The Wounds We Carry, The Love That Holds

Living our pain instead of explaining it away

We’re not healed by fixing our pain, but by letting Love hold it with us.

Some Wounds Don’t Close Neatly

For me, pastoral burnout wasn’t a dramatic collapse.
It was a slow erosion.

I kept going.
Kept showing up.
Kept serving.

On the outside, things looked steady.
But inside, something was unraveling.
Exhaustion turned to numbness.
Passion faded into pressure.
The work that once gave life began to quietly drain it.

I tried to think my way through it.
Strategize a comeback.
Pray harder.
Read more.
Push through.
Blame the pain away.

And when the pain wouldn’t go away,
I ignored it.
Put a band-aid on it.
Told myself it would pass.

But here’s what I see now:
I was chasing the wrong goal.

I thought faithfulness looked like fruitfulness.
I thought success meant growing a big church, collecting accolades, being recognized.

But that vision, shiny and exhausting, left me disappointed in myself all the time.
That constant disappointment slowly drained all my energy away.

It wasn’t until everything started to unravel that I could hear what Henri Nouwen names so clearly, what I’ve had to learn the hard way:

“The great challenge is living your wounds through instead of thinking them through. It is better to cry than to worry, better to feel your wounds deeply than to understand them, better to let them enter into your silence than to talk about them.” Henri Nouwen

Healing hasn’t come through control, but surrender.
Not through performing strength, but allowing weakness to speak.

And in that slow, quiet space, I began to understand what it really means to be a wounded healer.

Not someone who has it all together.
Not someone who has blamed all the pain away.
But someone who has stopped hiding the pain,
And started letting love flow through it.

Because in the end, it’s not strength that qualifies us for ministry.
It’s honesty.
It’s vulnerability.
And a heart that’s still open.

God has not abandoned me.
Love has held me.
And now, that love is how I lead.

Letting Love Meet the Wound

As I began to let go of performance and let love meet me in the wound,
I noticed a pattern.

My instinct was still:
To analyze,
To explain,
To stay in control.

But pain doesn’t live in the head,
It lives in the heart.

Head or Heart?

When we hurt, we tend to retreat into our heads.
We try to:

• Explain the pain

• Analyze the timeline

• Connect the dots

• Minimize the damage

• Intellectualize the grief

It feels safer that way.
The head is where we stay in control.

But the soul doesn’t heal through spreadsheets or systems.
It heals through presence.
Through tears.
Through the slow, holy work of living with what we cannot fix.

The Long Ache

Most of our brokenness cannot be simply taken away.
We can’t snap our fingers and make it disappear.

Coming to the place in life where we can accept our weakness is difficult.

There are wounds we carry for life:
A betrayal that shattered trust
A diagnosis that reshaped everything
A grief that moved in and never fully moved out
A rejection that rewrote the story we tell ourselves

We don’t get to choose all our pain.
But we do get to choose how we relate to it.

We can keep running, numbing, fixing.

Or we can say:
This is my pain.
This is part of my story.
And I will not pretend it doesn’t matter.

Because God is willing to show me his love through my pain.

The Way of the Wounded Healer

This isn’t about glorifying suffering.
It’s about refusing to shame it.

To befriend our pain is not to give it the final word,
But to trust that love is greater still.
That our hearts are greater than our wounds because God lives there.
Because Christ walks there.
Because healing isn’t the absence of hurt,
It’s the presence of love within it.

And slowly, over time, our wounds become windows.
Not just into our own soul, but into the suffering of others.

They make us tender. Present. Real.

They make us wounded healers,
Not because we have no wounds,
But because we’ve stopped hiding them.

We’re not healed by fixing our pain, but by letting Love hold it with us.

Questions for the Journey:

• What pain in your life have you tried to think your way through?

• What would it look like to feel that pain instead: to live it, befriend it, welcome it into your heart?

• What might the Spirit want to reveal to you through your long ache?

A Prayer to Live the Wound:

God of tenderness,
You know the pain I carry.
You know the story behind the silence,
The ache beneath the surface.
Give me the courage not to run from it.
To sit with it.
To breathe through it.
To let it speak, but not define me.
May my wounds not make me bitter, but more alive.
More compassionate.
More like Jesus.
Amen.