Broken Places
The places where we feel most broken often don’t need to be fixed. What they need is to be heard.
— Ken Page, Deeper Dating, p. 71
Category: Healing
10 Posts
Thorn in the Flesh
He asked God over and over to remove this thorn, but God said no. God said that grace and mercy had to be enough, that nothing awful or fantastic that Paul did would alter the hugeness of divine love. This love would and will have the last say. The last word will not be our bad thoughts and behavior, but mercy, love, and forgiveness. God suggested, Try to cooperate with that. Okay? Keep your stupid thorn; knock yourself out.
What was the catch? The catch was that Paul had to see the thorn as a gift. He had to want to be put in his place, had to be willing to give God thanks for this glaring new sense of humility, of smallness, the one thing anyone in his right mind tries to avoid. Conceit is intoxicating, addictive, the best feeling on earth some days, but Paul chose instead submission and servitude as the way to freedom from the bondage of self. Blessed are the meek.
We don’t know if Paul was ever healed of his affliction. I do know that being told I could keep my awfulness made holding on to it much less attractive.
— Anne Lamott, Hallelujah Anyway, p. 133-134
Letting Go of the Past
When we are holding on, we are living in the past. When we are living in the past, we are just living in a fantasy that we made up. Holding on can never make us happy, because fantasy is an illusion. As we are willing to let go of the ghosts of yesterday, we allow ourselves to receive what life has for us now, which is better than what we are letting go of. Life has something that is true for us that would move us forward. It is something that would let us really make contact and be satisfied.
— Chuck Spezzano, If It Hurts, It Isn’t Love, p. 262
Beautiful Cracks
One has to be done with the pretense of being just fine, unscarred, perfectly self-sufficient. No one is.
The ancient Chinese had a practice of embellishing the cracked parts of valued possessions with gold leaf, which says: We dishonor it if we pretend that it hadn’t gotten broken. It says: We value this enough to repair it. So it is not denial or a cover-up. It is the opposite, an adornment of the break with gold leaf, which draws the cracks into greater prominence. The gold leaf becomes part of its beauty. Somehow the aesthetic of its having been cracked but still being here, brought back not to baseline but restored, brings increase.
— Anne Lamott, Hallelujah Anyway, p. 50
Giving Grievances Space
If you can view your mind as your house, I can teach you to control how much space you rent to your wounds and grievances. You are the proprietor, and you set the rent. Each of us decides who our tenants are and the conditions of the lease. What kind of accommodations do we want to give our wounds and grievances?
We can rent our grievances the master bedroom and build them a hot tub out back. We can give them a great lease with terrific terms that never expire, or we can grant them only a day-to-day tenancy. We can allow them to put their stuff in all the rooms of the house, or we can restrict them to a small room in the back. In other words, we need to ask: How much time do we spend thinking about our hurts and disappointments? And, When we think about them, how much intensity is there?
— Dr. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Good, p. 8
Mercy People
To have borne broken hearts and seen such broken lives around the world is what gave us a shot at becoming mercy people.
— Anne Lamott, Hallelujah Anyway, p. 49
The Broken
Hannah tasted salty tears of infertility. Elijah howled for God to take his life. David asked his soul a thousand times why it was so downcast. God does great things through the greatly wounded. God sees the broken as the best and He sees the best in the broken and He calls the wounded to be the world changers.
— Ann Voskamp, The Broken Way, p. 24
The Way Out
The path away from judgment of self and neighbor requires major mercy, both giving and, horribly, receiving. Going without either of them leads to fundamentalism of all stripes, and fundamentalism is the bane of poor Mother Earth. Going without engenders blame, which offers its own solace but traps us like foxes. We trick out box traps with throw rugs and vases, until the pain grows too big. Then the only way out of jail is forgiveness.
— Anne Lamott, Hallelujah Anyway, p. 48-49
Defining Forgiveness
I define forgiveness as the experience of peace and understanding that can be felt in the present moment. You forgive by challenging the rigid rules you have for other people’s behavior and by focusing your attention on the good things in your life as opposed to the bad. Forgiveness does not mean forgetting or denying that painful things occurred. Forgiveness is the powerful assertion that bad things will not ruin your today even though they may have spoiled your past.
— Dr. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Good, p. xii
Deepest Wounds
Maybe you can live a full and beautiful life in spite of the great and terrible moments that will happen right inside of you. Actually — maybe you get to become more abundant because of those moments. Maybe — I don’t know how, but somehow? — maybe our hearts are made to be broken. Broken open. Broken free. Maybe the deepest wounds birth deepest wisdom.
— Ann Voskamp, The Broken Way, p. 24