In honor of women’s history month, I’m sharing some stories from my ebook, “15 Things You Never Knew About Women of the Bible.” There’s a link at the end if you’d like to download this free resource and read more untold stories of hidden women of the Bible. Enjoy!
15. A Woman Fights a Seven-Headed Dragon While Giving Birth
At the end of the Bible in the mysterious book of Revelation, we find the woman who is clothed with the sun with the moon under her feet (12:1). On her head, she wears a crown of twelve stars. She is giving birth to a savior of the earth while a great dragon with seven heads and ten horns stands before her so that he might devour her child as soon as he is born. The dragon is evil, of course, and he has great power, enough to wipe a third of the stars from the sky with his tail and throw them to earth (12:4).
This woman is perhaps symbolic of God’s people or the goodness of Creation itself. Just as she gives birth to a savior, God rescues her baby and gives her eagle’s wings to fly off into the wilderness to be nurtured for a period of time. Or as the scripture says, “for a time, and times and half a time.” (12:14). The story tells us that creation came to the aid of the woman as she fled the evil dragon. The earth “opened its mouth and swallowed the river that the dragon had poured from his mouth” (12:16).
She comes into the story just as war is breaking out in heaven; one in which Michael and his angels fight against the dragon and his angels. A war of darkness and light, the darkness is defeated in the end. But in the meantime, the devil dragon increases his power on the earth, charging his batteries with the hatred, greed, and deception of the people he stirs up in the world. The dragon may be expelled from heaven, but he lives, as the story tells us, to make war on all the woman’s children.
The woman clothed with the sun shows us the unique combination of vulnerability and strength that women carry so well. Giving birth to anything—a baby, a dream, a relationship, a new beginning—is a precarious and vulnerable act. But women have a unique ability to channel a deeper strength that shelters what remains vulnerable within us. Even though we may be hunted by the dragons of our past, by trauma, pain, or oppression, God gives us the ability to channel our Divine gifts into the world. Giving us the wings of an eagle to carry us when we’re too tired to carry ourselves, taking us to the wilderness to be nurtured until the way is clear.
Check out more stories like this one in this free PDF. Find out about the woman who was with God at the creation of the world, the women who were prophets, military leaders, and the women who funded Jesus’ ministry. Click this link for your free download.
Much of what we have known as “regular” life is up in the air these days. With so much isolation, many of us have been feeling the effects of a long term, pent up anxiety. We watch the news of explosive anger, violence, slander and bickering among our peers. We see more racism than reconciliation, more violence than victory, and more stress than sanity. COVID has us all guessing about what’s next and in need of some serious relief.
We need more than slogans like “stay positive” and “keep it real.” We need wisdom that has its roots deeply in the ground, we need to hear from people who’ve been through stuff like this before. We need ancient wisdom for anxious times. After all, we’re choking on information while we’re starving for wisdom.
We need to hear from someone who has the audacity to say things like this:
It’s okay that things are not fine. Carpe diem, anyway. Don’t worry about it, whatever will be will be. Find some friends to go through hard things, you can’t do it alone. While you’re busy figuring out how to buy food and pay rent, make sure you don’t let your soul starve. What was will be again, what happened will happen again.
Don’t get excited—it’s the same old story. Nobody remembers what happened yesterday. And the things that will happen tomorrow? Nobody’ll remember them either. Let go and live. (from Ecclesiastes “The Message” translation)
These are the things I’ve picked up from reading and writing songs about ancient wisdom. Before being introduced to the sages of old in seminary, I was previously unaware of Wisdom’s secrets. As I studied the Wisdom of many traditions, I began to see that beneath all the layers of do’s and don’ts that we’ve packed into our spiritual and religious traditions, there is a water table of cool, refreshing, thirst quenching wisdom. Just waiting to be discovered especially in times like these. Wisdom was made for times that feel like the end of the world. Wisdom’s got this.
“Out beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing, there is a field, I’ll meet you there.” –Rumi, 13th Century Sufi Poet
Maybe one doesn’t go looking for Wisdom, maybe it just finds you after you’ve thoroughly exhausted every other possible answer to the existential dread we all feel inside. For me, it happened a few years after that life altering experience known as divorce. I headed to seminary and was introduced to the wisdom literature of the world, including the books found in our very own Old Testament.
Wisdom is not something we really notice that much, but it’s been with us along. Calling out to us in the voices of ancient grandmothers, storytellers and poets of old. Telling us not to fret, it’s okay that things are not fine. Giving us honesty over politically motivated speech. Wisdom doesn’t dish up easy answers, but calls us to get rooted in something greater than ourselves and stop chasing the wind, for God’s sake.
Wisdom literature comes to us from many traditions, it’s timeless. It’s something that we all have in common, it’s built into us, it comes with the whole “created in the image of God” thing. But we need to cultivate it in order to experience its fruits. It can ground us in difficult times, show us how to live through anxiety and fear and even enable us to continue to bear fruit during times of drought.
It helps us to be still long enough to cultivate peace, even in the midst of unsettled issues. Wisdom teaches us how to trust God for the next right thing to be revealed.
It’s exactly what we need to get through COVID.
Rumi, a Sufi poet from the 13th century said: “perhaps you are searching among the branches for what can only be found at the roots.” I invite you to consider that this COVID chasm, this time of great change might be the one time when you can truly listen to the roots of wisdom calling.
We hear from the sages of old, reminding us that “this too shall pass.” COVID has pulled back a few layers and exposed us to our vulnerability. As we work through what that means, it’s good to take some advice from ancient wisdom, to find something at the roots of us, at the core of our collective humanity, something that connects us all.
Here are a few takeaways from Ecclesiastes, one of the Wisdom books of the Old Testament. If you’d like to explore some of the voices of ancient wisdom traditions and learn how to apply them to your every-day life, join me for an upcoming workshop “Kiss the Ground: Finding Peace in a Chaotic World” (see below) There’ll be music, laughter, some aha moments, new friends and some creative wisdom to take with you in a special gift from me. So don’t go crazy, get grounded!
From the Quester in Ecclesiastes:
Don’t Worry About It
What was will be again, what happened will happen again.
By yourself you’reunprotected. With a friend you can face the worst. Can you round up a third? A three-stranded rope isn’teasilysnapped.
Carpe Diem, Anyway!
Seize life! Eat bread with gusto, Drink wine with a robust heart. Oh yes—Godtakespleasurein your pleasure! Dress festively every morning. Don’tskimponcolorsandscarves. Relish life with the spouse you love Each and every day of your precarious life. Each day is God’sgift.It’sallyougetinexchange For the hard work of staying alive. Make the most of each one! Whatever turns up, grab it and do it. And heartily! This is your last and only chance at it.
Don’t Let Your Soul Go Hungry
We work to feed our appetites; Meanwhile our souls go hungry.
Join me for this online workshop on Aug 2nd. Just click the image above to register. Participants will experience the voices of ancient wisdom from various world traditions including poetry from Rumi, Hafiz, Ecclesiastes, and even some ancient Egyptian wisdom poetry. Learning how to let this ancient wisdom flow into our modern lives in anxious times. With registration, participants will be given a link to download music and a PDF with creative journaling prompts and highlighted wisdom poetry that will form the content for this workshop. Participants can use this material in every day lives, creating a habit of visiting ancient wisdom and becoming rooted in that which is greater than ourselves.
Sherry received a grant from the Louisville Institute to study Wisdom traditions from around the world and channel them into modern songs. She created “Kiss the Ground,” a beautiful CD full of wisdom from the sages of old. These songs, curated from Wisdom traditions in Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Egyptian and Native American spirituality act as guides through difficult topics. The workshop will cover the topics of the sages including: loneliness, finding purpose in a meaningless world, love, death, and entering into a dialogue with creation.
In a post 9/11 era and the age of the global pandemic, we are waking up to the new reality of collective trauma. It’s not something most of us want to discuss over coffee, in fact, we’d really rather avoid any unpleasant conversation about trauma in general. Yet, here we are, trying to get centered in a time that feels as if “the center cannot hold.” (W.B Yeats) The truth is, we can find a center that holds, that is, if we learn to cultivate it. But first, we need to understand why its so difficult to find. Our feelings give us clues.
Living in a culture of collective trauma often feels like we may have lost access to a loving, hopeful or joyful self, the very center of our being. It seems the evidence around us points only to the tragic loss of safety or sanity. And that is the core issue, that we are trying to gain a sense of peace, sanity and stability from outside of ourselves, trying to construct a center from things that simply cannot hold.
When we find ourselves in the grip of fear and trauma, we begin grasping for solutions. Where we may have once lived in a world that seemed to provide a measure of stability, we find that our usual framework may have lost its ability to sustain us anymore. Though it may seem easier to reach outside of ourselves for solutions, the key to healing the wounds of collective trauma is to go within, but that is easier said than done.
Trauma affects us in many different ways, but one of the main coping mechanisms that can hinder our healing is hypervigilance. It is a state of being constantly on watch, born from the expectation that something horrible is about to happen. In hypervigilance, one constantly feels the need to control and manage one’s environment. Most of us experience it as anxiety, some as anger, but it is also there in addictions to media devices and the constant news feeds of the ongoing tragedies of the world. Our hypervigilance gets confirmed over and over again by our news feeds through the evidence of terrible events unfolding all over the world. Add to that the violence occurring in one’s own life or community and a hypervigilant state then becomes justified. We are caught in an unending loop of needing to monitor and control an environment that seems to be spinning out of control. We can easily become trapped in hypervigilance and this can keep us from taking the healing journey within. Hypervigilance can also keep us in a state of fatigue and exhaustion. Because it’s exhausting to constantly be on watch.
Collective trauma also generates the feeling that the world, events and our lives are moving very fast and it is difficult to slow down. Media seems to play a prominent role in maintaining a hypervigilant state, though it can also provide opportunities for healing when its used wisely.
What we all too often fail to experience in our culture is any true acknowledgment and would be healing from the deep psychological wounds of trauma. But how do we even approach these wounds that seem to overwhelm us at every turn? The pain seems so much greater than the solution. In addition, the places that once seemed to keep peace and order seem to be less available. Churches are closing at an alarming rate, massive expanses of wilderness are being co-opted for natural resource development, the places that once brought peace seem to be bordering on extinction.
When Jesus, the great healer, walked among us, he shared the radical notion that the kingdom of God, the place where the healing happens, is within. Jesus left us a pathway, the Spirit or Holy Spirit, as a guide to this realm within. Whether you think of it as a kingdom or a realm or a dimension, it’s the same thing, he told us that we must go within if we are to discover our authentic soul life awaiting us, that part of us that is eternal, indestructible, connected to God, connected to love. The Christ Spirit is a companion to walk with us on this journey. The Great Healer walks among us still.
If we continue to seek out what is hidden in our hearts, the image of God within us all, we will begin to catch some initial glimpses of the possibility of healing. But we cannot do it alone, we need others to walk with us. Somehow, this inward journey is easier to do in a supportive community.
Stabilizing Community
As we take the risk of an inner journey, we need communities that provide stability for us to experience moving from a trauma driven way of functioning in the world, to a love infused way of being. To risk healing requires nurture from others. There are communities out there that can become places of healing for us if we seek them out. Even now, as we are learning to connect virtually, Zoom meetings are popping up everywhere. Churches are forming virtual small groups, 12 step programs are forming regular Zoom meetings, group therapies are going online now and so much more. You will find that if you ask God for direction, to supply your need to connect to community, you will find connection. Sometimes we just need to take the first step and ask for what we need.
Just as collective trauma is contagious, so is collective healing. Our journey inward to sit with pain, to bring it before the Divine Light and risk loving love into being is a pathway to overcoming fear in our ourselves and in our world. As we learn to cultivate the Center within ourselves, we will naturally help others to find it, too. Healing is contagious!
We are due for a collective healing and it begins in each of our hearts, each day. Claim some territory in your heart today for healing, slow down, breathe, meditate on the heart. As you do, ask God to be present and feel the wounds of fear letting go. Keep coming back to the prayer of the heart and to the community of prayer, the heart among hearts of love will surely find the way to God., the Center that holds.
P.S. Here’s a meditative song to help you on your path to finding a prayerful state within. I wrote this song after beginning to practice the first step of a 12 step program: “I am powerless over…..” Fill in the blank. Sometimes this step takes up a long portion of my prayer time! Naming all the things I’m powerless over helps me to enter into God space, where I’m letting go of control. “Surrender” is always a third option, after we’ve exhausted fighting and fleeing, we can just surrender to whatever God is trying to do in our lives and let it unfold.
When we think about the Bible, we don’t often think of the beauty and power of songs, especially by women. They aren’t sung loudly over edgy guitar riffs or punctuated by trance inducing beats. They’re not delivered to us via Youtube by stylish singers in trendy clothes. But if we go searching for them, we find that songs are a big deal in the Bible, and though they may not make it to the top 40 Billboard charts, they are some of the most powerful tools we have for claiming a new world order. One in which the hungry are fed, the weak are made strong, the oppressed are set free and the lion lies down with the lamb. A world in which swords are turned into plow shares.
If I were to get a hook out of the songs of Hannah, Deborah and Mary it would be this: God has done the impossible again, should we be surprised?
Though there are nearly two hundred songs in the Bible, some of the most powerful ones are created by these three women.
What makes them so special?
They teach us how to sing our faith into existence by envisioning God’s action in a song, it’s classically known as praise. But the word itself is deceiving. It brings to mind joy, beauty, ease or happiness. But their songs of praise tell us a different story. Praise is hard. That’s what makes it so powerful. These women do the gritty, scrappy, world ordering work of praise in their songs, and it’s what makes them world changing.
Praise is hard because it must be uttered over and against
evidence that points to the contrary. It’s much easier to believe the evidence
that the world is a horrible place than to speak the good news that it is not.
To praise God in a world in which violent hate crimes seem to rule the daily news, where children become targets just for attending school, where women are sold every day into sex trafficking, even in our own backyard, is a radical act. But that’s exactly what faith is, praising God in adverse conditions. This is how the world is changed. Channeling the love of God over and against the reality in which we live. That’s exactly why it’s crucial. Because praise not only heals us, it heals the world, too.
The women of the Bible who sang God’s powerful and healing
love into the world weren’t the product of warm, fuzzy, comfortable societies.
They were scrappy and lived in a culture that often held them to a rigid
standard of having to negotiate life as the property of men. They also lived in
a time in which a woman’s worth was often measured by her ability to bear a
male child, remain a virgin until married and be submissive to male authority.
But the three women whose songs changed the world, Hannah,
Deborah and Mary, colored outside of these lines. Not because they were seeking
attention for themselves but because God asked them to, they simply responded
to a calling from on high.
Hannah, Deborah and Mary were not only prophets, but women who overcame cultural adversity to channel God’s miraculous power into flesh and bones, into peace and love. Deborah’s song tells of an impossible victory that she commands with her vision, grit and military prowess as the right arm of God on earth. Hannah’s song claims God’s miraculous power to do the impossible through a woman that the world had given up on. Mary’s song creates a new world order in which God’s love is Sovran.
Through their songs love is made possible in the world through the odd combination that women carry so well -vulnerability and strength.
The songs of women are special, because they are uttered from hearts that know of sacrifice and oppression, hearts that are well acquainted with sorrow and the impossible. Hearts that have experienced the pain of rejection. Women who didn’t settle for being the victims of an unfair system, who didn’t believe the victim narrative but rose up out of it through God’s strength to share the truthfulness of God’s mighty power with the world.
They also teach us that we can’t do important work alone, we need others to be our best selves. In a culture in which we can easily feel isolated, lonely and without nurturing love, we need to remember that their songs were not sung alone. If they had been, the outcomes could have been very different. Deborah could have gone into battle without enough of the manpower she needed. Mary could have been abandoned by her family and friends and had to face giving birth alone. Hannah would have had no sacred vessel into which she could dedicate God’s gift to her. But because they sang their songs in communities that believed in them, and believed that their words were from God, the outcome was miraculous, every time.
God has done the impossible through the songs of women, should we be surprised?
Check out some of my modern interpretations of the radical stories of the hidden women of the Bible here.
May God add a blessing to your reading of this blog.
Tis the season of the longest night. Darkness arrives earlier and the sun takes its time waking in the morning. We are worn out by the Christmas rush and feeling the long stretch of winter’s yawn, inviting us into stillness.
In this time of speeding up to slow down it is not uncommon to sense feelings of sadness creeping in around the edges of our hard earned joy, once we slow down, that is. But if our first instinct is to chase the sadness away with some kind of distraction, we would be robbing ourselves of the hidden gift of winter. The wondrous gift that is given silently in this season of the longest nights.
Ancient holy people referred to this time of year as “thin space,” a time when heaven moves a little closer to the earth. Whenever this time of year approaches, it can be both wonderful and frightening.
For Christians, it’s also the season in which we celebrate the birth of the Christ child. Another event of the heavens that prompted the angels to inform humans that even though the whole world was about to change forever, there was nothing to fear. Tidings of great joy delivered into frightful times.
Following Jesus’ birth, Matthew’s gospel tells us that the infant boys were
massacred throughout the region of Bethlehem by order of King Herod. But, as the
angels said, we simply have nothing to fear.
I’m not sure why heavenly events are also terribly fearful, or why the
emotions of sadness and loss accompany supposedly joyful holidays, but these
are things I’ve come to accept…sort of. Or let’s just say, I’m working on it.
I suppose it’s all about perspective. When I can view winter solstice
and the annual always-coming-before-I’m-ready re-birth of the Christ child as an
opportunity rather than a burden, things get better.
I’ve come to realize that each of us is given the tools of our lives, and when we begin to apply these tools to our partnership with heaven, we soon find that we all have one material, a very necessary one without which we can become nothing at all. It is our own woundedness. Our wounds hold years of stored loss, sadness, and layers of grief. Like a big gray, cold, blob of hardened clay sitting there inside of us, uninvited, wanting to be expressed, wanting to become something useful. Often stuck and keeping us from moving forward.
But Old Man Winter brings a unique opportunity with his spinning wheel
of transformation, always turning. It’s a great season to go sit at this wheel
of time and learn how to work with the material of our pain. Reaching in to
pull out a little evidence, a little substance to offer up to the spinning
wheel.
Stubborn pain and loss sits there, shapeless and dark, and has become a
constant reminder of what has not happened in our lives. We need to take it in
hand and shape it into something, but we have no idea how to do that. We would love
to believe that our lives could become a vessel of good, but we don’t know how
to work with it, we are not artisans of our pain. We’ve never worked with
anything so stubborn and hard, so unwilling to be molded into something practical.
We reluctantly pick up our blob of pain, we spin the wheel, we poke some
holes. We cry, we get therapy, we join a 12 step group, we do yoga, we go to
church, it gets worse, it gets a little better, maybe our pain is becoming
something more than pain. At least we are willing to acknowledge its existence.
The point is, it will never move if we just let it sit there, we have to
touch it, throw it on the wheel of transformation, scream at it, caress it
gently, add water, pray to God to show us what it is to become; pray to God to
give us a clue about what to do, the master potter, who knows our pain by
heart.
We need a Higher Power to help us sort out the information of our grief
and lift from us the burdens, the overwhelming emotions that are too heavy for
us. What happens in this process is nothing less than amazing. Season by season
of working with grief, we see God, the master potter, working with us and
turning it into a vessel we can use, a vessel that can be filled with joy to
pour out to others.
Eventually, the season that we dreaded so much becomes a springtime. And
we have something forming on the wheel of our lives, a new thing, a vessel,
that we can use to hold love.
If we see grief as something we need, if we understand it is our grief that holds the vital information we need to move forward, then we can accept this winter as being one of the greatest transformational periods of our lives. If we don’t seek to distract ourselves from it. Rather, taking the risk of turning into it. With God’s help, and with the help of a group or a community, we can see this winter as an opportunity.
God takes the information stored in our big blob of grief and turns it
into something we can use to hold our wholeness and become that fully alive
person God intends for us to be.
It will get messy, no doubt, you will get your hands dirty, there will
be ugly tears, and sorrow, but each time you press against the edges, it takes
a different form. As you identify your grief and offer the layers to God to be
lifted, something new begins to appear, a hollowed out place within, big enough
to store joy, peace and love.
This is God’s promise to us and it will be met as we become willing.
At the heart of this season may be a dark night of the soul, but it is
also the place where we find God looking back at us, ready to meet us and get
to work with all the various materials of our pain. Saying, just as the angels
said on the dark, silent night in which the Christ child was born, “Do not
fear, behold, I bring you tidings of great joy.”
Each Christmas is an opportunity for the Christ child to be born anew in
all of us. From the churning chaos of the wheel of time, out of the elements of
pain, comes joy.
“How Silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given.”
“Nobody escapes being wounded, we are all wounded people. Whether physically, emotionally, mentally or spiritually. The main question is not, ‘How can we hide our wounds, or hide from them?’ but ‘how can we put our woundedness in the service of others?’ When our wounds cease to be a source of shame and become a source of healing, we have become wounded healers.” – Henri Nouwen, “The Wounded Healer”
The Wounded Healer is a human archetype that’s been around for thousands of years. In native culture, the wounded healer is the shaman or holy man/holy woman who heals themselves and others through becoming a channel for the Creator’s power to flow through them. They often use their wounds as a source of information for healing others. Jesus became the great Wounded Healer (the topic of Nouwen’s book) as his wounds became a source of healing for the wounded of the world.
It’s a beautiful idea, that our wounds could become a source of healing. But if you’re like me, you might initially balk at the thought of placing your wounds in the service of others. After all, if you’ve been on the earth very long, you soon learn from the school of hard knocks that you have to heal yourself before you can help anyone else, right? But here is what Nouwen is getting at and it’s also the real genius behind Jesus’ core teaching of “love one another.” The way to unleashing the wounded healer within isn’t in the fixing of our wounds or the wounds of others, it’s in the loving.
We so often confuse fixing and loving, and it’s easy to do.
When Jesus told his followers that the most important thing was that they love one another and love God, he knew they were broken people in a broken world. The thing is, he wasn’t telling them to fix the world or fix each other, he was telling them to love each other. It is somehow very important as we find solutions to the problems of the world like hunger, homelessness, climate change, violence and oppression that love leads the way.
Loving is different than fixing. We can’t fix each other but we can love each other, and this is where the magic happens, this is where the healing begins. In fact, Jesus was clear on this point too, that we need not get involved in trying to fix each other, but loving, loving one another is necessary for our own healing. Because it is love that connects us as human beings. People tend to suffer from loneliness, isolation and abandonment without love. Without love, we are just doomed to live out the nature of our wounds.
Healing our wounds is really important to human thriving. The field of psychology informs us that if we don’t heal our wounds, then they become the pain that we inflict on others. We project the dark attributes of our wounds onto others because we are trying to find some kind of method to cope with them. When we are not able to go through the healing process, we tend to project our pain outwardly, it’s how we manage the emotions we can’t process. Because we’re projecting the material of our wounds such as hurt, fear, mistrust, jealousy, it makes it difficult to connect with people, to love and have intimate relationships. Without healing our wounds, we are controlled by our pain.
But, as it turns out, the opposite is also true. That when we project love onto others, we go in the direction of love, in ourselves as well as outwardly. Love begins to give us messages about who we really are, because love is inside of us, the most powerful force in the universe. Love leads us to healing. We begin to crave more love as we get to know love, as we seek to love without conditions, we want more of that in our own lives. It leads us to seek our own healing. If we get into a program of healing, then our wounds can give us the information we need to move forward into friendships, love relationships, intimacy and a sane, manageable life. We become wounded healers.
Healing happens as we learn to give and receive love, as we share our brokenness with other human beings who are also broken. It took me a long time to really accept this. Because I always felt that I had to fix things, situations, problems; that in my ability to fix impossible situations, I could be spectacular and finally be worthy of love. I found out, in ten years of being the pastor at one of those churches Pope Francis has called “the frontlines of the world’s pain” that I was wrong. I couldn’t fix anyone or anything, all I could do was love broken people and eventually, learn to love myself. I learned that if I let love lead, solutions to problems would arise and I could see the way clearly.
Check out Sherry’s latest book: reflections from a pastor on homelessness and her spiritual journey.
The act of loving one another actually gives us access to our wounds. Because often, they are buried so deeply within us, we can’t reach them by ourselves. We need others to become mirrors for us so that we can locate them, have language for them. Sometimes our wounds are buried beneath layers of a false self that we’ve developed to survive because the pain of these wounds has been too overwhelming for us to process. Our real self or true self goes into hiding to survive. But the genius of Jesus’ teaching, “love one another,” is that as we risk loving instead of fixing, something deep within us begins to vibrate, God’s love, hidden inside of us all. It wakes up like a sleeping giant and begins to shake these layers of the false self as we connect with others through love. We begin to realize there is a truth inside of us that is much more powerful than our pain, that is Divine love. It shines out from inside as we risk loving, as we realize we are broken. Somehow our hearts need to break so we can believe that love is inside of us, love rescues us from within because it is innate in us all. We were all created with the image of God within, we just have a hard time believing it. Love holds us steady, loving others stabilizes us as we take the healing journey.
There is a wounded healer inside of us all. As counterintuitive as it might seem, we find our healing by putting our own wounds in the service of a greater love. God begins to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.
As the poet Rumi said, “the wound is the place where the light enters you.”
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