Telling your story in freedom

When you share a past failure do you feel the bile creep back up your throat and your heart constrict...you begin to relive it? Telling your story from the pain indicates you haven't yet dealt with it and have yet to realize healing.

Henri Nouwen wrote a journal during the most difficult period in his life. He was encouraged to publish it, which he did (at least some of it).*  In it he mentions addressing his past failures and pains in such a manner that they come to no longer revive the pain and hold onto him. His personal testimony has helped me get past much of a lifetime of hurt involving past abandonment, injustice, false accusation, and apparent failure.

Through the Holy Spirit we can come to a new place wherein we can tell our story from the other side of the pain and failure . . . and "the need to tell the story becomes less pressing."

If you are free from that past, and no longer depending upon it for identity, you can then share your story in freedom and from a new perspective. Its weight is gone and your story may release others from their pain, and get to the other side of their story.

Seek that release and freedom to tell your story from a place of reconciliation.

*Henri Nouwen, The Inner Voice of Love