Learning to Be Loved: Wounds

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. — 2 Corinthians 1:3–4 NIV

Unlearn: Wounds close me off from receiving God’s love.

Learn: Wounds can open me up to receive God’s love.

Learning To Be Hated 

My dad was a pastor. Even when he stepped out of ministry after years of service, our family was still involved in our local church. This is what made it all the more surprising for me when he told my sister and me that he was divorcing our mom. Before long he was out of the house and had his own apartment. I’d go visit on the weekends. He’d take me out to lunch once a week. But I was so angry. I was angry for my mom, who didn’t want the divorce. I was angry about the hole it left in our family. I was angry about the awkwardness, the new broken family rhythms, and the hypocrisy of a Bible-believing pastor who seemed to have no problem playing fast and loose with Jesus’ teaching on marriage.

My heart was wounded. I experienced trauma.

After a while I started to ignore it. I’d ignore the feelings, the questions, and the father who caused them. I got involved in school, excelled in academics, surrounded myself with friends, and busied myself with as many fun things as I could. The wound was closing, scabbing, and scarring.

By the time I was ten years into my marriage, with two kids and a ministry of my own, I thought that the wound I’d experienced through the divorce had mostly closed up. Until I started crying on a run. My inability to receive my heavenly Father’s love and my son’s love was partly because of the wounds left by my father on his son. When I thought about my own sonship, I didn’t think about running into my dad’s arms when he came home from work, I thought about his leaving me at home. I didn’t think about unconditional love, I thought about a conditional marriage. I didn’t think about reveling in a father’s affection, I thought about sitting in pain, confusion, and anger. This is what trauma does.

I knew that this was one of my life’s worst wounds. But I also knew it had the potential to become the center of one of God’s biggest blessings.

So I mustered up the courage to tell my dad what I was feeling. “I don’t feel pursued by you, Dad. And it’s making it hard to feel pursued by my heavenly Father.” With understanding and tears of his own, my dad lovingly listened.

We even got to talk about the wounds his dad had left on him. How he felt ignored, overlooked, and unwanted by an absent and abusive father. This led to his own broken view of God’s love. If God is a loving father, he thought, He must be ignoring me because I sure don’t feel loved. My dad knew just how I felt because his wound looked so similar to my own. He had been hurt in a similar way, so he struggled to be loved by God in many of the same ways I struggled. 

I invited my dad into this trauma because I wanted it to be healed. I wanted the deep wound that made me long for a pursuing father to become a deeper blessing when I found that I had one in God.

The places we carry the most pain have the most power. They have the power to keep us from learning God’s love, but they also have the power to be transformational places where we learn to experience it.

That is why God wants to turn our worst wounds into his biggest blessings.

The wounds we carry, whether consciously or unconsciously, are some of the main things keeping us from receiving God’s love. The emotional, spiritual, and physical traumas we have endured teach us not that we are loved but that we are in danger. They don’t cause us to open up in vulnerable trust or reckless abandon. They close us up, scarring over the soft places in our hearts. So we learn to be protective and guarded, cynical and untrusting, self-conscious and self-blaming. Our wounds make us feel unsafe, unseen, and unwanted. They have taught us to believe that we are hated, not loved.

Wounds are the ongoing, often unseen, pain and trauma that suffering leaves behind. For a child attacked by a dog, the fear of animals may persist long after the bite heals. The child may come to believe that animals are unsafe and grow up to protect his home by not having any large pets. He may stay away from any friends’ homes that have dogs and cross the street when a dog walker passes by. The physical suffering from the pain caused by the dog attack has healed completely, but the emotional wound is still shaping his life.

Most of us have suffered worse trauma than dog bites. Hypocrisy and abuse inflict church wounds. Bullying and cruelty leave us with wounds to our self-worth. The malice, lust, neglect, and anger in others have left us with wounds to our identities, trust, sexuality, views of God, and much more.

• Our wounds shape our views of God and ourselves.

Wounds have great power to influence how we live our lives. But that also means that, in their healing, they have a greater power to change our lives for the better.

My dad and I are meeting together regularly to talk about our wounds. Together we are opening the bandages, assessing the injuries, and applying the salve of God’s love. The most beautiful thing for both of us is how we are experiencing our Father God’s love for us as sons. The father wounds we both carried are becoming the white-hot center of how God is awakening us to his boundless, unconditional, and reckless Fatherly love.

The trauma of feeling rejected, ignored, or unwanted by our fathers has created in each of us a deeper ability to crave, enjoy, and be satisfied by the pursuing, attentive, and relentless love of God. The places we carry the most pain have the most power.

God can turn our worst wounds into our biggest blessings.

God Uses Wounds to Show His Love

The whole story of the Bible follows this pattern. It is out of Israel’s weaknesses and wounds, brokenness and battles, tears and trauma that God works His greatest acts of love.

This pattern is seen even more clearly in Jesus’ death and resurrection. Jesus, the author of life, received the ultimate wound — death. The one who promised His followers eternal life entered the clutches of the grave. The one who called Himself the resurrection and the life lay lifeless in a tomb.

Yet it was there in the one wound to which all wounds lead that Jesus brought the greatest healing. In His resurrection from the dead, Jesus used the dark, foreboding, inescapable mouth of the grave to put on display just how sure, resilient, and powerful his life is. The place with the most pain became the place with the most power.

Think also of the new Heaven and new earth that Jesus will create when He returns. He will use this broken, sinful, pain-ridden earth to be His dwelling place. The Bible knows nothing of a second coming of Jesus in which we are teleported off the earth while our planet is destroyed. No! God will use our wounded world as the eternal locale for His healing Home (Revelation 21:2–4).

God does not yank us out of our world of tears, pain, wars, homicide, dirty elections, cancer, divorce, pollution, and nuclear bombs as if to say, “Never mind all that. Let’s go somewhere else.” He comes to this twisted world, puts His kind hand to our tear-wet faces, dries the tears, and says, “It’s okay. I live here now. I will heal all your wounds. I will make everything new.”

God will use the most sin-stained planet in the galaxy to be His cosmic command center. He will move into the most run-down house in the neighborhood and make it His capital. He will use the deepest wounds to bring about the greatest healing.

The place with the most pain will become the place with the most power. God can turn our worst wounds into our biggest blessings.

Excerpted with permission from Learning to Be Loved by David Bowden and Mart Green, copyright David Bowden and Mart Green.

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Your Turn

Your greatest pains are in the hands of the God who will use them for good, transform them for good, and bless you, too! It doesn’t seem true, but God’s faithfulness reminds us that it is dependably true! What has hurt you the most is the place of the most power. ~ Devotionals Daily