For me, the path of surrendering mediocrity and taking up greatness leads to a road of healing. Actually, it feels less like a road and more like a highway sometimes—big and fast and powerful, potentially dangerous but safest as long as I stay focused, don’t move too slow and ride with the flow of traffic.
Just like a real highway, merging onto this road was a lot scarier than the actual driving. Realizing the healing road was the one I needed to be on and actually making it here started slow and sped up the closer I got, just like interstate driving.
Sometimes, the car I drive rides like a brand new Cadillac, smooth and shiny and sleek, but other times I realize it’s just a jalopy with a dangling bumper and no headlights. I may have hung a coconut-scented air freshener from the rearview mirror and it runs pretty good (most of the time), but that doesn’t mask the fact that it’s still a fixer-upper.
And you know what? It’s okay.
The healing road is part of the foundation I need to lay so that I can unlock the greatness God put in me. I spent a long time hoping for greatness without addressing my junk and brokenness. While it’s completely true that greatness can be found in the midst of what’s broken (look at Christ on the cross, for goodness’ sake), it’s also true that we will never really achieve greatness until we can be real about what is broken within us.
Some of the brokenness will never completely go away—Jesus’ resurrected body still had wounds, y’all—but here’s the thing: Certain lies have been whispered to our hearts, and we unknowingly cling to them like Gospel Truth. We need someone to point them out for what they really are—toxic charlatans with hands held tight around our wrists, arresting us in fear and self-loathing and cruel, merciless excuses. We need somebody, outside of our own brain, to look objectively at our broken hearts, point out those ugly lies, and speak healing words of truth instead. The real Healer is Jesus of course, but sometimes we need another human to decode the lies we’ve come to believe and help us arrive at true conclusions. We need another human to help us read our roadmap.
And let’s be real. As much as we have romantic notions about our true love being that person, or our best friend being that person, more often than not, that person needs to be someone with enough distance from us to actually see our hurts objectively and not be as emotionally tied to us as we are to ourselves.
If this is the next step for you in the journey toward greatness, won’t you join me on the healing road? Stop pretending you drive a Cadillac, and get behind the wheel of the lemon you’ve been given. Own it, drive it, and together we’ll arrive somewhere happier, healthier, and a little more whole than where we started.
