We all carry a lot of disappointment, frustration, and sadness inside.  Our hearts, minds, and dreams are huge, wonderful, and incurably restless. In them, we intuit the Divine, its hugeness and its mystery. We don’t easily absorb limits, humiliations, indignities, rejections, and disappointments. We hurt and that does something to us.

When we turn away in coldness from someone or something we once loved, perhaps even from God and religion, we usually do so out of hurt, wounded pride, out of the need to protect ourselves and keep our dignity intact. While that’s understandable, it isn’t life giving.
 

What can we do with wounded pride? With disappointment? With jealousy? With the sense of having been wronged? What can we do with all those feelings that invite us to become cold, bitter, angry, and cynical? What can we do when we’ve sinned and betrayed our own dignity and dreams?
 

The natural temptation is to deny, to lie, to pretend that none of this is happening inside us. And so when we’re asked how we are, we generally say we’re fine, even when our hearts are bleeding, our jealousy is raging, our faces are tense, our eyes are sad, our dignity is compromised, and our fists are clenched.
 

Whenever we deny that we’re wounded, we prepare the perfect breeding ground for bitterness, anger, cynicism, coldness, and rage. When we don’t recognize and accept our wounds and frustrations, we easily grow cold, grow hard, and toughen our skins, minds, and hearts. We turn away in bitterness from what’s soft and life giving to what’s hard so as to put a protective shell over our wounded pride. It seems the only way to preserve ourselves.

There are so many different situations that come across our paths in life. But it’s all in the way we think. We can get past the brick walls that we come to. We can get through the trials we face. But I have found, the best way to do it, is through the One who knows and sees our hurts…God.

If there is one thing God has taught me of late, it is that after pain comes joy. Seriously, there is always a reason to be happy during painful times. God always gives us something to be thankful for, it doesn’t matter how great our pain.