Why That Hurt Won't Heal

I cut my foot a while back and it would not heal. After weeks it was still red, a little swollen, and painful. It was one of those injuries that wouldn’t go away.Then I remembered how I had cut my foot doing baptisms in the Jordan River a couple of years ago. I was concerned that it would hold me back from all the hiking and climbing we still had ahead of us. So that night, I scrubbed it with soap, even though, that itself was painful. I also doused it with antibiotic. The next morning, it was nearly healed. I bandaged it to keep bacteria out during the day and let oxygen get to it for healing that night. By the second morning, the wound was completely pain free and barely visible, and it never held me back from the many miles we walked, or the hundreds of steps we climbed.The difference between those two cuts was bacteria. When I cleaned out the wound and killed all the germs, it healed. But when I didn’t, the abrasion festered and worsened. Healing a physical wound is all about getting the dirt and bacteria out and letting the body do it’s thing.It’s that way with emotional and spiritual injuries as well.Why does that hurt from many years ago never go away? Sometimes it’s because an injury is re-injured. But usually, there is another factor.Neither cut on my foot was my fault. In both cases, it was something that was done to me. But in one case, I cleaned and protected the wound. In the other case, I allowed dirt and germs to get in and hinder the healing process.We tend to do that with our emotional injuries as well.It wasn’t your fault that you were mistreated years ago. You had nothing to do with the original injury. Often, our greatest hurts in life are things that were done to us…things that we had no part in.But these emotional injuries, like physical injuries, become openings to our insides…openings to our souls. And often, in the aftermath of an injury, other contaminates make their way in. We are all sinners. When we are sinned against, we often sin as well. Sometimes it's in very small ways, like the tiny microorganisms that get into a physical abrasion. But we hardly notice our small sinful response, because the injury to us was so painful and so much bigger. While the big injury would normally heal (God has given us robust emotional mechanisms to heal after being hurt), it’s the little resentments, or harmful ways of thinking that we learned in response to what was done to us, preventing that injury from healing. Sin works its way in and festers the original injury.Without contaminants being cleaned from the wound, that wound can become a lifelong source of pain, sometimes it’s even debilitating. If your injury is going to heal, you have to cleanse away everything that is hindering the healing process. That “scrubbing” after the wound is festering can be even more painful than the original injury itself, but it is necessary.So if you are still living with resentment or nursing a habit that you started in order numb your pain, its time to do your part in removing the impurities that are keeping your hurt from healing. And that only happens through honest and sincere confession. You have to admit your part.This confession can be intensely painful. It may feel as though you are reopening your wound. But appropriate confession is a freeing and healing cleansing, that enables our psyche to do what God designed it to do. When our own sin is confessed, the result is that we heal, we learn, and we become better people for God’s glory, even as a result of that original injury.“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).