Today, the process of healing in the room for a new fraternity of roomies who are in retreat at the LifeApp 3Day has been on my heart. My heart is in prayer to our Creator with gratitude for the outcome. Lives being brought to light is a beautiful beautiful thing. I’m inviting us to join in gratitude for the process and the outcome.

Today, I read about 10 year old, Sarah Rector who my heart saw as a vision of hope. She was the child of former slaves who was a part of two Indian tribes through ancestral adoption and enslavement.

In 1913, Sarah was given 160 acres of barren land as a part of a land allocation program. It seems that the idea was to fulfill the obligation to give land to her kind, while minimizing her chance of success, maybe hoping to kill her spirit and maybe even pushing her to work herself to death or to despair as she toiled uselessly on barren land.

I don’t know Sarah’s whole story, and it is said that she struck oil on that land, making her one of America’s first Afrocentric millionaires – from barren land.

The story of colonialism and colonization is the same globally with a few small variances across the world.

If we are willing to consciously face the truth we will heal, grow, and live together.

We have been equally brutalized, and if we begin to work together in recognition of our common pain, we could work toward healing and growth together with power that would unite this land – all the world being the land, because the story is the same with different players all across the world.

In our story on this side of the world, African people were stolen from their homeland, dragged across the ocean, and treated worse than or equal to animals depending on the hand of the massa under whom they fell in this land.

Indigenous people were stolen from their land, brutalized and shoved into corners so that land became suddenly free for development.

Europeans stole land from one territory and stole labour from another.

There is pain unacknowledged and unconscious energy being wasted by all players in the scenario.

Trying to compare pain leaves us expending energy that would be best spent in healing together.

Barren land takes different forms, and until we can look at the truth without shame, until we look at the truth through God’s loving compassionate eyes we will suffer needlessly. We are choosing suffering. We are choosing not to heal because we are trying to force others to heal in order to make our experience better.

Taking space to look at a whole scenario including looking at our own selves is the path to finding oil in barren land. If we stand on the barren land and use space to keep our condemnation and justification stories running through our minds we will keep just barely missing the oil on our land. We’ll keep running away to start all over again.

It’s important to know the difference between stepping away from that battle of condemnation to keep life in play with an open door to unity another day, and stepping away to pulverize an enemy so that we can preserve the rights to our barren land.

It is the difference between being focused and grounded for success in creation with a host of creators, and living in unconscious or conscious fear which steals our ability to enjoy the gift that our Creator intended when They created creators to create in cohesion with fabulous diversity.

And I know this because this is a part of my ongoing healing experience.

I invite us to open ourselves to the light of healing. Here are a few of my favourite resources:

Caste: the origin of our discontents by Isabelle Wilkerson

Homecoming by John Bradshaw

It Didn’t Start With You by Mark Wolyn

What Happened To You by Dr. Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey

Parenting from the Inside Out by Dr. Daniel Siegel

The Gifts of Imperfection by Brené Brown

Psalm 103 New Living Translation of the Bible

Wheel of Awareness

And the place where my heart is today:

https://www.lifeapp.ca/3day

I believe that we can experience healing in love now on Earth, as Jesus taught us to experience in the prayer that we call the Lord’s Prayer. Your kingdom come on Earth as it is in heaven. I believe.