Why do bad things happen to good people? How do such unspeakable tragedies strike innocent children? Why is there so much brokenness in the world?
I hear these questions often. I hear them in my practice as I sit with individuals who have endured a lifetime of pain with little relief. I hear them in the church at large. It is here, where we tend to believe everything in our lives is healed at the moment of conversion, that these questions gnaw at us. They disturb us.
Why are there so few emotionally healthy adults, even in a community of spiritually minded, Christ followers?
Life continually writes upon the slate of our emotional identities. And yes, even after conversion there are some wounds that are to be healed over the course of our lives as we, “continue to work out our salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil 2:12, NIV). Some wounds just don’t disappear instantly no matter how much we study and pray.
Yet, if we understand the nature of our journeys here on earth, we can recognize that God is always about the process of healing, teaching, and growing us up to become more and more like Him. What a beautiful picture!
Here is an excerpt from my new book, Peace For a Lifetime, where I explain why there is so much brokenness in the world and how we as individuals can move beyond our wounds to experience healing, embrace wholeness, and cultivate the kind of peace we’ve always dreamed of for our lives.
If children develop emotionally as they do physically and intellectually, why are there so few emotionally healthy adults? What happens that stops or prevents children from attaining Emotional Abundance—that ability to feel, reason through, understand, and effectively manage emotions—as they arrive at adulthood? The short answer is this: life happens.
We are born as blank slates. However, since we live in a broken world, that brokenness makes its mark on the slate of our identities in many ways. Brokenness changes everything about how we see the world, how we see ourselves, and how we see relationships. Life in a broken world creates broken people, and that brokenness is our universal wound. No one escapes being broken. No one is exempt. Brokenness is simply the reality of life and relationships on this side of heaven.
For example, many children living in environments where they are helpless to protect themselves or those around them learn to see themselves in adulthood as powerless to affect change in any area of their lives. They sometimes begin to experience themselves as deserving of the abuse they attract in relationships, and they may begin to feel a certain comfort in unhealthy environments and relationships because that unhealthiness seems familiar. Because they feel powerless to affect any change in their worlds, they continue in the pattern written on their physical, cognitive, and emotional slate many years earlier in childhood.
We are left to carry our wounds with us into the relationships that mean the most to us. We unconsciously wound those we love with our wounds.
That doesn’t have to be the end of the story.
God loves you. He weeps for the ways your childhood wounded you. He longs for you to be healed, to be whole. Whole — spiritually, emotionally, physically. Complete. Lacking in nothing. Abounding in everything. Every wound. Every relationship. Every heart. Every life. Yours.
My new book, Peace for a Lifetime, provides step-by-step information and tools for how you can experience healing in the darkest, deepest wounds within your heart and mind. This material can help you create and experience an indestructible peace – not just for today, not just for tomorrow, you can experience peace…for a lifetime!
To learn more about the book, click HERE!
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