psalms on Woundedness

Jesus, our Great Physician, our sins have brought wounds on ourselves and others. Heal our hearts first, that we would no longer desire the sins that have only brought us and others pain. Go on to hea...

In a futile attempt to erase our past, we deprive the community of our healing gift. If we conceal our wounds out of fear and shame, our inner darkness can neither be illuminated nor become a light fo...

My tradition teaches that no heart is as whole as a broken heart, and I would say that no faith is as solid as a wounded faith.

George Matheson was just entering the bewildering teenage years when doctors informed him he was going blind. Undeterred, he pressed on with his education and graduated from the University of Glasgow ...

A wound that goes unacknowledged and unwept is a wound that cannot heal.

What often continues to shape our stories (interpretations) are the implicit emotional responses to our wounds. We must be willing to attend to our wounds and address the emotions embedded in our woun...

Dawn grew up in a family in which she felt she had a fairly happy childhood. But in her adult years she struggled greatly with emotional, psychological, and physical maladies. She never felt a sense o...

One of the challenges, at least in the western church, is an inability to deal with our wounds in a healthy way. Our training as Christians has been focused on Bible studies, small groups, and Sunday ...

Gracious God, how often we have withheld a word of kindness, of truth and of love. We have lifted our voices in quick criticism rather than gracious encouragement. Through our actions and inactions we...

Wholeness is brokenness owned and thereby healed.

Over the past few years, I’ve often heard parenting and child development experts offer the charge: “Give your kids a childhood they don’t have to heal from.” I’ve heard its echoes even in my own comm...

The bad news was that a friend’s leg was severed in a gruesome automobile accident. The good news was that it was surgically reattached. A few months later she asked if I wanted to see her scar. I swa...

What is the shape of your pain? Is your pain a gaping wound? Is it stuffed into the back corner of a closet, or is it neatly categorized and filed away with annotations that no one but you understand?...

Sometimes we have to “step over” our anger, our jealousy, or our feelings of rejection and move on. The temptation is to get stuck in our negative emotions, poking around in them as if we belong there...

How shall my heart be reconciled to its feast of losses?

One of the greatest needs of all bereaved people is to have access to someone who will take a risk and be involved—someone who is not afraid of intense feelings, but who will encourage their expressio...

The wounded gladiator forswears all fighting, but soon forgetting his former wound resumes his arms.

No matter how much the world shatters us to pieces, we carry inside us a vision of wholeness that we sense is our true home and that beckons us.

What is the shape of your pain? Is your pain a gaping wound? Is it stuffed into the back corner of a closet, or is it neatly categorized and filed away with annotations that no one but you understand?...

The strangest thing happens when what we have most wanted to conceal is brought into the open. We don’t die. Instead, we often begin to heal.

Darkness. If you’ve experienced it, you know what I’m talking about. Darkness sets in long before we’re old enough to recognize it. It begins with anguish. We’ve been hurt, sometimes tragically, and w...

Ann Voskamp, in her book The Broken Way, describes what it was like to have mental illness trivialized from the pulpit, as someone who identified with similar struggles: I was eighteen, with scars a...

Pastor: He was wounded for our transgressions; He was crushed for our iniquities;  People: upon Him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with His stripes we are healed. Pasto...

One of the dangers of living in a constant state of distraction is that we never go to the bottom of our pain, our sadness, our emptiness, which means we never find that rock-bottom place of the peace...

Healing begins at the place of hunger.

Pastor: Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.  People: He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; Pastor: and as one from w...

My husband, Doug, is an athlete whose body is protesting. He has had numerous knee injuries and torn his Achilles tendon twice. Doctors have operated on him, put casts on him and sent him home, thereb...

Pastor: He was wounded for our transgressions; He was crushed for our iniquities;  People: upon Him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with His stripes we are healed. Isaia...

Gracious God, you receive us in your gentle arms. You anoint us with your healing presence. Help us to be mindful of your mercy, your deep compassion for the wounds of the world, and your willing pres...

In her book The Broken Way, Ann Voskamp shares a beautiful exchange between her and her husband (The farmer). His encouragement is for all of us: that God uses the broken things in this world for good...