wounds on Marriage

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 ...

Remember Miss Haversham in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations? Her entire life was defined by the fact that she was jilted on her wedding day. People can become very attached to their pain and i...

Bitterness imprisons life; love releases it. Bitterness paralyzes life; love empowers it. Bitterness sours life; love sweetens it. Bitterness sickens life; love heals it. Bitterness blinds life; love ...

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

Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.

Time heals griefs and quarrels, for we change and are no longer the same persons. Neither the offender nor the offended are any more themselves.

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.

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...

The furniture salesman said the couch would seat five friends without a problem. Then I realized, I don’t have five friends without a problem. Old joke—sorry—but still. It reminds me of the old saying...

In Love's service, only wounded soldiers can serve.”

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...

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...

Almighty and everlasting God, who has restored all things in your well-beloved Son, the King and Lord of all: Mercifully grant that all peoples and nations, divided and wounded by sin, may be brought ...

Other people are going to find healing in your wounds. Your greatest life messages and your most effective ministry will come out of your deepest hurts."

The mystery of perfection as an aspect of beauty is its transcendence. It points to a glory beyond itself. I knew that when I held my children, I didn’t simply cradle flesh and blood. I held a living ...

To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you...

Love keeps no record of wrongs. We keep to-do lists so we don’t forget We check them twice We carry them in our pockets Holding on to the pain The disappointment The failure Re-viewing the wrong Poi...

Too often we are given a choice—emotions or faith and belief. Yet as Dan Allender and Tremper Longman observe,  Emotion links our internal and external worlds. To be aware of what we feel can open ...

Calm us now, O Lord, into a quietness that heals and listens. Open wounded hearts to the balm of your Word. Speak to us in clear tones so that we might feel our spirits leap for joy and skip with hope...

We don’t know what we are doing, and I think this is especially true about the way our society deals with mental health. In just the past fifteen years, I have witnessed a massive shift in how evangel...

Truly, it is allowed to weep. By weeping, we disperse our wrath; and tears go through the heart, even like a stream.

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 ...

As a young pastor, I wanted to pray for Jean, who had been sick in bed for about a week. So I took Mike, a fellow leader in the church, with me to her home. Her husband, Jim, greeted us at the door an...

Leader: Let us pray for the whole Church of God in Christ Jesus and for all people according to their needs. Brief silence Leader: Heavenly Father, with joy the Church continues to celebra...

Context This Sunday’s passage takes place during Jesus’ long final journey to Jerusalem (which takes up over a third of Luke’s Gospel). In the preceding pericope the disciples have asked Jesus to in...

Gracious God, we confess our sin to you, for we have denied your light in us; we have betrayed your Holy Spirit in us. For those sins which weigh upon us, and those we do not even know we ...

A true prayer is an inventory of needs, a catalog of necessities, an exposure of secret wounds, a revelation of hidden poverty.

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...

All-Gracious God, we have become callous to those in need, holding back compassion yet unsparing with judgment.  We defend our motivations, rather than using all you have given us to love and care for...

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...