Understanding, Acceptance and Recovery

“Understanding is the first step to acceptance, and only with acceptance can there be recovery.”

― J.K. Rowling

Let’s take this idea in its two clauses, independently. There is a great deal of peace (and therefore, prosperity) we can attain in taking possession of the concepts of understanding, acceptance and recovery – as we fit them to ourselves by our experience of living.

Understanding as it Leads to Acceptance

If we are to break through the crust of our grief, with accord to loss or life adjustment, our experience of life must be characterised by acceptance – having dealt with many overtures of denial, frustration, bargaining and depression.

Understanding is aided by surrendering our own pathetic and prideful perception of things in favour of God’s reality as the circumstances of our lives have unfolded – as they are.

Staring reality down is a blessing, for if reality can be accepted as it is, without it having the cause for crushing us, we are impervious to many threats upon our lives that are driven by how we take (or resist) our circumstances.

No one can teach us understanding, but we gain a grasp on it when we let go of our insistence that life be as we wish it to be. We cannot control life, so it’s futile – even maddening – to try.

Acceptance as it Leads to Recovery

As a lived state, acceptance takes us into the holy of holies for healing. When recovery is granted as a process to be entered into, we can be made whole again, or made brand new.

It is no rocket science to connect the concepts of acceptance and recovery. Recovery has as its chief aid the need to sit calmly, as if weened from our mother’s breast (see Psalm 131), and allow the processes of recovery to take place.

The major obstacle to the transforming life – a life lived with the Holy Spirit’s power – is the inability to sit in this space devoid of the comfort of mother’s milk. Learning to sit in the seat of turmoil is the demonstration of having reached the state of acceptance.

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Understanding trickles us forward via a capillary to the bright oasis of acceptance, and from there flows the river of acceptance into the sea of recovery. Such seas are full of life and abiding in peace.

Life requires us to skilfully recover. The traits of understanding are varied and many. The more we understanding we stow, the more acceptance we peaceably enjoy, and the more our recoveries are blessed. Such is the blessing of resilience.

© 2013 S. J. Wickham.