He Lifts Me Up

1 — The Wound That Wouldn’t Heal

It’s me, O Lord, standing in the need of prayer.

That’s how this message begins—not with triumph but with honesty.

Because forgiveness never starts from strength; it starts from brokenness.

Maybe you know that kind of breaking.

Someone walked away, someone lied, someone took from you what you can’t get back.

If you live long enough, somebody will hand you pain you didn’t deserve.

For me, it happened in the middle of what I thought was my calling.

I was serving as country director for an NGO, overseeing humanitarian projects that mattered.

We were doing good work—feeding families, building clinics, bringing light into dark places.

Then, without warning, I was relieved of my position.

The explanation arrived on a thin sheet of paper:

> “You are being replaced because you do not have a working relationship with the U.S. Embassy.”

I stared at the words in disbelief.

A “lack of relationship”? I’d spent years cultivating one.

But reason doesn’t matter much once someone decides your story for you.

The next day—the very next day—the phone rang.

It was the U.S. Embassy.

They offered me a job.

I remember hanging up and just sitting there.

Part of me wanted to laugh. Another part wanted to cry.

I had been told I wasn’t good enough for a relationship with them, and then they turned around and hired me.

It was vindication wrapped in sadness.

You learn quickly that vindication doesn’t heal humiliation.

A paycheck doesn’t fix betrayal.

You can win the argument and still lose your peace.

So I accepted the embassy position, but the wound came with me.

Outwardly I looked fine—new badge, new office, new mission.

Inside, I was carrying a private courtroom in my soul.

Every day I retried the case.

Every night I replayed the evidence.

And every verdict I rendered kept me chained to the same bitterness.

Unforgiveness has a way of turning the lights off inside you.

It starts with replaying the injustice, then it becomes resentment, then it becomes identity.

You stop talking about what was done to you and start becoming the one it was done to.

That’s when you know you’re stuck.

I tried to pray my way past it, but my prayers had an edge.

“Lord, teach them a lesson.”

“Show the world who was right.”

Heaven was silent, and that silence forced me to face a harder truth:

I wasn’t just angry at people—I was angry at God.

Why hadn’t He stopped it?

Why let a lie replace the truth?

Why take me from a ministry I loved only to drop me in the wilderness of confusion?

If you’ve ever asked why, you’re in good company.

Moses asked it in the desert.

Job asked it on the ash heap.

Even Jesus cried it from the cross: “My God, why have You forsaken Me?”

God didn’t answer my “why” right away.

Instead, He began to lift me by degrees—softly, quietly, the way dawn lifts the night.

It started when I realized forgiveness wasn’t something I could feel first; it was something I had to choose.

Paul writes, “Be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

Feelings don’t transform first—thinking does.

So I began asking God to renew my mind, to help me see the whole picture differently.

That’s when I saw what unforgiveness was doing to me.

It was draining my joy, hardening my tone, and narrowing my world until everything I saw was colored by injustice.

And the cruelest part?

The people who hurt me had moved on.

They were eating breakfast, planning meetings, living their lives.

While I was still standing at the scene of the crime, refusing to leave.

One evening I walked outside after work.

The city lights shimmered on the river, and a breeze came through the palms.

I looked up and said, “Lord, I can’t fix this. I can’t even stop feeling it. But if You’ll lift me, I’ll go wherever You carry me.”

That was the first small rise—the first breath of grace.

Nothing around me changed, but something in me did.

I began to sense that God wasn’t punishing me; He was preparing me.

That He wasn’t exposing me; He was educating me.

He was teaching me that forgiveness isn’t about letting someone else off the hook—it’s about letting me out of the trap.

And that’s when I knew this message would someday need to be preached,

because there’s a whole congregation of people sitting in pews every week smiling on the outside and dying on the inside, still tied to the one who hurt them.

And the same God who lifted me is still in the lifting business.

---

2 — The Turning of the Heart

Forgiveness rarely happens in a flash.