please show me.

I can’t even express what this book is doing for me right now.  People have told me to read it for years, but I refused, purely out of obstinance.   But basically, if you’re a woman, you NEED to read this.  There’s a life changing message waiting for you in it.

“Over the years we’ve come to see that the only thing more tragic than the things that have happened to us is what we have done with them.

Words were said, painful words.  Things were done, awful things.  And they shaped us.  Something inside of us shifted.  We embraced the message of our wounds. We accepted a twisted view of ourselves. And from that we chose a way of relating to our world.  We made a vow never to be in that place again.  We adopted strategies to protect ourselves from being hurt again.  A woman who is living out of a broken, wounded heart is a woman who is living a self-protective life.  She may not be aware of it, but it is true.  It’s our way of trying to “save ourselves.”

We also developed ways of trying to get something of the love our hearts cried out for.  The ache is there.  Our desperate need for love and affirmation, our thirst for some taste of romance and adventure and beauty is there.  So we turned to boys or to food or to romance novels; we lost ourselves in our work or at church or in some sort of service.  All this adds up to the women we are today.  Much of what we call our “personalities”  is actually the mosaic of our choices for self-protection plus our plan to get something of the love we were created for.

The problem is our plan has nothing to do with God.

The wounds we received and the messages they brought formed a sort of unholy alliance with our fallen nature as women.  From Eve we received a deep mistrust in the heart of God toward us.  Clearly, he’s holding out on us.  We’ll just have to arrange for the life we want. We will control our world.  But there is is also an ache deep within, an ache for intimacy and for life.  We’ll have to find a way to fill it.  A way that does not require vulnerability.

In some ways, this is every little girl’s story, here in this world east of Eden.

But the wounds don’t stop once we are grown up.  Some of the most crippling and destructive wounds we receive come much later in our lives.  The wounds that we received over our lifetimes have not come to us in a vacuum.  There is in fact a theme to them, a pattern.

The wounds you have received have come to you for a purpose, from one who knows all you are meant to be and fears you. ”

– Captivating