Chapter 7 – Healing the Wound

[Jerry Wierwille]

Quotes
“A car is made to run on gasoline, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on himself. He himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other.” ~C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (p. 121)

“The true essence of strength is passed to us from God through our union with him.” (p. 112, emphasis original)

“It is no shame that you need healing; it is no shame to look to another for strength; it is no shame that you feel young and afraid inside. It’s not your fault.” (p. 125)

“When somebody you love dies, it is like when your house burns down; it isn’t for years that you realize the full extent of your loss.” ~Mark Twain (p. 125)

“Our false self [our defense against entering our wounded heart] stubbornly blinds each of us to the light and the truth of our own emptiness and hollowness.” ~Brennan Manning (p. 127)

“A wound unfelt is a wound unhealed.” (p. 127)

“There are no formulas with God. The way in which God heals our wound is a deeply personal process. He is a person and he insists on working personally.” (p. 127)

“Healing never happens outside of intimacy with Christ.” (p. 128)

“Until you have given yourself to him [Jesus Christ] you will not have a real self.” ~C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (p. 128)

“If forgiveness doesn’t visit the emotional core of your life, it will be incomplete.” ~Neil Anderson (p. 132)

“True strength does not come out of bravado. Until we are broken, our life will be self-centered, self-reliant; our strength will be our own. SO long as you think you are really something in and of yourself, what will you need God for? I don’t trust a man who hasn’t suffered; I don’t let a man get close to me who hasn’t faced his wound.” (p. 137)

“When we begin to offer not merely our gifts but our true selves, that is when we become powerful.” (p. 138)

Response
It is hard for a person to admit they need help; to admit they are somehow defective; to admit they are wounded. Our culture propounds the idea that masculinity is all about toughness, about never showing weakness, about being indestructible. I believe one of the hardest things is for a man to be willing to enter his wound. Actually, I think one of the hardest things is for a Christian to enter their wound. Christians have this delusion that they are supposed to be perfect and never mess up and be like the Brady Bunch all the time or something tacky like that. Add on top of that our culture’s pressure for men to be like the freakin’ Hulk and never have anything affect you and where nothing can penetrate you. We men like to be stubborn and blind because even if we act stupid and neglect sound advice and can’t see where we are going, we at least are not perceived as being weak. But Eldredge says this is exactly the syndrome men have contracted. There is a defense system we activate in order to maintain our self-image and cover our injured heart. However, without ever entering our wound, it can never be healed. We will forever be fooling ourselves.

I would have to agree that “healing never happens outside of intimacy with Christ,” as Eldredge says. That resonates deeply with me. It was not until I started developing a relationship with Christ that I started feeling the strength to enter my wound….to find that part of me that was damaged and let him fix it. Inviting Jesus into the wound is the key that trigger the initial stages of my healing. Before then, I was still trying to “tough-man it,” to act like I was a “believing stack house,” that I did not need anyone else because I had the power to take care of myself. The deception was that I thought I had the power. The power was in me…but it was not me, it was not about what I could do.

When I was in my darkest days of my wound, it was letting Jesus come into my heart in a way I had never let him come before that started my progress toward healing. Something about inviting Jesus in and trusting him to be the Healer, the Deliverer, and the Savior that I knew him to be opened a flood gate in my heart. As Eldgredge asserts, “Grief is a form of validation; it says the wound mattered” (p. 130, emphasis original). When we let ourselves be vulnerable, we let ourselves know we are ready to receive. Grieving is a stage that prepares us for being remolded and renewed.

Regarding grieving, Augustine wrote in his Confessions (IX.12), “I used truth as a kind of fomentation to bring relief to my torment, a torment known to You, but not known to those others: so that listening closely to me they thought that I lacked all feeling of grief. But in Your ears, where none of them could hear, I accused the emotion in me as weakness; and I held in the flood of my grief. It was for the moment a little diminished, but returned with fresh violence, not with any pouring of tears or change of countenance: but I knew what I was crushing down in my heart. I was very much ashamed that these human emotions could have such power over me….I found solace in weeping in Your sight both about her [Augustine’s mother] and for her, about myself and for myself. I no longer tried to check my tears, but let them flow as they would, making them a pillow for my heart: and it rested upon them, for it was Your ears that heard my weeping, and not the ears of a man, who would have misunderstood my tears and despised them.”

I think Augustine understood the power of letting yourself feel and letting yourself accept the hurt that is pounding in your chest. I love the line “I no longer tried to check my tears, but let them flow as they would, making them a pillow for my heart: and it rested upon them, for it was Your ears that heard my weeping, and not the ears of a man, who would have misunderstood my tears and despised them.” Human may not understand what you are going through. But God does and he knows what it takes to help you rise above the pain. That enablement is what we can receive through Jesus Christ.

When we let Jesus into our hearts (I mean really let him in), when we open up, when let ourselves be vulnerable, when we enter our wound, only then do we transition into a mode of reception. Maybe we have mentally known about God’s love for years, or have said we believe in Jesus Christ, but it is not until we call out and surrender our pride and confess our brokenness and let them come and make their abode in us, do we ever really understand what that love is. And that love can only be known truly through a relationship with his son, Jesus. He is the one God sent through which we can cry “Abba, Father.”

I appreciated what Eldredge said about how we must allow God to bring up the hurt from our past “for no one but God sees what the man is” (p. 133). God knows our constitution better than we know ourselves. We must let him give our identity to us. Eldredge speaks of receiving “God’s name for us.” I remember when I began to sense a revealing in my heart of who I was. I began to slowly realize the beauty that was there. It was a beauty that only God can show us, and it is only a beauty that God truly knows. “What God sees when he sees you is the real you, the true you, the man he had in mind when he made you” (p. 134, emphasis original). Asking God to rebuild the broken pieces through your union with his son Jesus is asking for God Almighty to tell you your name. They name he has given you. Your TRUE name. It is asking him to show you what he thinks of you and who you really are.

It was the voice of the Creator speaking into my soul that broke the power of the wound, the power of the lie I had come to believe or probably just believed all along. New life flowed into my heart as I embraced Jesus and withheld nothing from him, letting him take his rightful place as my Lord and Savior. Only then did God’s love become something more real than life itself, only then did I begin to realize who I really was, and only then was I truly ready to face the Enemy.

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