Breaking Hurt Cycles Long Enough To Seek The Helper

​Hurt sucks, but hurt doesn't have to suck the life out of you.

Maybe I'm not the right person to be writing this to you. Not because I haven't experienced my fair share of hurt, because I indeed have, but because more than most - I think - I have let hurt suck the total living life out of me.

Literally.

Hurt is an event. An experience. A chapter in time. That is not the problem. The problem is when we allow the chapter to become the book. When hurt no longer defines an experience in our lives but actually becomes the story of our lives.

How does that happen?

We keep letting hurt tell the story about us instead of us telling hurt the story about our helper.

It is true that I've told stories of my hurt in many different ways. I can be creative. Often the same hurt, just different stories. Like:

The story of blaming others for my hurt.

The story of clinging tightly to the victimhood of my story.

The story of writing a false truth on my hurt that says experiencing ugly things surely means I'm an ugly person.

The story of believing that DOING horrible things makes me an unredeemable horrible person.

One hurt. Many narratives. Narratives that can circle around my hurts - round and round - forever. Like guards standing watch, making sure those narratives never stop circling long enough for me to cry out.

Cry out for help.

For God is the great interrupter of circles in my life. The God who is not the story of my hurt but the absorber of my hurt. The God who says, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

Maybe the opposite of going to God with my burdens is circling them all alone with my own creative stories. And maybe the stories I tell myself about my hurts are quite the opposite of the stories God will tell me about my hurts. And maybe—just maybe—that leads to hurts that never heal instead of hurts that become instrumental to a life journey that turns burdens to light.

That has been the greatest source of healing in my life. Letting go of the need to tell myself stories about my hurt that will make me feel better and handing it over to a God who wants only to make rest of that hurt. Rest of my every hurt.

I long to feel better; God longs for me to receive rest.

We can get so busy circling our hurts that we forget how to summon help. ~ Steven Furtick

For me, that help is God. Maybe for you it is not. But the message remains the same.

Chances are always better that crying out to a helper is going to do for our hurts what our own made-up stories never will. Crying out for help is always going to give us a better chance of breaking out of patterns of reliving our hurts and freeing us to move into new patterns of healing.

The way forward isn’t circling our hurts; it’s moving toward our helper.