Once upon a time, there was a king and queen who were very unhappy because they had no children. Everything else that the heart could wish for was theirs. Yet none of these things made them happy, because they wanted a little child of their own to love and to care for. When a princess was finally born, there was rejoicing throughout the land. But an evil sorceress cast a spell on the child, promising that on the eve of her sixteenth birthday she would prick her finger and die. Her godmother tried to undo the damage by casting another spell that promised the princess would not die, but would simply fall into a deep sleep until wakened by a kiss.
Attempting to save his daughter from this terrible curse, the king ordered all spinning wheels in the kingdom be burned. Then he and his wife sadly bid farewell to their precious princess, and three good fairies took her deep into the woods to hide. There she met a handsome prince and fell in love.
The forces of evil were angry. The sorceress knew the prince would fight for the heart of his princess, so she kidnapped him and tricked the princess into touching the fated spindle. The sorceress created a forest of thorns to surround the castle and turned herself into a fiery dragon to destroy the prince. The powers of darkness fought the prince, but the three fairies had armed him with the Sword of Virtue and the Sword of Truth. The battle intensified. The prince, with the help of the three good fairies, dealt a death blow to the dragon with the Sword of Truth. The prince found his princess and wakened her with a kiss, and they all lived happily ever after.
What is it about Sleeping Beauty and other fairy tales that so enchant us? Heroes triumphing over villains? The battles fought and damsels rescued? Or maybe it’s the assurance of happy endings. Fairy tales are an escape where, for a couple of hours, life turns out the way we dreamed it would—if not for us, at least for someone.
Somewhere inside us, no matter how old we are, we want to believe that dreams come true. When we cease believing, we face despair. In time, the heart will grow cold and the battle will be lost. But it only takes a glimmer of hope to re-light a spark in our souls.
Think of your favorite fairy tale. The situations the hero and heroine find themselves in generally appear hopeless. Evil seems to triumph over good. A fateful curse. A wicked stepmother. A jealous witch. An incurable sickness. Yet someone always believes. Someone always fights. And someone makes matters of the heart a priority.
If we notice, from Cinderella to Sleeping Beauty, there are a couple of things that each fairy tale, or any heartwarming story, have in common: someone is fighting to win, capture, or rescue someone else’s heart— and a battle is raging against them in the process. What does all this have to do with the losses of life? Everything. Just like the fairy tale characters, we are in a battle to win back, reclaim, and rescue hearts from evil forces trying to destroy them through the sufferings we face. But unlike our fairy tale characters, we don’t always get the happy ending. Sometimes we don’t even know what to do in the battle, and it’s easy to give up, lose hope, and lose heart.
But here’s the good news. God knew how we would feel. In 2 Chronicles, he reminds us that we don’t have the power to face the evil, any more than Prince Phillip had the power alone to defeat the evil Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty. We don’t have to. God will do it in and through us—all we need to do is stand firm.
That does not mean we do nothing. If you broke your arm, you wouldn’t sit at home and simply wait for it to heal. You would be deliberate about seeing a doctor and having it set. Why? Because the pain would motivate you to take action to achieve the desired outcome—healing. Similarly, getting honest about our pain is an intentional and deliberate action we need to take for healing and recovery to occur.
In order to move toward recovery and reclaim our hearts we must consider the following healing tasks of the heart:
- Acceptance
- Faith/Love
- Willingness/Surrender
- Forgiveness
Acceptance
Death! Fear! Loss! Pain! Loneliness! These are not the “happily-ever-afters” we signed up for. Something seems terribly wrong when the story doesn’t have a happy ending. Surely, God made a mistake. He could not have meant for us to accept pain and rejoice. Count it all joy when we’re going through trials…. be glad with exceeding joy when we suffer…. is that really what he wants us to do? Accept this mess?
Acceptance is the first task the heart must consider in the battle against loss. Close your eyes and imagine that God has you right where you are supposed to be, even if it’s a painful place. He is waiting for you to accept what he has allowed to come into your life right now, to grow you into deeper dependence and to accomplish his purpose for your life. Even if you have absolutely no idea what he is up to. Even if you don’t understand the circumstances you find yourself in. Even when you question and feel like giving up.
If we choose (notice the choice here) to continue to fight, complain, and wrestle against what God has allowed, we’ll find ourselves fighting the wrong battle. We’ll lose heart. And we won’t be the only ones who will suffer. We will waste time and energy that is sorely needed to fight the real battle for our hearts. This battle—the one that you will fight for your heart—will primarily be fought and won on your knees. Remember what Jesus said to Peter: “I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail” (Luke 22:32). Jesus himself is interceding for us! He’s doing battle, just as the verse in 2 Chronicles reminds us: “You do not have to fight this battle. Take up your positions. Stand firm and see the deliverance the Lord will give you.”
Fighting the wrong battle
I have struggled with anxiety my whole life. It wasn’t until I became a counselor that God began to give me insight and understanding about what was really going on inside me. For years, I fought against it. It was painful. It was weakness. It was bad. It was something that as a Christian I should not experience because I thought it meant I didn’t trust God. But as I began to learn more about my heart, and as I sat with countless people who struggled with anxiety disorders, I found a commonality. We all struggled to avoid it or fight against it, and that only made it worse. Once I began to understand some basic physiological concepts about the central nervous system, I could consider that if I was willing to accept and experience the anxiety, and not fight against it, it might not be as bad. And it worked!
That was my challenge to Kevin, a man who seemed to look through me with hollow eyes. He was six foot four and twenty-two years old. He weighed a hundred and forty-five pounds. They say the eyes are the windows of the soul, and his looked dead. He started off with the obvious roadblock of denial, of course; most folks who struggle with eating disorders do. He didn’t believe he had a problem. Then he followed the typical path the rest of us do with the roadblocks of avoiding, control, fear, and guilt.
But as he prepared to go to a treatment center for help, something began to change in him. The battle he was fighting for his heart, for his life, had escalated beyond what he could bear. Fear had a vice grip on him. He was angry and he was hopeless. My heart broke for him and for his family. But I believed he could recover.
I started to talk to him about acceptance, and I asked if he could trust that God had him exactly where he wanted him. He wasn’t ready to hear that yet.
Maybe you find yourself in that same place. Part of you desires healing, wants to fight the battle for your heart, and another part of you rages against it. The coping strategies that have protected you from facing your issues have thick and high walls, but make no mistake—their foundation is shaky, and they can offer you only limited protection against the onslaught of the enemy.
Consider Jesus’s words in Matthew 26:52–54. He is rebuking Peter for drawing his sword and cutting off the ear of one of the guards who came to arrest him.
“Put your sword back in its place,” Jesus said to him, “for all who draw the sword will die by the sword. Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels? But how then would the Scriptures be fulfilled that say it must happen this way?”
Jesus is saying that he is willing to accept what God had decreed for him. No vacillating. No easy way out. No padded cross. Why? Because he had already won the battle on his knees at Gethsemane.
If you have seen the movie The Passion of the Christ, you will remember the powerful opening scene. Through the dark and hazy fog, Jesus reveals his human frailty: tension; anxiety; fear; and mortal agony of body, soul, and spirit. He is wrestling with Satan. And then he looks to heaven, utters some words in Latin, and smashes his foot on the head of the snake coiling beneath him. The battle was won in his mind and in his heart. He asked the Father if there was any other way. God said no. And Jesus accepted it. This was the way it had to happen for the Scripture to be fulfilled. So that you and I could be redeemed. So that we would not lose heart. So that we would not lose the battle.
Each of us has a set course that we must travel. All things must be accomplished in due time and in said order to fulfill the mission God has for us. No matter how bad, how painful, how fearful, or how desperate we are, we are right where we are supposed to be. None of it takes God by surprise. He has already walked it, and he’s willing to walk it again with us.
We face a fork in the road. We can accept our trials, and use our resources to fight this battle for our hearts, or we can choose to allow the roadblocks of denial, anger, control and fear to keep us frozen in our pain.
For Kevin, it meant changing his relationship with food, accepting the loss of the eating disorder as a way to control and protect. It meant being willing to lose one identity (eating disorder) to embrace another (child of God). And it meant accepting who God made him apart from his weight, appearance, and performance.
By faith, Kevin stepped out to address his issues. He was willing to surrender his rights to the fairy tale ending he so desperately desired for his life, and trust God with the outcome. He was able to forgive himself for being less than perfect, and accept himself warts and all. In the end, he made a total recovery. I spoke with him several years later; before we hung up the phone he reminded me of the fairy tale story I told him; “You know,” he said, “Dreams really do come true.”