Friday, June 11, 2010

wounded

I love to read! LOVE IT! I recently read "Captivating" again by John and Stasi Eldredge. Dang, just amazing! Almost better the second time :)

I really love when someone shares something great with me, so today, I shall share a tid-bit with you. I pray it blesses you.

"Over the years we've come to see that the only thing more tragic than the things that have happened to us is what we have done with them.
Words were said, painful words. Things were done, awful things. And they shapped us. Something inside of us shifted. We embraced the messages of our wounds. We accepted a twisted view of ourselves. And from that we chose a way of relating to our world. We made a vow never to be in that place again. We adopted startegies to protect ourselves from being hurt again. A woman who is living out of a broken, wounded heart is a woman who is living a self protective life. She may not be aware of it, but it's true. It's our way of trying to "save ourselves."
We also developed ways of trying to get something of the love our hearts cried out for. The ache is there. Our desperate need for love and affirmation, our thirst for some taste of romance and adventure and beauty is there. So, we turned to boys, to food, to romance novels; we lost ourselves in our work, at church, or in some sort od a service. All this adds up to the women we are today. Much of what we call our "personalities" is actually the mosaic of our choices for self-protection plus our plan to get something of the love we were created for. The problem is our plan has nothing to do with God.
The wounds we recieved and the messages they brought formed a sort of unholy alliance with our fallen nature as women. From Eve we recieved a deep mistrust in the heart of God toward us. Clearly, he is holding out on us. We'll just have to arrange for the life we want. We will control our world. But there is also an ache deep within, an ache for intimacy and for life. We will have to find a way to fill it. A way that does not require us to trust anyone, especially God. A way that will not require vulnerability.
In some ways, this is every little girl's story, here in this world east of Eden.
But the wounds don't stop once we're grown up. Some of the most crippling and destructive wounds we recieve come much later in our lives. The wounds we have recieved over our lifetimes have not come to us in a vaccuum. There is, in fact, a theme to them, a pattern. The wounds you have recieved have come to you for a purpose from one who knows all you are meant to be and fears you".