A few weeks ago I saw a person from my past who had left their mark on me. It wasn’t a good one. Seeing them elicited in me, an immediate physical response. A trauma response.

My breath became short as my chest tightened. My mind raced with disbelief and confusion. This person didn’t live around here. I instantly wondered if God was punishing me for something I did? Why would God allow me to see them, knowing the years it took to heal from this person?

It’s the evangelical in me that points me straight to punishment first. But I serve a loving God now. To me, God is a feminine and nurturing spirit. Our guardian. Our Devine  Mother.

May your unfailing love be my comfort, according to your promise to your servant. Psalm 119: 76

So why do I have to see them, after years of being away? Why did we have to cross paths? After I move the punishment theory out of the way,  I generally consider a hard situation to be some kind of test. I’m sure at times they are tests. Not set for us to fail but to learn.

Always last to cross my mind is that maybe my trauma dirt cloud is getting kicked up because someone else in this world needs my actions to chain react to help them. Maybe this discomfort that I am in is because I am answering another woman’s prayer. Maybe our Devine mother is asking me to protect another.

I’m in a healthier place with this situation. Still triggering and traumatizing but… not debilitating. Uncomfortable but without the anchor. I’m free from those chains.

I think it’s important, when we find ourselves in extreme pain or discomfort, that we entertain the idea that our pain may be answering another’s prayer.  An unspoken service to others. In this way we may be loving our neighbor.

As spiritual people, we are infinitely connected. We already know that God works in mysterious ways and uses a multitude of vessels to do Gods will.

So in the quietness of prayer, I realized that the steps I took following this encounter could have been preventative maintenance for another one of Gods children.  Maybe that person would not have made it through like I had. In that moment I felt like I took the hit for the right reasons. I trusted God in all the places and people I could not see, hoping to be a silent instrument of peace. Hoping also that anyone reading may consider the same when things get hard.