The Me I Want To Be

Facing Our Wounds So We May Heal an

After getting cut from the basketball team my senior year of high school, I remember only attending one game that season. As much as I would like to believe that I went to the game for some benevolent reason, I only went to berate the coach.

Sitting in the student section, just fifteen feet from the bench, I booed as loudly as I could when the announcer mentioned his name during team introductions. While I don't remember everything I yelled that night, I know it was an ugly representation of me.

At the time, I foolishly believed my verbal retribution would somehow make me feel better.

It didn't.

Isn't it interesting how we grow up believing that if we hurt people who hurt us, we will feel better? We desperately want the other person to experience the same pain we are feeling. But repaying one evil with another never heals our wounds. It only deepens it and perpetuates our toxicity and destruction.

Consequently, we live out of our wounds because it is easier than sitting with them and facing them. Instead of doing the necessary holy inner work to heal from within, we continue to transmit our pain to others, which profoundly affects our relationships and how we see the world.

If I could go back to that time and honestly sit with my pain, I would have uncovered something unexpected. The real reason why this experience hurt me so badly was that the coach took away what I idolized. From the time I was a little boy, I had allowed this idol to shape and form my identity. And as the years passed, my success and the notoriety that came with it fed my voracious and growing ego.

Getting cut obliterated my ego and left me in the wake of pain and then ultimately regret.

As I wrote last week, the beauty of metanoia is that it gives space to breathe and self-reflect in that wake. It provides an opportunity to look inwardly and search our motives and impulses to see who we have become. Metanoia opens opportunities for the Spirit to heal us and become something new if we allow it.

The truth is that if we are to heal the wounds we continue to carry and then grow beyond the culturally-conditioned mindset of repaying evil for evil, we must discover the ever-present gift of metanoia.

Question

1. How have your wounds influenced you, affected your relationships, and/or how you see the world? What would it look like for you to create space to begin healing those wounds?

Peace,

Brandon