Soul Cure

How to Heal Your Pain and Discover Your Purpose

Gregory Dickow

• Publisher: Chosen Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780800762452
• eBook ISBN: 9781493437184
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Your Most Valuable Possession

Your soul, simply put, is your mind to think, your heart to feel, and your will to decide. It's the very deepest part of your humanity, the source of all treasure and talent. 

Refreshingly honest and keenly insightful, pastor and talk show host Gregory Dickow shows how your mindset is the single most powerful force in shaping your emotions, your decisions--and your destiny.  When you discover the power of God's healing love, then fear, anxiety, anger and shame will stop sabotaging your happiness--and your life.

Your best days are going to be your next days. Turn your pain into purpose and let God continue your winning story.

Part I: Soul Health

1
“Someone Has Stolen Our Tent!”

Look at what is obvious.

2 Corinthians 10:7 HCSB

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson were on a camping trip. In the middle of the night Holmes woke up and gave Dr. Watson a nudge. “Watson,” he said, “look up in the sky and tell me what you see.”

“I see millions of stars, Holmes,” replied Watson.

“And what do you conclude from that, Watson?”

Watson thought for a moment. “Well,” he said, “astronomically, it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets. Astrologically, I observe that Saturn is in Leo. Horologically, I deduce that the time is approximately a quarter past three. Meteorologically, I suspect that we will have a beautiful day tomorrow. Theologically, I see that God is all-powerful, and we are small and insignficant. . . . Uh, what does it tell you, Holmes?”

“Watson, you idiot! Someone has stolen our tent!”

Life Lessons That We Miss

Sometimes we miss the simplest things right before our eyes.

Watson was so sophisticated and smart—with his astronomical, theological and meteorological analysis. Meanwhile, he missed the simple fact that his tent was gone.

You see? While we try to analyze our lives, examine the world, assess our situations with the highest sophistication and education, our “tents” are being robbed right from under our noses. Someone has stolen our “tents.”

The answers we all need are right before our eyes, right between our ears, and smack-dab in the middle of our hearts. In other words, they are in our souls. As the soul goes, so go our lives.

This is where life is really lived—in the soul, the place where battles are won or lost. It is where every joy and sadness begins and where every success and failure finds its roots. The condition of your soul will determine the condition of your life. Because it determines how you think, what you feel and what you choose to do.

In other words, the soul is the source of your thoughts and your emotions and the choices you make—minute by minute, day by day.

Soul health turns into whole health. Soul sickness turns into whole sickness.

A broken soul creates a broken life, broken relationships and shattered dreams.

But all that is about to change for you. Your next days are going to be your best days. You are about to step into the life God intended for you. As Jesus put it, “I came that they may have and enjoy life, and have it in abundance (to the full, till it overflows)” (John 10:10 AMPC).

But Jesus also said, in the same verse, “The thief comes only in order to steal and kill and destroy.”

The life we deserve, the one God wants most for us, has been blown away by the 24/7 news cycles, the never-ending barrage of violence and the social media overload that subjects us to constant stress and pressure. Inside and out, we are losing the calm, the safety and the security of the world as it once was. The soul of humanity is sick in many ways. Mental health—soul health—has been overtaken with soul sickness, mental anguish and people living stress-filled lives.

We all know what it is like to suffer some sort of emotional pain, don’t we? (And Jesus paid for it all.) We bleed when we get injured, whether in our bodies or our hearts. It hurts.

Now multiply that hurt and consider a world filled with millions who bleed, a planet riddled with illness, fear and anxiety.

Tragically, more than one million people commit suicide each year. And more than twenty million attempt it and fail.1 That is staggering.

There is no doubt about it: Mental “dis-ease” is an epidemic on the rise. And remember, the statistics are based upon people who admit the problem and do not include those who are suffering silently.

I hate to lay it on, but there are 20 million Americans battling addiction,2 10 million who are victims of domestic violence,3 and 8 million who suffer from eating disorders4—not to mention the thousands of homicide and suicide victims between the ages of 5 and 245 and the thousands of elementary-school-age children who injure themselves—cutting their skin, burning themselves, pulling out their hair, punching themselves.6

Why are they doing this? It is a desperate attempt to cope with stress and relieve anxiety, loneliness and anger. In other words, they are in severe emotional pain and attempting to numb it—or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, attempting to feel something . . . anything.

And this is nothing new or original to modern culture. Self-injury goes back two thousand years. Look at Mark 5:5: “And always, night and day, he was in the mountains, and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones” (KJV).

These emotional epidemics are proof that the heart of humanity has been overtaken by soul sickness and all the misery it creates.

This means that the happy life God wants for us is under assault by an enemy that has been targeting us all our lives, as if an infrared laser beam were aimed right at the core of our beings.

To sum it up: Whether our pain is physical or emotional, whether it is heart disease or heartbreak, strokes or struggles, cancer or condemnation, people are in pain. It is part of the human condition.

No wonder Jesus came to heal. He knew that sickness, trauma and disease were crippling families, economies and destinies.

A Dark Night of the Soul

Have you ever experienced a dark night of the soul—a time when you felt desperately sad, discouraged or afraid?

Before I go any further, let me tell you that there is no shame in experiencing a dark night, dark week, dark month, dark year or dark life. Jesus gets it. He felt everything you have ever felt, and He is here now—to hear you, heal you and carry you through to the other side.

“And He took with Him Peter and James and John, and began to be struck with terror and amazement and deeply troubled and depressed. And He said to them, My soul is exceedingly sad . . . so that it almost kills Me!” (Mark 14:33–34 AMPC).

Notice that although Jesus felt everything we have ever felt, He never sinned. So it is not a sin to go through emotional pain. And this is big: It is nothing to feel shame about. Instead, let me encourage you to treat it as a signal that you are ready for a breakthrough; Light is coming. The hope you have lacked is going to be revived.

We all know what it is like to experience a dark moment—a moment when you are broken by some loss, failure or long-forgotten emotional wound. That is when so many of us experience disappointment or even trauma. And those toxic memories and emotions stick with us and drag us down, targeting our vulnerable souls. It is as if a trap is set, damaging our enjoyment of the present and our prospects for the future.

I sure have had my share of dark moments. I have experienced a roller coaster of emotions, including intense anxiety, anger, depression and fear, all dating back to my youth. So you may ask, How can this guy have an answer for me? And how does he know so much about pain? Well, as Clubber Lang (played by Mr. T) said in Rocky III, when asked for his prediction for his upcoming match with Rocky. “Prediction?” he rhetorically asked. “Pain!” he answered.

The “prediction” of every day in my early years was pain. I just knew and expected something bad to happen every day.

Contrast that by asking my prediction for my tomorrow and every day to follow. My answer is “Glory!” I am expecting something good, something great, something glorious to happen in my life today. And every day. And you can too.

But at the time, my dark moments got even darker after one of my closest friends in high school, Randy, unexpectedly and tragically committed suicide just as we were entering our junior year. I can picture his young face even now, over forty years later. I can see his smile and I can see his pain.

I was already feeling lonely and unsure of myself in those early years of life, and that moment spun me further into darkness. I had never felt God’s unconditional love. I was a loner, alienated and depressed. By sixteen, I was hooked on alcohol and drugs. It was a dark night of despair.

I was already experiencing some form of depression at a young age. At the time, I had no sense of my worth or value.

Have you ever felt that way? It happens when we derive our value from the way we look or perform—and the way others see us.

Yet simultaneously somehow, Randy’s death and, more accurately, his life left an indelibly profound mark on me. It awakened a desperate yearning in me to find answers from God and to find my purpose in life.

It would be some years later before I would truly understand and step into my life purpose. But it may never have happened had it not been for the friendship I found in Randy and the impact his sudden death had on me. So in a very real and deep way, I carry the memory of this young man in my soul, and his memory sometimes carries me.

In fact, my soul was in such a dark, lonely place that had God not intervened in my life, there is no telling what I might have become. Too shy and insecure to reach out for help, I turned my emotions inward. I often wonder what would have happened if I had turned my self-hatred outward.

We all know of lone wolves who act out their sorrow and rage.

All this violence unleashed in twisted minds, causing torment, sickness, heartache, murder, such unimaginable pain.

But just as God interrupted the dark night of my soul, He can interrupt yours, too.

The Bible says that we were all dead in our sins, controlled by the darkness, by the darkest version of ourselves (see Ephesians 2:3). “But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved)” (verses 4–5 NASB1995).

Do you see God as the “interrupter” here? In the middle of the fear, the loneliness, the sin, the pain—the darkness—there is a “but God” moment when He crashes through our pain, crashes through the darkness and brings the light of His healing and delivering hand. Healing comes to the soul through the power of connection. Our connection with God is our connection to healing—spirit, soul and body.

You see, my “but God” moment was happening.

As a teenager, I had very few friends, and now with Randy gone, I had even fewer, and I felt empty inside. I was traumatized by tragedy, which compounded the void I felt from the absence of a real attachment to God. I felt so depressed at times that I, too, like Randy and many others, thought of suicide. I was in a battle for my soul.

Then one night during those painful days, a yo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Soul Health
• Part II: Battling Soul Thieves
• Part III: Parting Gifts for the Soul
• Appendix: Deciding and Declaring God’s Love
• Notes
• About the Author
• Cover Flaps
• Back Cover