Teleios
complete, perfect
Well, really, a book – and it’s not done yet. It’s called Teleios which is the Greek word for complete or perfect. We all carry pain in our lives. Pain from people who hurt us, pain from situations or events beyond our control, or pain from mistakes we’ve made (most of my wounds are self-inflicted). These wounds won’t just go away. They have to be attended to, otherwise they get worse we hurt the people we love and ourselves.
So how do we do heal this pain? By using this simple acronym NAME:
Name
The first thing we do is name our pain or what we are feeling. You can’t heal something if you don’t know what it is. The pain has to be identified and the best way to identify it is to name it.
Attend
After we have identified our pain, we have to attend to it. Time doesn’t heal all wounds. You can’t just throw a little dirt on it and hope the pain goes away. It doesn’t. It gets much, much worse. But wounds that are attended to get better. We learn to understand the wound, what caused it, and how God heals it.
Move in the Spirit
Sometimes we have to move backwards before we can move forwards. Our pain can be difficult to name and then to attend. We need help. We need God’s Spirit to reveal what needs to be healed and how we can continue in health. God’s Spirit is given to every follower of Jesus. He is our Comforter and given for our benefit so we would not be left as helpless orphans. But we need to learn to move in the Spirit to identify our pain, to bring healing to that pain, and to keep ourselves from further pain.
Elevate
Often a person gains healing in his/her life, only to return to the very things that created the wounds in the first place. If we are not careful, we allow the same toxic people, toxic behavior, or toxic circumstances back into our lives and we are again wounded even more than before. We need to elevate ourselves and set a new trajectory for our lives.
Jesus said, “I have come so that you can have life, and to have it to the full.”
John 10:10