pray for healing and freedom from various addictions/habits – drugs, alcohol, eating disorders, anger, worry…

We declare our healing, believe we are healed and yet we still run around frantically, have no self-control and continue to act in a self-destructive manner questioning God all the time “Why won’t you heal me?”

It has often taken years for our bad habits/addictions to take root in our lives so purely out of habit we continue with them and it is during this time of ‘running around like a headless chicken’, blood spurting and making a mess everywhere that we may need to seek professional help, or start a journal documenting our thoughts and feelings, or join a group who are experiencing what we are going through.

You may even have to admit publicly, for the first time, that you have a problem. You will need to face the fact that your guilt, shame, self-disgust…will be made public.

“Hiding our hurt only intensifies it.  Addictions grow in the dark and become bigger and bigger, but when exposed to the light of the truth, they shrink.  You are only as sick as your secrets.  So take off your mask, stop pretending you’re perfect, and walk into freedom” – Unknown

God does heal miraculously at times but most of us find that we have to go through the death throes (we have to live the painful, violent, agonising moments/days/months of dying to our addictions, to ourselves) before we collapse ‘dead’ to the ground. Dead to the addictions that have held us in chains.

It is then that God says, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you…” (Ezekiel 36:26)

Or as Andrew Murray puts it: “When we pray for the Spirit’s help…we will simply fall down at the Lord’s feet in our weakness. There we will find the victory and power that comes from His love”

“Recovery didn’t open the gates of heaven and let me in.  Recovery opened the gates of hell and let me out” (author unknown)