Gut Punch
After my divorce, there was a time when I was raw. I wore every passion on my sleeve and my ability to filter and process emotions was faulty. The people around were not able to lift me up, but I allowed them to injure me daily. One misspoken word from a friend or colleague sent me into an emotional spiral that took days if not weeks to recover from. I swayed back and forth through a wide spectrum of emotions. One moment, I felt like an unmovable piece of granite, but the next minute I was triggered into tears by a insult from a friend, real or imagined. Beneath the surface was an ocean of deep anger that remained repressed most of the time, except in the moments it bubbled to the surface. Everybody better watch out!
I hated being in this place. The light shines all the more brilliantly from a dark place, so I’ve been told. If there’s one silver lining to grief, it is only that from a place of despair, the light is all the more visible and at least we can position ourselves to walk toward it. All my life, I considered myself an emotionally steady person. I didn’t have mood swings. I wasn’t someone who lashed out irrationally at others. But…grief was a game changer. The grief over the betrayal of my spouse exposed every emotional vulnerability and insecurity. I had to learn new skills to survive and overcome the overwhelming wave of depression.
Whenever, we experience a deep injury at the hands of another person, our first hope is that the person who hurt us will make the situation right. We long for an apology, the confession of wrong doing, and a series of actions that demonstrate a desire to restore the relationship and heal the damage done. When we wrong others, this is what we should do. But, those of us who live in the real world know we will most likely never get that apology, there will be no confession, and those who hurt us may never act in a way to restore and heal the relationship. Ouch! For the sake of our own healing, we should avoid putting our emotional recovery in the hands of those who have hurt us. We my be waiting for an apology that will never come.
Yet, we still must heal, for our own sake. We have to find peace and move forward without becoming bitter and cynical. Our lives should be grounded in a foundation that keeps us rooted and gives us strength to keep moving forward. My foundation was cracked by trauma and I didn’t know how to fix it. I was doing what most of us do, carrying on the best I could and taking one day at a time, but all the while, the damage from my pain was still growing. There were fissures that moved into other areas of my life and impacted my relationships with my children, my friends, and colleagues. Taking each day at a time without dealing with the source of my pain, was not going to help. In fact, I was allowing my pain to make me part of the problem, not the solution. Because I was hurt, I was hurting others.
Projection is a powerful phenomena and now that I consider myself a survivor, I see how many of us project our painful experiences into our daily interactions with others, possibly without even knowing it. The other day, there was a heated exchange between colleagues over politics. They aren’t speaking to each other anymore. Were they really talking about politics or did the conversation reveal a deeper hurt? A friend did not receive an invitation to another friend’s party? Her first thought was to end the friendship. Does anyone else get the impression that we seem to be living in a society where our emotions are on steroids? We are walking around unrooted and ungrounded, tossing and turning with every gust of wind. Often we are not healing brokenness, but only facilitating its spread and destruction. This is the emotional world we live in, a place where we are not rooted in the transforming power of the Gospel, but only in our fear of getting hurt.
I, for one, am tired of being tossed about by the wind. My grief left me exhausted and profoundly disappointed in myself and deeply unhappy with the state of my relationships. Jesus says it perfectly in John 7:24 as he speaks to a crowd. “What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind?” Jesus is referring to those who left their homes to find John the Baptist because they were seeking his wisdom. They were drawn to him because he was firmly rooted in God and not tossing in the wind like everyone else.
Mature people are difficult to find these days. We live in a world where we are encouraged to throw emotional tantrums. We cancel people, feel constantly offended, and even out and shame our friends on social media in passive aggressive posts. I am a product of this culture too, so I’m not judging, but I know there is a better way. True healing comes from God. Although an apology is wonderful, we are not healed by words, or even the actions of others. We are healed by our relationship with Jesus. We have a living faith that challenges us to be better, to forgive others, recognize our own failings, and work towards peace whenever possible. The Apostle Paul in his letter to the Ephesians said, “Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming. Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ” (Ephesians 4). A relationship with Christ leads us to maturity, a place where we are rooted and no longer tossed and turned by a gentle breeze.
Before experiencing growth in my Christian faith, I was living my life waiting for every gut punch. I walked around defensive and ready to throw punches back if necessary, flailing my arms like a deranged monkey. In this state of mind, I was not going to improve my life or the lives of others. I was chaotic, disruptive and destructive and the peace of God was not in me. How can a twig in a hurricane do anything, but pray for survival? Jesus offers us something better: a relationship with Him. If we have a relationship with Jesus, when the storms come, we seek God’s help through prayer and scripture. The relational practice allows us to listen to God’s will rather than relying on our own erratic reaction to a gut punch. Faith grounds us and guides us and offers us a peace in the storm, even when life’s at its most difficult. Gut punches are a part of life, but with God on our side, we will find that we can stop spreading hurt and fully heal with God’s grace.
