I absolutely detest THIS WORD

This word isn’t abolished from my personal dictionary per se. 

I use it in ministering prayer, in written stories, in spiritual discussions. 

But there is a particular context in which I vehemently resist its use. With excruciating resolve I tell God over and over through gritted teeth and clenched jaw: I don’t like it. I really don’t like it.

The word is ‘hurt’.

The context is “I’ve been hurt.”

Just replaying that sentence over in my head brings an almost gag reflex. 

To give it voice would require a tremendous amount of death to self.

It took a reconciling and healing exercise of feet washing in church to reveal exactly why I hated that word: I was a perpetrator of hurt in my childhood, wounding friends on a flesh-led, sinful whim. My identity as a perpetrator removed from me the right to feel hurt by others, or so I believed, in a subconscious way. 

I’ve heard the saying, “Hurt people hurt people,” and have even peppered discourse with it. But the fact that the hurter and the hurting could be one and the same person never applied to me personally. After all, I was the one who started it; no one ignited that first hurt in me that set off a “hurt-driven” rampage. 

An old, endearingly handwritten letter from a friend from when I was 9 or 10 years old was almost the nail in the coffin for my struggle with the Holy Spirit, where I thought my adamance would triumph. She said she couldn’t understand why I acted towards her the way I did and it hurt her badly. But “it’s okay”, she still admired and treasured me as a friend. 

Here I was a decade later finally realising the degree of hurt I’ve caused. I’ve had that letter for years, but it never dawned on me that these weren’t just childish feelings finding themselves in childish expression. I felt terrible for causing a friend to most likely require inner healing for the hurt I’d caused her. I repented, as I did for all the other hurts I’ve inflicted that came to mind. I prayed for opportunities to apologise and make things right—it almost happened with the friend who wrote the letter, years later when I met her in university, but the door closed as quickly as it was opened.

That feet washing exercise was my first admittance and utterance of being hurt by friends myself, right at the tipping point of conviction to surrender, albeit inwardly to God (I don’t remember vocalising it).

Then came another God-orchestrated opportunity to hammer home the importance of owning up to feelings of hurt, even if all my life I’d seen myself as a perpetrator first.

I was accidentally (I’m thoroughly convinced it was an accident) left out of a list of names during a presentation. My friend caught on and asked me if she had missed my name being mentioned. In a kind of embarrassment that I couldn’t quite understand, I told her I didn’t know and couldn’t remember. After copious reasoning (with God, though in hindsight I never did hear His opinions on them), I made peace with the situation and moved on. It was an accident. It was never intentional. There was no reason to dwell on it. I forgive, if there’s even anything to warrant forgiveness.

That weekend, feeling an inexplicably uneasy feeling swirling in my chest, I spent extended time with God, talking to Him about everything and anything that could be bothering me. But I could feel something hadn’t given way, and my chatter (it was clearly a one-sided conversation) was but pushing against a drywall—leaving me feeling dry and walled up.

So I began to worship, singing a song that just rolled off my tongue. The line, “God, you heal every hurt,” came like a mallet through that drywall and into the plumbing. The onslaught of tears that followed was like a pipe that burst. With trembling (but still stubborn) lips I admitted with a barely audible voice that I was hurt. And healing came. 

I shared in a sermon that healing didn’t mean forgetting what happened. It just meant that when the memory came, like a passer-by in my path, I acknowledged him and let him pass. No grabbing him by the lapels and staring into his face to relive the incident in 4K.

I still shudder at the thought of admitting “I’ve been hurt.” The idea of it still doesn’t sit well with me. The night before I wrote this, I had a hypothetical conversation with God about feeling hurt and felt that oncoming gag reflex again (I can’t remember what exactly prompted that conversation). So I’ve yet to conquer this #UNRELATABLE struggle.

But now as I’m writing, I believe God is calling forth in me a determination to push through that gag, that shudder, all that teeth-gritting, heart-pounding, fist-clenching, breath-hitching reactions for when I’d need to face admitting hurt again.

Because to face it is to look in Jesus’ patient, gentle, loving, forgiving face and embrace the humbling and freeing truth that He died for a hurter like me so that I, too, could receive healing for my hurts.

I find this...

• 0%#Relatable
• 0%#Unrelatable