Our Ministry is a Biblically based prayer ministry designed to bring healing to emotionally wounded people.   Many people simply say they 'just feel bad or sad' and do not know why.  We help them go back to the first time they began to have those feelings and begin the process of being set free from the negative feelings.

How do we get wounded in the first place?

Wounds can come from many sources.  We can be wounded by parents, siblings, aunts and uncles, teachers and classmates.  Even strangers can wound us.  We can be wounded when people do bad things to us (abuse) or when adults that are responsible for us fail to provide for our needs (neglect).  These wounds happen even when the person doing them does not mean to harm or hurt us  It is our perception about the incident that causes the pain. 

Generally speaking, we can be abused physically or emotionally.  Types of physical abuse are hitting, slapping, rape/molestation, and/or being forced to do things against our will.

Some types of emotional abuse are being told you are dumb, worthless, or no good, being used to provide emotional support for a parent or grandparent, etc.

Some types of physical neglect would include: not having a place to live, food to eat, clothes, and health care.  Emotional neglect is when the responsible adults in our life don’t support us emotionally with praise, attention or a sense of being loved.

Many times things are said or done to us when we are children that are not meant to be harmful or hurtful, but it is our perception as a child that causes us to come to conclusions about ourselves that are not true - but we believe them to be.  For example,  I am dumb, stupid, ugly, not important, worthless etc.  Perception is reality.  If we believe something is true, we will live like it is. 

Misperception.  What does the abuse/neglect say about me?

A child exposed to abuse or neglect is left trying to make sense of why it happened to them and what the abuse or neglect says about them.  Understandably, a child that experienced abuse or neglect does not posses the ability to fully and accurately understand why the abuse is happening.  In fact we tend to believe bad things happen to us because we are bad.  As a result, we develop inaccurate negative beliefs about ourselves such as; “I get hit because I’m bad and deserve it,” or “there is something wrong with me.”  The lingering emotional pain comes from the misperceptions.  A child that is sexually abused may feel dirty and responsible the rest of her life, because the perpetrator told her that what she did was bad and if she told anyone they would think she was bad for doing it.  A small child lacks the ability to understand this manipulation by the adult and that he said this to simply keep her quiet.  It doesn’t matter that she was five and couldn’t/didn’t understand what was happening; she will believe it until the Spirit of Truth sets her free.  The younger the children are when they experience abuse/neglect the more likely they are to misperceive why the abuse/neglect happened to them and what it says about them.

What impact do these negative beliefs/misperceptions have our life?

Once we believe that the reason we are treated badly is because we are bad or worthless, these thoughts get imprinted onto our brains.  In other words, once we believe these negative beliefs about ourselves because we were abuse/neglected, we will still believe them long after the experience is over.  In fact, even when we try to talk ourselves out of believing them-we can’t.  For instance, a grown man, we will call “Bob,” feels unimportant and that there is something wrong with him.  As a child his older brother was good at everything he did, sports, school etc., and Bob didn’t do as well in those areas.  He believes he’s not important and that something is wrong with him.  As an adult, Bob is successful at his job and well-liked, but when someone at work does something well, Bob experiences feelings of being unimportant and like something is wrong with him.  Even at home if he can’t do something perfectly these feelings come up.  He finds himself in a trap of working more and harder to avoid these feelings.  No matter how hard Bob works or how much his wife and boss say they appreciated him, the feelings are just under the surface.  Furthermore, the way that he protects himself, through work, is leading him to feel empty and alone.

Not only do we re-experience the old emotions over and over, we re-experience the old ways we coped with those painful situations.  In other words, we revert back to a child-like way of coping with our current problems.  An adult with a belief that she is worthless, will feel this feeling every time her children don’t listen to what she tells them to do.  As a result, she will deal with the current situation much like she did as a child and feel overwhelmed and unable to correct her children.  On top of that she may try to cover up these worthless and helpless feelings by yelling or hitting to ‘make’ her children do what she wants them to do.  Only later, she will feel guilty for abusing them.

We can tell we are reacting out of our misperceptions and negative beliefs when we have a reaction that is bigger than the current situation warrants or we feel paralyzed to do anything about it.  This paralysis comes from the fact that we learned these negative beliefs as a child when things were too big or more than we could handle.

So now what?

If we are ready to accept that we are wounded we can begin to heal.  As we become open to the idea of being freed from painful beliefs about ourselves, we will experience different thoughts and feelings that will block our efforts.  We may start to think that “I should leave my past in the past.”  We may also think and feel that facing our past is too overwhelming and it’s better to leave it alone.  At some point everyone experiences these objections.  The first one, that we should leave the past in the past, is another form of deception.  The reality is that if we could leave the past behind us and it didn’t bother us, it would not affect us today, but it does.  As for thinking our past is too big or overwhelming, this comes from the fact that most of the abuse/neglect happened to us when we were young and dependent on the adults in our lives.

How can Jesus heal our false beliefs/misperceptions?

The truth is that we have already lived through everything that has happened to us and survived.  Since we lived through the painful experiences the first time, we can go back through them as adults and let Jesus heal us of the misperceptions that trouble us.  However, we don’t have to face the painful memories alone.  Jesus, through his Power, Grace and Strength will help us go to places we didn’t think we could.  In Matthew 13, Jesus outlines a promise to all of us when he states that those that have eyes, let them see, those that have ears, let them hear, understand in your heart and turn, and Jesus promised to heal us.  Jesus also assures us to “know the truth and the truth will make you free.”  If we will tell the truth about what happened to us and what it meant to us and how this left us feeling without holding back for fear of being disloyal or somehow un-Christian, Jesus said, “I would heal them.”