Feeling Broken and Busted?
I read….a lot. When my kids were all little it was nearly impossible to sit down with a good book. Actually it was nearly impossible to sit down! There was always something that needed to be done. But when they were older the first thing I made a priority to do was to develop a “habit” of reading everyday.
I was reading a Blog by Ann Voscamp the other day and she made this statement, “The wound in His side proves that Jesus is always on the side of the suffering, the wounded, the busted, the broken.” It gripped my heart as I thought of what that really means for Jesus to be for me…a broken mess of a human.
You see we are all broken. We live our lives being hurt, wounded, abused, misunderstood, misused, lied to, and kicked around, a lot of times by the people who should love us the most. Then those wounds get infected as we add bitterness, unforgiveness and hatred to the mix. Little by little, layer by layer our hearts become stone as we try to shield ourselves from any more pain.
Healing is the “process” of Jesus working in our soul to remove our layers of pain and bring healing to all of the broken places. Here’s the real kicker though…He will never force you to do it. It’s always your choice. You just have to want it so bad you are willing to apply yourself to the process it requires.
Why do people hurt us? Well because hurting people hurt other people. Most of the time they don’t mean to but sometimes it’s intentional. Nothing bothers me more than injustice. I mean from the time we are little we are screaming, “it’s just not fair!” We have this inner radar against injustice. God is a god of justice and we are created in His image.
But…we can’t control another person. We can’t make them not hurt us or do the right thing. So we are left with a choice. Do we let their dumb actions make us bitter and cause us to sin, which will cause us even more pain, or do we learn to take those lemons we’ve been handed and make some lemonade out of it?
I personally love lemonade!! So I set out to learn just how to make it! I decided to stop letting what some broken person did to me affect me but to allow God to turn it for my good! Here are the steps I used to do that:
1. Accept it happened. Ok…someone hurt me. I can’t change what happened. So being bitter won’t change anything.
2. Allow my emotions to process the pain. Ignoring my emotions won’t help. They are a real factor so I must allow myself to “feel” the pain of the situation. I need to allow my emotions to go through the four stages of grief, reeling, feeling, dealing and healing. You can read those here:
3. Choose to forgive every.day. Forgiveness is a choice. But it doesn’t mean we won’t FEEL emotions of anger, rage or god only knows what later. We just have to realize as our emotions process, we have forgiven and our emotions just need to catch up with that fact.
4. Choose to realize the person who hurt you is a hurting person. Very often people don’t deal or get over their own trauma and can act out of that pain and hurt you. Their choice was stupid, it was not necessary, and it caused you grief. But if we will understand the “why” behind their “what” it makes it easier to be empathetic toward them.
I’m only responsible for myself. I am the only one who can make the right choices for me to get out of the ditch of wounding. If I insist on focusing on the person who caused my pain I will never get healed! I’m not responsible for them, their choices, or what they did. I need to change my focus.
Jesus is for you! He is waiting for you to let Him walk you through your pain to your healing. He is always for the bruised and the busted! He died for not only you but for you to be whole, inside and out.
Remember…it’s not what was done TO you that matters but what you DO with what was done to you that counts. I’m not telling you something I haven’t gone through myself. I’ve been abused, mistreated, lied about, rejected bla bla bla. Who hasn’t? But I’m no longer bitter, wounded or broken. I’m sitting here sipping on some pretty great lemonade…