You Were Created To Heal

The life force in you is strong. It has brought you this far. It won’t let you down now.

I must admit that there were decades when I was unaware of my resilience. I was stumbling from one calamity to another, and just trying to get by. I was also unaware that what was going on in my body and nervous system, was the deep toll that trauma had taken. I was unaware of words like trauma and resilience. To be honest, I had a growing suspicion that I was completely broken and, perhaps, under some kind of unavoidable and horrid generational curse.

But one thing didn’t escape me…I was meant to live.

This message was clear. From God saving me from being born dead (my mother’s first attempt on my life), to several other near death experiences, God continued to breathe the breath of LIFE into me. He would not release me. Even when, at times, I begged Him to.

One year, between ages 16-23, after my mother kidnapped me, and locked me in chains in a basement, God came to me in a particularly desperate moment. I had no idea how old I was, or how much time had passed. I truly wanted to die. To be let out of my misery.

He met me in the dark. My arms were crossed over my head, and my hands had gone numb, from the weight of my exhausted body pulling against the edges of the handcuffs on my wrists. He knelt on the cold hard cement in my excrement. He wiped the tears my hands weren’t free to.

I screamed silently at Him, and asked Him why He had forgotten me in this place. I angrily spat at Him, and asked Him what I had done wrong to be punished so harshly, and just forgotten. Day after day. Year after year.

He sat with me in the night watches, and allowed me to say all the slanderous things I could think of. The bitter, hopeless things. I asked Him all the existential questions that came pouring forth from this dark night of my soul.

I finally fell asleep, head dangling forward. Hours later, I awoke, drool having wet the front of my shirt. My head snapped up, and I felt it collide with something warm. God had placed His hands upon my head, and was pronouncing words of blessing over me, instead of punishing me for my thoughts and words, as I had been trained to expect from authority figures.

Something was passed to me that night. Something that would be 40 years in the making. A holy unction. A mission. And a promise.

I promised Him that night, that if I ever made it out alive, I would do all that I could to walk beside one other person who had also suffered.

This was the beginning of my dream of creating restorative community. Just me, and one other person.

Are you that person? Are you the person God blessed me with on the night that changed the whole direction of my life?

Thriving Founder of our Restorative Community, Holly Nelson

I am the girl, and the woman, who dug deep into her resilience, and eventually turned her trauma into super powers.

When I took my first tentative steps off that Greyhound bus, in 1983, and felt the snow melting through my t-shirt, I would have never guessed that that homeless, fragile girl would someday use the internet to build the world’s largest (and safest) restorative community of trauma survivors.

God is good. He makes all things possible.

“You have turned my mourning into joyful dancing. You have taken away my clothes of mourning and clothed me with joy, that my glory may sing praise to You, and I may not be pierced with sorrow. O Lord my God, I will give thanks to thee for ever.” Psalm 30:10-12