Hearing the Sacred Echo

One of my favorite authors is Margaret Feinberg. She has an amazing ability to make the Word of God come alive. Tomorrow on my own personal blog, I will write about her latest book Scouting the Divine, but today I’d like to look at her book from last year, The Sacred Echo.

Feinberg describes sacred echoes as “those moments when God speaks the same message to my heart again and again. I call them sacred echoes because I’ve noticed that throughout my relationships, daily life, and study, the same scripturally-sound idea or phrase or word will keep reappearing until I can no longer avoid its presence. Is this mere coincidence, or is there something more?”

Indeed I’ve have many experiences where several things have come up, and I wonder if God’s trying to tell me something. This is the most recent example:

A couple of months ago I had a dream where I was interviewing Renee Altson. Her story has deeply touched my heart. At one point in the dream, she told me, “It’s not about what happens to you; it’s about how you handle it.”

Then last week I was reading Anne Jackson’s Mad Church Disease, which is about overcoming burnout in ministry. I don’t work with the Church, but I found the book to be extremely relevant nevertheless. At one point Jackson says she was abused by some one she trusted in high school, and for a while she basically self-medicated the pain. Through a counselor, she eventually realized that, “even though I needed to let go of the guilt I was carrying in thinking that the abuse was my fault, I needed to take responsibility for working through the pain. It was irresponsible to cover up the hurt or ignore. God had so much more waiting for me if only I could face the pain and loss, grieve it, and then accept the good He had planned for me.”

Also, ever since I wrote about my history with being bullied for Disturbed Christians, I keep thinking about scriptures that talk about God’s strength. According to Bible Gateway, there are about 58 verses that include the words “Lord” and “strength.” For example, 2 Timothy 4:17: “But the Lord stood at my side and gave me strength, so that through me the message might be fully proclaimed and all the Gentiles might hear it. And I was delivered from the lion’s mouth.”

I don’t know about you, but I think God’s trying to tell me that I’ve been dealing with my issues the wrong way.

I have a tendency to bury things deep down inside, and when something triggers me all those things leap and say, “Hey, remember us?” Also, I have tendency to try to make myself whole, although it never works. But ever since I wrote that Disturbed Christians post, I’ve felt . . . free, in a way. Like I no longer had to pretend. So maybe God is telling me that I don’t have to cover anything up anymore, and to rely on His strength instead of mine.

Am I making sense?