Daily Devotional: Healing & Wholeness, The Wounds We Hide

MADE WHOLE

“He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.”
Psalm 147:3

REFLECTION

Most of us are better at hiding our wounds than we are at healing them. We have developed an entire set of skills around it.

• We stay busy so we do not have to feel what is underneath.
• We perform competence so no one looks too closely.
• We deflect with humor when conversations get too near the tender places.
• We have learned exactly how much to share to seem real without actually being vulnerable.

And it works, mostly. We function. We show up. We keep our lives moving forward. But the wound does not go away just because we have gotten good at covering it. It just goes deeper, and it tends to show up sideways in places we did not expect, in our closest relationships, in our patterns of behavior, in the way we respond to things that should not bother us as much as they do.

The psalmist says God heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. That word binds up is a medical word. It is the language of a physician who has examined an injury, assessed its depth, and applied the specific treatment it needs. God is not offering a general sense of feeling better. He is offering the careful, attentive, skilled treatment of a healer who sees exactly what is broken and knows exactly what it needs.

But a physician cannot treat a wound the patient refuses to show. The hiding that protects us from vulnerability also keeps us from the healing that vulnerability makes possible. Bringing our wounds to God does not require that we understand them fully or that we have the right words for them. It requires only that we stop pretending they are not there and bring them, as they are, to the One who heals.

What is a wound you have become so skilled at hiding that you have almost stopped noticing it yourself, and what would it look like to bring it into the open before God this week, not to perform vulnerability, but to receive healing?

PRAYER

Father, You see the wounds we hide from everyone else. You see the ones we have hidden so long we have almost forgotten they are there. Today we stop hiding. We bring what is broken, what is tender, what has been covered over and managed and quietly carried for longer than we want to admit. You are the healer of the brokenhearted. We are bringing You our broken hearts. Bind up what is wounded. We trust Your hands. Amen.

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