LIBERATED AND LOVED - Laura Demko

If there is one thing we can count on at Resurrection, it is opportunities for deepening our faith. The recent “Undone” retreat offered just that: an invitation for women to encounter God’s original design and purpose for our hearts. This most recent offering by the John Paul II Healing Center invited attendees to examine “woman” through God’s lens.

The first evening focused on Eve, the climax of God’s creation, made for relationship, receptivity and beauty. Our second night brought us to The Fall, when woman’s feminine identity became distorted by sin. In the third and fourth sessions, Mary entered the picture as our model and gave us the opportunity to reunite ourselves with God’s love; to undo any sin and shame, any “knots,” we experience as God’s daughters. Through a series of honest testimonies by the Undone presenters, small group discussions, adoration, prayer experiences, live praise and worship music and reconciliation, retreatants were given unique opportunities to enter into God’s invitation for healing and grace.

Perhaps you are like me, unsure if you are a “retreat” kind of person, but certain you are in need of healing. After attending Undone, I am grateful for the opportunity to step out of the busyness of raising young children, and focus on my identity as a daughter of God. One defining moment of the experience came as we examined our God-designed identities and relationships as daughter, sister, bride, and mother. As the presenters helped us realize, all women are called to these roles, even though they may not all seem to fit. God’s original design for woman, as His “finishing touch” of creation, was for her to be inherently different from man. God created woman for beauty, openness, and relationship; to give life. As St. John Paul the Great once said, “You are not who they say you are. Let me remind you who you are.”

Our modern world is speaking untruths about what it means to be a woman, just as Eve encountered the lies of the serpent in the Garden of Eden. We are told to be equal with man, that we have to be the same. We are taught that instead of complimenting man, we are meant to compete with him. We are told that motherhood can keep us from our dreams. How good that God offers us Mary’s unfailing and beautiful example. How good that she calls us back to our Father and to our true identities as His beloved daughters. How good that she gave her YES! I am grateful for the opportunity to reexamine who God has called me to be: free and personally loved by Him.