In the last post I said that humans often operate with a commitment to avoid pain. So if we are not living with a commitment to avoid pain, what might that look like? Well, I can say it DOESN'T look like living with no pain. But it means that you have named the pain and grieved it enough so that it doesn't drive you. It means that the pain doesn't win.
So, say for one person, their driving wound is loneliness. They cannot be alone, and they make destructive relational choices out of this paradigm. They have a hard time drawing healthy boundaries. They will say yes to anything to be liked. They feel ashamed of who they are; it's hard to get them to look you in the eye. They don't believe that their own voice matters, and therefore they don't feel they have a right to say so when something is wrong.
What would freedom look like for this person? It doesn't look like the opposite of my above description, but it begins with seeing what is true of their loneliness. It means that they have lived in the stuff of their story enough to name the impact of it. Over time, the loneliness begins to lose power. There is a lonely person inside, and there is also a "created glory" person inside. They are quicker to see the days where they give power to the wound. And they can begin to live out of the glorious person God has made them to be.
This is NOT pretending that they are not lonely when they really feel lonely. But there are other parts of their heart, glorious parts, God-given and God-gifted parts that aren't about pain. And so they begin to recognize the difference, and name those situations that trigger a temptation to live out of pain. They can begin, by grace, to live out of freedom. They begin to discover who God made them to be, not as defined by everyone around them, but by a deep sense of internal awareness and God awareness.
What would the opposite of wounded living look like in your story?
No comments:
Post a Comment