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Broken Chain (Photo taken from http://eudoranachand.files.wordpress.com)

Broken Chain (Photo taken from http://eudoranachand.files.wordpress.com)

By proclaiming the following words from the Old Testament, Jesus confirmed that they have been fulfilled in His own person.

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Lk 4:18-19 ESV)

And from his own experience the apostle Paul stated,

“Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” (2 Cor 3:17 ESV)

Indeed, it is one thing to read about it and another thing to experience the truth of what is written in the Bible. I think you could compare it with head and heart knowledge. However, heart knowledge that always springs from our own experience never makes a detour round our mind so that we would be forced to believe something we could not also imagine. Although God’s logic and wisdom are not comparable with ours, He would never force us to believe something as long our mind says, “No – I can’t believe it.”

God’s ways are unfathomable and much different from what we might imagine. Always. That fact makes life with God to a both mind-altering and heart-changing experience. In order to illustrate the spiritual process of being freed by God, I decided to share how our Lord deals with me regarding these things.

Some years ago, as I was lying in bed praying in the night, I suddenly jumped.
“Ouch!!! What was THIS?”
There was something I had never felt before. Actually out of the blue, while having been in a peaceful state before, a flash of light that was similar to a more or less small electric shock made my body cringe. The center of the flash was obviously my heart since I heard and felt that a chain there had been broken asunder.
So far, so good.
Since the Lord did not answer my question as to what that event might have meant, I simply thanked Him for having freed me from “whatever” and fell into a peaceful sleep again.

But the very next day suffering began.
Although the chain around my heart was gone, now I could see more and more clearly what had been hidden behind. Without going into detail here, you could also compare that process with walking into a dark cellar and opening a door that had been locked for decades until you dare to open it for the very first time.
YIKES!
Only dust and dirt, filthy darkness everywhere. No light at all. Opening the window (i.e., letting God’s light in), you see it is a mess. Oh, I was the mess! Not sure whether I really wanted to know this, yet then I saw it clearly. Holy Moly! And the enlightening process had just begun.

Although I thought before that this painful flash had already freed me, it simply brought some light into my darkness. Seeing so many old wounds and still painful experiences from my past, I was wondering whether it might be really possible to ever be free from these things. And the years of weeping began…..

The tears dried up, again and again. But as soon as another chain was broken asunder, suffering began anew. For years…Truly, I never liked that process of being healed and set free. I would often ask the Lord why He did not simply “press a button” so that I could have been freed in the wink of an eye.

However, last night there was something that was so different from those many chains that had been broken before. The light that unexpectedly as always flashed through my heart, caused NO pain at all. Instead, the chain around my heart was softly pulled apart, and the light was floating in bright waves through my body until it reached my hands. Indeed, it was a quite blissful experience.
Yet Susanne was still suspicious, waiting for another painful process lying ahead of her. In the morning I actually awoke with fear and pain in my heart, yet for the first time I could very clearly see where my fears in life have come from. The Lord showed me different fear-evoking situations of which I did not want to be reminded again. He quasi took me by the hand and helped me see the connection between the first situation that caused my underlying anxiety and the following years when I often experienced panic attacks in rather different situations.

As I was about two years old, I had to undergo the first of several surgeries in my life. At that time it was a life to death decision for my parents to commit their little daughter to the care of a big university hospital. It was anything but easy for them, but they were told that parents would not be allowed to be there. I remember the moment when I was desperately clinging to my father’s neck, not wanting him and my mother to leave me alone there in that aseptic hospital bed. My father told me later that he thought that I would choke him and he wondered where my enormous physical power came from. And it grieved him a lot that he had to leave me there. My mother was even thinking about committing suicide when the doctors told her that they were not convinced I could ever be healed, that is, which age their daughter might be able to reach.

One or two years later as we were on vacation, I was swimming with my mother in a huge lake (Chiemsee). I was not swimming completely on my own, yet I would hold fast onto her shoulders and kept swimming behind her. Suddenly my mother got into a panic and began to scream. Her feet had touched creepers in which her feet got more and more entangled. I only remember that I was shocked and tried to hold her by her neck in order to not let go of her.

My father later told me that he had to rescue us both because I choked my mother and he was afraid that I would drown her. Can you imagine that I felt guilty for decades about it, not knowing how to get rid of these feelings which only reappeared when I hit the panic button myself?