29 Aug How to Help Yourself and Others Heal from a Hurt
Proverbs 27:9 [NLT] – The heartfelt counsel of a friend is as sweet as perfume and incense.
Life hurts. Financially, emotionally spiritually, and physically, life finds a way of shooting torpedoes into the hull of your life.
Our family had such a season some years ago. Thankfully, some godly older wise counsel helped us walk through a healing process. Each had a unique insight and way of being a burden lifter.
Through it all, we discovered something I call the “hurt cycle”. Here’s how it works. One, we experience some form of hurt. Two, we then interpret why it happened. Three, we then determine our response. Two people can undergo the same hurt but respond very differently and plot a very different future depending upon how they interpret what happened and decide what to do.
Evil people use their hurt as an excuse to justify hurting others so that hurt is multiplied. Foolish people ignore their hurt, shift any blame they bear to others, make excuses, and live a life of deferred maintenance, neglecting the upkeep of their soul, spelling doom for the future. Wise people seek God and godly wise counsel.
If you are seeking wise counsel or serving as wise counsel for someone who is hurting, here are some things that will be healing, helpful, and hopeful.
- Rather than doing all the talking, wise counsel listens to a hurt person to uncover what happened, why, and how they are responding.
- You know you’ve hit a hurt when someone overreacts to an immediate situation which has multiplied the pain of a past hurt.
- Wise counsel is knowing which truth applies to each person and their situation without using the same solution for every problem.
Just like a doctor can do great harm to the body by prescribing the wrong medication, so too we can add to someone’s hurt and harm their soul if we are not careful. One example is the story of a man named Job. He was a godly man whose life quickly cratered into a pit of death, pain, and poverty. Job had some friends who were anything other than wise counsel. They wrongly decided that God was punishing Job for his sin, and that he needed to repent of secret sin in his life. But the truth was that Job was under severe demonic attack. In the next series of daily devotions, we will examine in detail how to heal from a hurt and help others do the same.
Who is wise counsel in your life?
