Today’s replay is from Episode 18, in which I shared about how, after my dad died, I went months without the debilitating migraines that defined my two years before his death. How, when I recorded that episode, I hoped those months of lightness without pain were a true healing. I had been worried to share that story, because what if I called myself “healed” and then the migraines came back? 

 

Listener, they did. In the summer of 2022 they returned with a vengeance and have remained. 

  

What do I believe about those sweet months in my deepest time of grief, when I was free of pain? Was it an answer to my dad’s prayer, to mine? Was it a gift in a season of suffering? Was it relief from the stress of watching my dad suffer? 

 

In her book To Be Made Well, Amy Julia Becker writes that, “to live in God’s healing presence is like swimming in the ocean: immense, frightening, powerful, beautiful. Where, as the Psalmist writes: ‘deep calls to deep,’ where answers don’t come easily, where pain is exposed rather than covered over, where healing leads to transformation.” 

 

Whatever healing means for me, I want my pain—both the physical and emotional—to be exposed rather than covered over. Healing as transformation. 

 

Links:

• This reflection and practice were also published this week in The Slow Way Newsletter.
• Click HERE for free downloads/printables 
• Check out The Slow Way online store
• Read more from @amyjuliabecker
• Find a transcript of this episode here. 
• Find Micha's website and sign up for her weekly newsletter here
• Find Micha on Instagram
• Find Micha on Threads
• Micha's other podcast, The Lucky Few, is all about Down syndrome advocacy. She cohosts it with Heather Avis and Mercedes Lara.

Preorder my new book Blessed Are The Rest of Us: How Limits and Longing Make Us Whole at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and available everywhere books are sold.