The Source of Real Strength.

Most of the men and women I’ve met are, to put it plainly, rather harsh with the broken places inside them.  They despise the fact that at times it feels like there is a lost and lonely little girl or boy down there.  You can see this from our reactions to our own woundedness: “Come on, just get on with it …just get over it!  Enough of this, damnit, this morbid introspection.”  Ever said this, or something similar, to yourself?  Probably.  And more than once.  But that’s most certainly not what God say’s about the Story of your wounds and your warfare and the message you received because of them.

Jesus said to His Disciples in Luke 17:1-2, “Things that cause people to sin [‘stumbling blocks’ {NAS}] are bound to come, but woe to that person through whom they come!  It would be better for him to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around his neck than for him to cause one of these little ones to sin [to ‘stumble’ and sin, to falter and fail their way, time and time again, through the maze of The Matrix]” {NIV}.

Listen to me… and listen close; hear me with your heart.  “It is no shame that you need healing;” there is no shame in this.  “It is no shame to look to another for strength;” there is no shame in this.  “It is no shame that you feel young” and fearful inside; there is no shame in this either.  And it is not your fault.  Not now, not ever.  You must trust in this as the final word of a loving Father.

Frederick Buechner wrote of the suicide of his father one beautiful Saturday morning in the fall his tenth year:

“When somebody you love dies, Mark Twain said, it is like when your house burns down; it isn’t for years that you realize the full extent of your loss.  For me it was longer than most, if indeed I have realized it fully even yet, and in the meantime the loss came to get buried so deep in me that after a time I scarcely ever took it out to look at it at all, let alone speak of it.”

This is precisely what I have seen so many of us do with the unbelievable hurts of our bleeding, broken hearts.  Bury it down below …and never take it out again.  But take it out we must, and enter deeply into it.  This is where most people fight the Journey the hardest.  The fullness of the false self in all its God-forsaking glory, the ‘lifestyle’ we’ve erected around it, is an elaborately designed defense against entering our wounded souls.  It is a willful blindness: consciously chosen, and subconsciously supported.  But a wound unfelt is a wound unhealed.  We must go back there— fully and finally.

“The way in which God heals our wound is” an intensely “personal process.”  For some, it comes in a moment of tender touch; for others, over tracks of time and through the help of many mediators who have taken you into the presence of the Healer Himself.  In the words of Agnes Sanford: “There are in many of us wounds so deep that only the mediation of someone else to whom we may ‘bare our grief’ can heal us.”  {Italics mine}

There will be times of healing prayer, and times of grieving wounds— the enormous losses of all our lives— times of forgiving those who have harmed you, and times of powerful and personal repentance, times of renouncing and times of restoring, renewing, rebuilding the ruins.  But always, always, flowing from a place of fellowship with the Father, a place of communion with our King and intimacy with the Spirit.  The point is: “Healing never happens outside of intimacy with Christ.  The healing of our wound flows out of our union with Him.”1

HJC	Ric Webb  |  Shepherd Heart’s Journey Community 9621 Tall Timber Blvd. |  Little Rock, AR 72204 t +1.501.455.0296
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Heart’s Journey – Live Generously and Love Graciously