Caution: Ice!

Caution: Ice!

By Drenda Keesee

I was going to Colorado for a skiing trip with a friend. She was a very experienced skier, and I was, well … not. I did a last-minute crash course lesson the day before (crash course is right!), but the skiing hills in Ohio are “slightly” smaller than the skiing mountains in Colorado.

My flight had just arrived in Colorado, and I was having a pity-party over something that happened that week. I let myself slip into wrong thinking…

My friend and I met up at the airport and took our bags to the car. She went back inside to get something, and as I went to put another bag in the car, I slipped on a patch of ice. My head and my elbow slammed against the concrete, and I saw stars!

I didn’t tell my friend how badly I had fallen. We went to our accommodations, and when I woke up the next morning my elbow was black and blue. I still went skiing that day (not a great choice), and I fell on my elbow again. The pain got worse, so I went and had it examined. My tendon and my triceps muscle were separated.

I had surgery to reattach the tendon and a supernaturally quick recovery. I was supposed to have a sling on for six months, but after three weeks the doctor said my arm was healing so quickly that I didn’t need to wear it. That was only half the battle; afterwards I had to fight the fear of reinjuring it. 

We all have missed God before. I definitely did that time. But this is so similar to how depression operates in our lives. Something happens that hurts us emotionally—we make a mistake, we slip on the ice, a traumatic situation happens, or we get discouraged. We take on that wound and we build a wall.

There is a difference between emotional healing and building a wall to protect that sore spot. Emotional healing deals with the issue, but it gives it time to heal. It takes baby steps toward recovery, and for a while, you may protect that wound in a sling, but you are working toward becoming whole again. 

When you build a wall, that wound isn’t healing. You actually keep that wound alive when you do that. If I never allowed my arm to heal, that wound would have gotten more and more irritated and the injury more serious. 

When you build a wall, you sever and cut something off from your ability to feel emotion. Pain seeks pleasure, which is why people often turn to forms of addiction to anaesthetize the pain. There is a certain point where pain seeks to cut off that area of your life. When we experience a trauma that is so painful that we can’t deal with it, we can actually cut ourselves off emotionally. 

Depression is when we’ve gotten stuck in that trauma, in that severed place, in that hurt. We keep rehearsing it and protecting it, so we never allow it to heal. Life becomes hopeless, and our vision for it becomes paralyzed. You can’t live in that place! Pain is an emotion that we need to be able to feel in order to know when to say no to relationships, situations, and circumstances. 

You have to take time to heal, but then you have to go from there. You can’t spend your whole life nursing those wounds and protecting them. After my arm was hurt, I couldn’t spend my whole life protecting that wound. I had to move on. If I didn’t start moving it and stretching it, I would have stunted its healing. Please don’t do that to yourself sweet friend! It’s time to heal.

Drenda Keesee’s contagious zeal and humorous personal experiences help make her ministry of spiritual, emotional and relational wholeness one that will bless your life and spark a new fire in your spirit.

A wife of over 30 years and a mother of five children, Drenda has ministered at churches, seminars, and conferences, and through the mediums of television and radio, for more than 20 years.

Her books, The New Vintage Family, Better Than You Think, and She Gets It are available wherever books are sold. In these heartfelt books, Drenda shares her personal journey and the life lessons that have brought her to where she is today, as well as practical answers that all people need to live a joyful life.

Drenda and her husband Gary founded Faith Life Now, a ministry designed to spread the message of freedom in the areas of finances, faith, marriage, and family. Tune in for their weekly messages here. Faith Life Now hosts conferences worldwide, and sponsors both Fixing the Money Thing, which Drenda co-hosts with her husband Gary, and Drenda.

Through their own life experiences, the Keesees have found the principles from God’s Word to be powerful and effective. At one point, Drenda was a young, suicidal feminist with no hope of ever being “good enough” for her own standards of perfection. She never wanted the “inconvenience” of a husband or children, and she was on her own path to success. But the stress of trying to achieve perfection and perform for love left her broken and used. She had success, but it was nothing compared to the pain and loneliness it had also brought.

That’s when God got a hold of her heart. It was there—at her lowest point—that she found the One who accepted and loved her, faults and all. Since that transformation, Drenda has had a passion to reach women who find themselves where she once was.

She married Gary after attending college, and there she found herself in a personal boot camp of sorts. She says, “I cried and told God, ‘I can do anything but be a wife and mother.’” She committed to learning how to do it God’s way. Through the many years of raising their children and struggling to make ends meet, Drenda learned from their mistakes. “I didn’t know how to be a wife and mother, but God saved our marriage, taught us how to parent our children for success, showed us how to have financial success, and then irony of all ironies, He called us to ministry.” It’s truly because of these life experiences that Drenda can now share so many insightful principles for people who are now going through the same struggles.