pain on Trauma

When pain is this fresh and this awful, I’m not sure much light can get through. You have to wait for some of the initial jolt to subside, to let something settle enough that you can emerge from being...

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?...

I’ve known a lot of people who have lived painful, tragic lives. When I was young, I assumed these people were abnormal. Their suffering was the exception that proved the rule that a well-lived life i...

When God first nudged me in the direction of developing The Pastor’s Workshop, I threw myself wholeheartedly into the collection and curation of great content. It was, on the whole, a rather foolhardy...

Do you remember the first time someone explained to you the concept of “Good Friday?” I remember my own mother explaining how it was possible that Jesus’ death was “good,” not because torture and suff...

Individual disasters, too, very largely follow upon human choices, our own or those of others. And whether or not they do in a particular case, the situations in which we find ourselves are never as i...

Not one thing in your life is more important than figuring out how to live in the face of unspoken pain.

Paradoxically…healing means moving from your pain to the pain…When you keep focusing on the specific circumstances of your pain, you easily become angry, resentful, and even vindictive. You are inclin...

Live to the point of tears.

All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story.

We cannot afford to forget any experience, not even the most painful.

Resilience is the virtue that enables people to move through hardship and become better. No one escapes pain, fear, and suffering. Yet from pain can come wisdom, from fear can come courage, from suffe...

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 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...

A mother ran into the bedroom when she heard her seven-year-old son scream. She found his two-year-old sister pulling his hair. She gently released the little girl’s grip and said comfortingly to the ...

Just after leaving a training session on the ice in Detroit, Michigan, on January 6, 1994, Nancy Kerrigan was assaulted in the leg by a man wielding a telescopic baton. Television cameras captured the...

Your greatest ministry will most likely come out of your greatest hurt.

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...

Truth is, everybody is going to hurt you; you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.

If you do not transform your pain, you will surely transmit it.

“A heart can be broken, but it keeps beating just the same." ,

My transition into my 40’s came with the obligatory hip surgery. The only way to stop the cycle of hip pain was to literally carve out some bone. Those parts had to be removed. But recovering my funct...

We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.

Gracious God, I am reminded today of the horrible pain that sin causes. How many lives are destroyed by sin? How many families rent apart? How many parents overcome with grief? And this is just the be...

Trials are the ruler and scale to reveal in our lives.

Was ever grief like mine?

Merciful God, we turn away from the pains and cries of our world. Overwhelmed by its brokenness, we ignore the call to engage and love those who are hurting. Father, forgive us, strengthen us, and hel...

Author David Seamands once wrote, “Children are the best recorders but the worst interpreters.” I remember a lot about being a kid. I remember colors and moments, arguments and smells… Though my me...

Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

There is no growth without change, no change without fear or loss and no loss without pain.