"This is a Safe Place"

Is life beating you down?

Do you have a wound or affliction that just won't clear up?

The Hemorrhaging Woman

She was bleeding.  It had been this way for 12 years.  The doctors she saw only made her worse, not better.  This woman who hemorrhaged had lived a life with wounds and fear.  The bleeding was only part of the problem.  She also struggled to be part of society for all those years.  You see, wherever she laid or sat would be unclean for anyone else, and if others touched places she had been, they also would be unclean for a few days.  Think that would take a toll on her feelings?

Would you push your way through a tight crowd and talk publicly about this problem to Jesus?  It would cause instant recoil.

She didn't want to talk to him.  She didn't want to reveal that she would make everyone unclean in the crowd.  So she found a way to interact with Jesus without looking Him in the face.  Faith brought her.  She thought, "if I can only touch the hem of His robe, I will be healed."

And she was!  She stopped bleeding as soon as she touched Jesus.  He had made her finally feel safe from the oozing wound.  Her plan was to slink away.  But the Lord was thinking about how she felt in the presence of many.

Thank God for Jesus!  He didn't follow the usual protocol and count this bleeding woman unclean.  He was safe, for her.  What happens when we only feel safe with one?

In this video Nikita intuitively hears wisdom's voice.  Nikita stops Alex's oozing wound.  She retells her own story to Alex.  How, once she had an oozing wound, a need for safety, and Carla stopped the hemorrhaging.  In spite of Carla's absence, Nikita grasps the rest of the lesson and embodies it for Alex: "And I thought, 'There has to be a reason."'  She wasn't going to wait on Carla - her own devotion to righteousness called her to excellence in being a mentor herself.

The Clackamas Town Center Shooting

When people become associated on an intimate level with shocking tragedy, such as the Newtown School shooting or Clackamas Mall shooting last December, they say afterward, "I'll never go there again."

This kind of thinking is like the woman who only wanted to be healed in body and not in the crowd: a half-way deliverance.  It seems like wisdom to avoid the places where people remind you of something that brings you down.

But experts in trauma and post-traumatic stress suggest that the best thing you can do after a perceived life-threatening experience, is to revisit the very place where it all happened.  To face it.  To sit in the corridors, to walk the expanse, and just let your senses take in the normalcy of it all.

The woman who hemorrhaged very well might have suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.  Research shows us that people with chronic life-threatening illness, such as cancer, can be triggered with intense re-experiences of traumatic fear for survival.  They call this the "fight-or-flight" response, or "hyperarousal" or "hypervigilence." It is a lower-brain response, not part of the brain responsible for critical thinking at all.  It comes from the amygdala, which for example, tells you to take your hand off a burning stove even before you've had a chance for the more advanced part of your brain to interpret the situation and decide to remove your hand.  It's much faster, beyond thinking almost.  The amygdala and hippocampus are in charge of fear responses and the way those memories are held and revived in the mind.

The hypervigilence of post-traumatic stress is similar to what schizophrenics experience in paranoia.  It's not paranoia, but it acts similar.  Hypervigilence seems like a foreign concept until it just comes over someone.  Their senses warn them saying, "I've seen this situation before.  Run first, ask questions later!"

Those Who Don't Go Back, Lose Community

Why go back to a place of a nightmare?  For mall shoppers who don't go back, it seems at first like a no-brainer, like a healthy decision.  Somewhere down the road however, it may catch up. This increases in likelihood if there should be another life-threatening experience later, even if it is completely unrelated to the first. The re-experiencing of a traumatic response doesn't just happen in that mall, on the third floor right at the Macy's entrance where the tragedy occurred.  The mind may revive this experience through totally unfair reminders, such as the scent of Bath and Body Works, down the hall.  Or any retail center which has the same tiles on their floors.  Or overhead holiday music.  The amygdala and hippocampus just plays unfairly.  The fear can irrationally come out in so many more places and scenarios than you would have ever thought possible.  It makes public places and people, unsafe, and there is little community for people with fear.

This is why it is good to consider going back, when life settles down to normal.  The traumatized should attempt to take back and normalize the situation that had been terrifying.

Moving Us Toward Community

Your responsibility is to go back.  Your mentor's responsibility is to advocate for your community.  We must find a way to help people feel safe around one another, after tragedies like these shootings.  Mark 5:30-34,

And Jesus, immediately knowing in Himself that power had gone out of Him, turned around in the crowd and said, 'Who touched my clothes?'
But His disciples said to Him, 'You see the multitude thronging you, and you say, "Who touched me?"'
And He looked around to see her who had done this thing.  But the woman, fearing and trembling, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell down before Him and told Him the whole truth.  And He said to her, 'Daughter, your faith has made you well.  Go in peace, and be healed of your affliction.'

Many Christians have trouble being vulnerable beyond a couple of our closest friends.  What if, barring a few mismatched personalities, Christians were a safe place to be yourself?

Jesus became a beacon by which the woman could retake a sense of safety and rapport with several more.

He instantaneously imposed on all His followers to become that safe environment.  He did it through His public acceptance of her, in the place and the people where she was most aware of her issue.  This is a fine example of healing communities.

As I write this I realize some readers are thinking about those who have not been safe.  Have you ever taken a risk, and stood out?  Did you ever choose to be vulnerable?  Have you shown a small community your battle scars and risk being misunderstood?  Sometimes Christians go silent because they don't know what to say, even though they feel respect and compassion for you.  Sometimes they add judgement on top of your wound, instead of moving toward vulnerability themselves.  Imagine in the television show above if Nikita and Birkoff separated themselves from Alex because they could see her hemorrhaging?

If this is the case in your life, take a look at the scriptures.  The woman honestly didn't know what would happen if she became known.  But she was sure scared!  God defends and saves those who take Kingdom risks.  Those who tell "the whole truth" for His glory and power to become known.  Jesus stops to hear her story.  He isn't defending the comforts of those following Him in the crowd.  He puts them on edge.  He wraps her in acceptance and this is the story that is left for us from the disciples in our bibles.  Jesus is on the side of the openly broken.  Through His dialogue with her, He subtly tells everyone else their duty which is to communicate: "We are okay.  You're going to be fine."  Depend on Jesus to do this for you in your vulnerability!  He can transform Christians who struggle to embody safe community.  God doesn't guarantee that all our afflictions will healed in an instant, but He has shown us that we don't have to live this life alone.

It just might be that Jesus would use your openness as a model of His grace for a whole throng of onlookers.

The Community's Response: This is a Safe Place

Do you suffer from wounds and fear?  I can't promise you all Christians will treat you right.   It is the Savior, Jesus Christ, who ended the era of separating the broken.  Have you ever thought that your words and your presence is a ministry God can give through you to someone in need?  When I've drawn near to someone's wounds and pain, that was not me; it was Jesus who lives in me and who's shown me in His Word how much He loves everyone so much, that He took many wounds for us.  He will be closer to you than I ever could.  I'm not perfect.  I will let you down now and then.  If you happen to have felt acceptance from me, come and experience acceptance in the community of Christians with which I follow Jesus.  As D.T. Niles said, "I'm just one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread"  -


"You can stay here.
This is a safe place."