Process With Words - Five Days to Joy When You’re Overlooked

“So be truly glad. There is wonderful joy ahead, even though you must endure many trials for a little while. These trials will show that your faith is genuine. It is being tested as fire tests and purifies gold—though your faith is far more precious than mere gold. So when your faith remains strong through many trials, it will bring you much praise and glory and honor on the day when Jesus Christ is revealed to the whole world.” (1 Peter 1:6-7, NLT)

When we walk through the valley of overlook, it’s hard to articulate the trial. Sometimes we just don’t have words to put to the pain. But there is a huge benefit of assigning words to your tangled emotions.

When I speak to audiences, I often say, “An untold story never heals.” Instead, it festers, finds a way to poison us, and sits inside of us, longing for release.

If our pain doesn’t come out in our words, it often screams through our behavior. Have you ever found yourself doing the very thing you swore you would never do? Part of the reason you’ve been stuck in destructive patterns of behavior is because you haven’t let out what has wounded you in a safe environment.

When you tell your story (either from the past or a current heartache), you take away its power over you. Have you ever noticed that when you’ve been harangued by a particular secret sin, you can’t seem to overcome it? In college, I battled something that felt impossible to overcome. I believed (wrongly) that I was the only human battling this sin, and I constantly harassed myself for it. When I finally confessed my struggle to a friend, immense relief flooded me. I learned (quite surprisingly) that many others struggled with the same thing. I was not alone. The power of that sin was broken in the context of community.

It may be hard to find face-to-face community. But we all have access to a nonjudgmental piece of paper.

So grab your pen and a piece of paper, set the timer to five minutes, and write down everything you are feeling right now when it comes to feeling overlooked (or use your paper from day 1). Don’t evaluate your words; this is a free-writing, no-judgment zone.

If you feel stuck, here are some intros:

• When [insert something that happened], I felt . . .
• Right now, I feel . . .
• I know I shouldn’t feel this way, but . . .
• It’s scary for me to grant myself permission to struggle, but when I finally did, this is how I felt . . .
• When [insert when a person ignored me], I felt . . . Today I feel . . . about the situation.
• Today I am worrying about . . .
• I really wish this [insert incident] hadn’t happened, but since it did, I feel . . .
• This is what makes me angry . . .
• This is what makes me feel overlooked . . .

Once the five minutes is finished, read aloud what you wrote as a prayer to Jesus. Let him carry the weight of your worries. Pray about sharing your five-minute masterpiece with a trusted, safe person for further healing and release.

PRAYER:

Jesus, I give you my complicated feelings about being overlooked. Help me to release this jumbled mass of emotions into your sweet care. I trust you to carry my pain. Amen.