When Today Touches Yesterday: A Story of Inner Healing and Freedom

Some people come into prayer ministry knowing exactly what they want God to heal. Others come carrying so many layers of pain that they are not even sure where one wound ends and another begins.

Recently, I had the privilege of ministering to a woman I will call Anna. I have changed identifying details to protect her privacy, but the heart of her story remains the same.

Anna loved God. She had served Him faithfully for years. She knew Scripture. She prayed. She ministered to others. But when she joined our virtual counseling session, she was carrying the emotional weight of a family crisis that had become almost unbearable.

Relationships had fractured. Serious concerns had surfaced within her extended family. People she loved had stopped speaking to her. Some had accused her of being disloyal. Others believed she had betrayed the family. Perhaps most painful of all, she felt that she had tried to do what she believed was right, only to lose people she deeply loved in the process.

As she shared her story, I could hear the anger. But underneath the anger was grief. She was grieving her family. She was grieving trust. She was grieving relationships that had once felt safe. She was grieving the possibility that people she desperately wanted to understand her might never see things the way she did.

At one point, I asked a question I often ask during prayer ministry.

“If Jesus could do anything for you today, what would you want Him to do?”

She became quiet.

Then she answered, “I wish He could erase the memories.”

That sentence told me something important. We were not only dealing with what was happening in her life right now. There was history underneath this pain.

One of the things I have learned in pastoral counseling and inner healing prayer is that our strongest reactions are not always only about the moment in front of us. Sometimes today touches yesterday. A current rejection awakens an older rejection. A present accusation touches an earlier betrayal. Something happening at forty-five can suddenly make a person feel thirteen again.

So we began to pray.

I invited Anna to bring the emotional pain before Jesus, and then I asked her to pray a simple prayer: “Jesus, would You show me where this pain began?”

Then we waited.

Silence can feel uncomfortable in prayer ministry, but I have learned not to rush it. We do not have to manufacture revelation or force an emotional experience. We simply invite the Holy Spirit and give Him room to work.

After a few moments, Anna began talking about something she had not mentioned before.

She remembered being around thirteen or fourteen years old. Someone in her church had falsely accused her of wanting a relationship with a boy. In her family and culture, that accusation was taken very seriously. Her father heard about it, became angry, and responded before really hearing Anna’s side of the story.

She remembered trying to explain herself.

No one seemed to be listening.

As she described the memory, the emotion became clearer.

“I was furious with my father,” she said.

Then she went deeper. “I felt betrayed.”

And then came the sentence underneath the entire memory.

“I felt like his reputation mattered more than me.”

There it was.

The current crisis was painful on its own, but it had also touched an old wound. Years earlier, something inside that young girl had learned, When people accuse me, the people I love may not believe me.

Now, decades later, she was experiencing something that felt painfully familiar.

Different people. Different circumstances. Same wound.

That is why healing often requires more than simply managing our present reaction. Sometimes we have to ask, What is this reaction connected to? What did this moment awaken in me?

The first movement of our prayer ministry process is what I call Realize. You cannot surrender what you have never identified. You cannot heal what you refuse to acknowledge. You cannot challenge a lie you have never recognized.

Anna had spent months carrying anger, helplessness, responsibility, rejection, fear, and grief. But underneath all of that was the wound of not being believed. There was another burden too. She felt responsible for making everything right. She wanted people to understand. She wanted leaders to act. She wanted her family to change. She wanted justice. She wanted reconciliation.

None of those desires were necessarily wrong. But somewhere along the way, concern had become weight, and weight had become responsibility. She was carrying things that belonged in God’s hands.

Inner healing often begins right there. Not with the question, “What is wrong with you?” but with, “What are you carrying that God never asked you to carry?”

The next movement was Release, and that brought us into forgiveness. Forgiveness is one of the most misunderstood parts of inner healing. Forgiving someone does not mean what happened was acceptable. It does not erase accountability. It does not remove healthy boundaries. It does not mean you must immediately reconcile. And it certainly does not mean serious wrongdoing should be ignored. Forgiveness means I release my personal claim to vengeance and surrender the debt into God’s hands.

So I asked Anna, “Would you be willing to forgive the people who contributed to this pain?”

She said yes.

We began with her father.

“Jesus,” she prayed, “I choose to forgive my father for not listening to me.”

Then she continued.

“I forgive him for making me feel like his reputation mattered more than I did.”

She named the betrayal. She named the anger. She named the pain.

Then she prayed, “I release him from the debt I feel he owes me.” That matters because sometimes we say, “I forgive them,” while quietly maintaining an internal list of everything they still owe us.

An apology. An explanation. A confession. Recognition. Repayment. Vindication. Sometimes those things may come. Sometimes they will not.

Forgiveness is the decision to stop making our healing dependent upon someone else’s repentance.

Anna continued praying through several relationships. Her mother. Her sister. Other family members. People connected to the earlier childhood wound. Spiritual leaders who had disappointed her.

Eventually, we came to someone else she needed to forgive. Herself.

For years, she had looked back on moments from childhood and felt guilt about how she responded. But she had been a child placed inside adult situations she did not understand. She had been exposed to things children should never have been required to navigate.

So we prayed, “Jesus, I choose to forgive myself for the ways I responded when I did not know what to do.”

That prayer can be incredibly difficult. Many people have received God’s forgiveness but are still punishing an earlier version of themselves. They look backward with adult knowledge and condemn the child who did not yet possess it.

Sometimes healing means releasing the younger you. The frightened you. The confused you. The survival-mode you. The version of you who was simply doing the best you knew how to do with what you had. After forgiveness, another layer began to emerge.

Anna had not only experienced painful events. Those experiences had started telling her who she was. She had internalized labels like disloyal, betrayer, failure, and bad mother.

This is what emotional wounds often do. Pain becomes interpretation. Interpretation becomes belief. Belief eventually begins shaping identity. We rarely live according to what happened alone. We often live according to what we decided what happened meant.

That brought us into the third movement: Repent and Renounce.

Renunciation can sound like a heavy religious word, but the idea is simple. It means withdrawing agreement. It is saying, I no longer agree with what this wound taught me.

Anna prayed, “I renounce agreement with the lie that I am a betrayer.” Then we asked, “Holy Spirit, if that is the lie, what is Your truth?”

We waited. Eventually she said, “I am God’s child.”

Simple, but powerful.

Other people were defining her through accusation. God was defining her through belonging. Later, we addressed the belief that she was a failure. Again she prayed, “I renounce the lie that I am a failure.” Then she received the truth, “I am not a failure.”

We also addressed her fear about motherhood. Because of what she had experienced growing up, she carried an underlying fear that she might somehow become like the person who had wounded her.

That fear had created another accusation: Maybe I am a bad mother.

I reminded her to look at the evidence already present in her life. Her children were cared for. Loved. Protected. Nurtured. The fact that she was asking God to help her become healthier already demonstrated that she was not blindly repeating the same patterns. Sometimes we become so afraid of repeating our past that we fail to notice God has already been rewriting it.

At one point, Anna asked an important question. She had concerns about serious wrongdoing involving vulnerable people, and she wondered whether forgiveness meant she was no longer allowed to desire justice.

I told her no.

Forgiveness and justice are not enemies.

God is merciful, and God is also just. Forgiveness does not mean pretending abuse did not happen. It does not mean refusing to report wrongdoing. It does not mean removing consequences. It does not mean allowing unsafe people continued access to vulnerable people.

You can forgive and establish boundaries. You can forgive and cooperate with appropriate authorities. You can forgive and pray for truth to come into the light. You can forgive and still believe consequences matter. Forgiveness releases vengeance. It does not erase wisdom.

This is one reason I love the promise of Psalm 34:18: “The Lord is near to those who have a broken heart, and saves such as have a contrite spirit.” God is not distant from the places in us that hurt. He draws near to them. He enters them. He meets us there.

After we had prayed through forgiveness, false beliefs, fear, shame, rejection, control, anger, abandonment, and other areas connected to the wound, we came to the final movement: Receive.

This is one of my favorite parts of prayer ministry because God does not simply ask us to empty our hands. He puts something in them.

I asked Anna to pray, “Jesus, for everything I have released, what do You want to give me in exchange?”

Then we waited. After a moment, she answered.

“Joy.”

Then another word came.

“Peace.” And finally, “Rest.”

Joy. Peace. Rest.

Those three words summarized everything she had been missing. For months she had been emotionally running. Trying to fix. Trying to prove. Trying to protect. Trying to convince. Trying to understand. Trying to anticipate what might happen next.

But rest said, You do not have to carry everything anymore.

Then she said something I will not forget. “I feel like God has stepped into the situation.”

Her circumstances had not suddenly changed. Her family relationships had not all been repaired. Questions remained unanswered. There were still decisions outside of her control. But something had shifted inside her. She was no longer standing alone in the middle of the story. Before ending the session, I brought her back to that childhood memory. The accusation. Her father’s anger. The moment she felt unheard.

Then I asked, “Jesus, would You show her where You were in that moment?”

Again we waited.

Eventually she remembered that during the incident, someone had arrived and interrupted what was happening. For Anna, that became a small but meaningful picture.

The memory did not disappear. The painful thing still happened. But the meaning of the memory began to shift.

She had once remembered the moment primarily through betrayal. Now she was also beginning to recognize that she had not been completely abandoned inside it.

Another prayer minister serving with me then shared something she sensed from the Lord. She believed God wanted to restore something that had been stolen from Anna when she was young.

Her innocence. That landed deeply.

Anna had been introduced to adult deception, adult conflict, and adult responsibility far too early. She had carried knowledge and burdens a child was never designed to carry. And sometimes inner healing is not only about healing who we are today.

Sometimes Jesus touches the child inside the memory.

The child who needed safety. The child who needed truth. The child who needed someone to say, “You should never have had to carry that.” By the end of the session, Anna’s external circumstances were still unresolved. I think that is important to say.

Prayer ministry is not magic. Inner healing does not mean complicated situations suddenly become simple. There was still grief. There were still questions. There was still a need for wisdom, healthy boundaries, continued support, and appropriate care. But Anna was different.

She entered the session carrying years of accusation, anger, guilt, responsibility, rejection, and fear.

She left naming three things:

Joy.

Peace.

Rest.

That is why I believe so deeply in inner healing prayer. Jesus does not only want to change what we do. He wants to meet us in the places where our reactions were formed. He wants to uncover the wound beneath the anger, the fear beneath the control, the grief beneath the striving, the rejection beneath the people pleasing, and the lie beneath the shame.

Then He invites us into an exchange. We Realize what we are carrying. We Release the people and pain through forgiveness. We Repent and Renounce the lies and unhealthy agreements that grew from the wound. And we Receive the truth, peace, freedom, and presence of Jesus in exchange.

Maybe you recognize yourself somewhere in Anna’s story. Maybe something happening today is touching something that happened years ago. Maybe you are carrying responsibility for people you cannot change. Maybe you have forgiven others but are still punishing yourself. Maybe pain has been speaking so loudly that you have begun confusing its voice with your identity.

If so, here is where I would encourage you to begin.

Find a quiet place and ask Jesus one simple question: “Lord, what am I carrying that You never asked me to carry?” Do not rush the answer. And when He brings something to the surface, bring it into His presence. Name the pain. Forgive where forgiveness is needed. Break agreement with the lies that pain taught you. Then ask Him what He wants you to receive in exchange.

You may discover that the thing you have been gripping for years is the very thing Jesus has been inviting you to place in His hands. You can put it down now.

You can experience this same kind of healing and freedom in your own life. If you are ready to invite Jesus into the places of pain, release what you have been carrying, and begin walking in greater spiritual and emotional wholeness, get my newest book, Breakthrough Prayer: A Simple Guide to Freedom and Emotional Healing. It will walk you through practical, biblical steps to help you recognize what is hurting, release what needs to be forgiven, break agreement with the lies that have kept you stuck, and receive the truth and freedom God has for you.

Get your copy and begin your own journey toward breakthrough today.

Get Your Copy of Breakthrough Prayer!