relationships and community on Scars

In their excellent book, Mending the Divides , Jon Huckins and Jer Swigart describe a Japanese pottery tradition that articulates the power of peace and reconciliation: When we speak of peace, we c...

Davon Huss tells the story of a boy who came home one hot afternoon, anxious to take a cool swim in the pond behind his home. He lived in south Florida, so taking a quick dip was a common way to cool ...

All great Christians have been wounded souls.

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 ...

Two decades after I worked with the airmen, I read a fascinating article, “The Quasimodo Complex,” in The British Journal of Plastic Surgery, Two physicians reported in 1967 on a landmark study of e...

Our Father, Lord, the world is sometimes a dragon with teeth set to devour the dreams of our children. Help our little ones go softly from our homes remembering all we taught them of your great love a...

Not everyone living in a distressed neighborhood is associated with gang members, parole officers, employers, social workers, or pastors. But nearly all of them have a landlord. —Matthew Desmond, E...

There is nothing that more tends to strengthen the faith of the young believer than to hear the veteran Christian, covered with scars from the battle, testifying that the service of his Master is a ha...

The vast majority of violence oppressing the poor is not driven by the overwhelming power of the perpetrators—it’s driven by the utter vulnerability of the victims. Give the poor a strong, consistent ...

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...

In a world so torn apart by rivalry, anger, and hatred, we have the privileged vocation to be living signs of a love that can bridge all divisions and heal all wounds.

It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.

There is an unaccountable solace that fierce landscapes offer to the soul. They heal, as well as mirror, the brokenness we find within. Moving apprehensively into the desert's emptiness, up the mo...

Living with a family wounded by a loss you can't remember is like sitting behind a tall person at a movie theater. The people around you are laughing, crying, reacting to something, but you have n...

We repeat what we don’t repair.

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

No one heals himself by wounding another.

Another feature of shame’s presentation is that of hiding. Whether it is the involution into the silence of our own minds or the literal turning away from someone with a downcast facial expression wit...

Shame is not just a consequence of something our first parents did in the Garden of Eden. It is the emotional weapon that evil uses to (1) corrupt our relationships with God and each other, and (2) di...

Leader: Blessed Lord Jesus, before your cross I kneel and see the heinousness of my sin, my iniquity that caused you to be made a curse, the evil that provokes divine wrath. All: Show me the enormit...

All artists must learn the art of surviving loss: loss of hope, loss of face, loss of money, loss of self-belief… Artistic losses can be turned into artistic gains and strengths—but not in isola- tion...

Like the Good Samaritan, may we not be ashamed of touching the wounds of those who suffer, but try to heal them with concrete acts of love.

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...

Hearts are broken in ten thousand ways, for this is a heart-breaking world; and Christ is good at healing all manner of heart-breaks.

Conflict is a painful fact of life. Many of us have not experienced the trauma of war or the violence of racism, but we have all been wounded by words.

It’s a word we do not often use in daily conversation, book groups, or church pulpits, but shame is something we all experience. It’s the feeling that we have missed the mark according to our own stan...

I know well there is no comfort for this pain of parting: the wound always remains, but one learns to bear the pain, and learns to thank God for what He gave, for the beautiful memories of the past, a...

When I teach on the dynamics of real change and maturation, I often describe a “furnace of transformation” each of us must pass through for the sake of growth and refinement. I’ve never seen real grow...

…I put down these memorandums of my affections In honor of tenderness, In honor of all of those who have been Conscripted into the brotherhood Of loss…

A man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green.