Author Stephen Mansfield begins Chapter 4 (“Lessons from a Season in Hell”) of Healing Your Church Hurt by asking us to revisit those agonizing days of our church wounding in order to carefully probe them for lessons to be learned. Speaking from personal experience, he states:
“It will take courage, and a brand of humility that defies embarrassment for the sake of gaining the wisdom that makes for a meaningful life.”
Stephen adds that we human beings understandably run from pain. While this makes sense with physical pain, running from emotional pain doesn’t work. With emotional pain, we only can attempt to escape from the cause of the pain, not the pain itself. To heal and restore, we need to look at who we were during the time we were “raw and exposed and laid open.”
The author relates an experience he had in the Syrian Desert. Speaking with an Arab friend, Stephen commented on how foreign the desert was to someone who called the lush hills and flowing rivers of Tennessee home. His Arab friend responded that the desert has just as much life as the sea, but that you must know where to find it. Stephen concludes:
” . . . during our dry and painful spiritual seasons, there is much life to be found, but we have to find it in places we have never considered before, digging for it in ways we have not tried.”
Today’s question: What signs of life have you found as you journey through you desert, transitional time? Please share.
Tomorrow’s blog: “Unpaid guardians of the soul”
