Healing Trauma
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I would love to hear from you! A Jewel: Do you believe God holds all of us accountable or do you see His love like milk toast? If your image of God’s love does not include judgment how can there be ultimate justice? Don’t hear what I am not saying. I did not say God…
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Childhood was a house where I learned the weight of footsteps. I knew who was coming by the complaint of the floor. I knew when to become small. The wallpaper kept its little flowers. Morning arrived, offensively ordinary. I was sexually abused. I write it plainly because I spent years making a thicket of language…
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Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”Anyone who has tried to heal a family wound knows how inconveniently alive the past can be. We bury it, and it comes down to breakfast. We forbid it to speak, and discover that our children have learned its language.Long before we had scientific names…
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Wherever I go, I am not alone. I have walked through fire, through the wreckage of love that wasn’t love, through shadows that whispered my name like a curse. I have stood in rooms where the air was thick with the ghosts of all the things I could not save. And yet, I am here.…
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Some families pass down money. Mine passed down fear. Addiction. Violence. Abuse. Broken marriages. Children who became victims. Adults who became victimizers. People who disappeared into drugs. People who hurt children. People who spent their lives trying to survive what had been done to them. For a long time, I thought this was simply what…
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We have become a civilization obsessed with taking care of ourselves, and somehow we have become remarkably bad at living. Every feeling requires a name. Every discomfort requires an explanation. Every difficult season requires a diagnosis, a boundary, a retreat, a podcast, a bath, a journal entry, or three business days of “protecting our peace.”…
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I spent a great deal of my life wanting to be loved, which is perhaps the least surprising thing about me and the most revealing. I wanted love to arrive like a rescue. I wanted someone to discover me, understand me, choose me, and in choosing me, prove that I was worth choosing. Then I…
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They made a mess of me. That is the cleanest way I know to say it. They put things inside me that did not belong there. Fear. Shame. Silence. The strange conviction that love had to hurt before it could be called love. For years, I mistook the evidence of what happened to me for…
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I used to think freedom meant nobody could tell me what to do. No rules. No authority. No one telling me what was right or wrong. I wanted to belong entirely to myself. I thought that was freedom. It took me a very long time to discover that I had mistaken the absence of boundaries…
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Come into my home with me today, join me in my prayer life, and my daily reading. Welcome! A Jewel: “An Unintended Quandary” That is a subtitle in the book, “Experience Jesus. Really” by John Eldredge. The paragraph begins: The Christian community in the developed world – particularly in the West — has accidentally fallen…