Don't Become Who Hurt You
When someone hurts you, that person is responsible for what they did to you. HOWEVER, when you then use that consciously or subconsciously as a reason to hurt someone else, then you become just as guilty as the person who hurt you. They say hurt people hurt people. I'd like to change this statement:
Hurt people who choose to not forgive and receive healing from God hurt people.
So if you've been wounded (and who hasn't?), PLEASE allow God the time and space and ability to heal you so you FULLY. Without this completed process, you begin to build up a stronghold hold of defense with the same stones that were thrown at you. It's not success or achievement; it's an ugly, bitter irony.
You may think you're keeping yourself safe by keeping people at an arm's length--rejecting them so they can't reject you, controlling them so they can't control you, hurting them so they can't hurt you--but in reality, you're entrapping yourself in a stronghold of bitterness so strong that no one will be able to penetrate if it goes unchecked for long enough. Yes, you're safe from people hurting you. But more than that, you're closed off from true, authentic relationships. You're closed off to love. And slowly but surely, you become numb... You allow the same spirit that wounded you to become your "saviour," but you don't know what this false saviour is really keeping you from. What is life without love? What is life without trusting God instead of yourself and your wicked, deceitful heart?
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it? (Jeremiah 17:9)
You effectively set up the strongman of bitterness, resentment, and unforgiveness. But if you allow Him, God will come in, be the Stronger Man, and bust you out of your self-inflicted prison so you can walk in true freedom.
No one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man. And then he will plunder his house. (Mark 3:27)
