Trauma has impacted people all over the world. There has been an ongoing conversation around what happens when trauma collides with faith. What does the Bible say? What does science say?

When the science conversation collides with the faith conversation, there is opportunity to bring spiritual growth. However, when one chooses to define trauma, the spiritual component of how trauma is internalized must be a part of the conversation. When trauma collides with faith, soul injury happens. The exercise of allowing faith to heal the trauma is when spiritual awakening happens, which leads to spiritual healing. When trauma collides with faith, if we allow God to heal us, we move to spiritual awakening.

We awaken spiritually when life, love, age, and God happens to us.

Life happens. We can get distracted by our current reality that shapes and reshapes who we intended to be.

Love happens. Loving and non-loving encounters make and or break us.

Age happens. It shapes and shifts us.

God happens. Our experience with God tries and transforms us.

Shift means to exchange or replace something with something else. In life, we are challenged to forgive and forget, move on, suck it up, and the like. What is it about moving past something that is so difficult for us to do? How is it that we can replace a thought, yet have so much trouble replacing an emotion?

Emotions are strange in that they can take hold of us, and we can become paralyzed. That is where many of us have been, even while having the faith to move mountains. What we never realized is that our inner turmoil is our biggest mountain. 

You don’t know to ask God for what you have not dealt with. A hurt that has not been dealt with has no time frame for healing. Who we are becoming, is our desired movement to be more like God every day. Who we are becoming, is our willingness to embrace God’s healing from our brokenness. Who we are becoming, is our intentional headwork, heartwork, and hardwork.

Remembering trauma is head work, yet with the integration of spirituality, the heart work, the process can be handled through God’s grace and peace, the hard work. We find ourselves at emotionally stuck places. My sisters and my brothers, it is time to shift out of the emotionally stuck places and move into our emotionally healed places. It is time for our spiritual awakening.