Trash Bin Sharks

It took 10 tries to capture the selfie of our puppy Lacy today. This one finally caught a moment in time just right. My other failed attempts now deleted and discarded, no longer exist. I was happy with this one. I chose to keep it and put the rest into the trash bin. It was a process of elimination. This is the photograph that won the honor of staying in my memories. I chose happy.

Life is filled with good and bad events. Along the road of life we encounter things we want to remember forever and also events which we want to throw in the trash bin never to be revisited again. We are quick to dispose the ugly, painful and trauma filled catastrophes into the nearest rubbish pile as we run towards the goal of happiness. Often it’s a dump and run scenario. What we fail to notice, is that sometimes that trash comes back to bite us.

I am teaching a class based on Lisa Harper’s book “The Sacrament of Happy” and in one of the first few chapters it talks about sharks lurking just under the surface waiting to attack. Now, she wasn’t talking about actual sharks but rather traumas we never dealt with. Those painful things we just threw in the trash bin and forgot about.

Have you ever had your phone stop you from taking anymore photos because you have used all your storage space? This recently happened in my phone, so I began deleting hundreds of photos thinking this would be an easy fix. Imagine my frustration when it still said my storage was full after deleting all those photos. What I failed to realize was that I had to also empty my trash bin of all of the deleted photos to actually free up the space on my phone.

This got me thinking about the sharks. If we never deal with the trauma it will come back to bite us eventually. When we just bury the pain in a rubbish pile it never really goes away, it still exists along with the agony associated with it. It may be days, weeks, months or even years later before we stumble across it again but it is still there.

So what is my point? We need to sit with our sharks and feel the pain. We need to stare it right in the face and acknowledge we need healing. We need prayer. We need to cover it with scripture. Above all we need to come to the realization we have what it takes with the help of Jesus to completely terminate the sharks in our lives. We need to understand we are worthy of healing. We are capable of receiving healing.

I encourage you today to ask God what one of sharks in your life is. Whatever it is, choose to sit in it. Let God heal you. Then empty the trash bin. When you do this it doesn’t mean the trauma never happened, it means that it doesn’t hurt you anymore. You can look back at it and not cry anymore or act out because it bit you. It means that you are healed. Choose healing because you are worthy of freedom.