Bleeding Out

The wound really slowed my activity yesterday. The nurse had already told me I couldn’t swim since the wound couldn’t be submerged. He neglected to tell me all the things that would cause it to hurt and bleed: lying face down, crossing my legs, carrying heavy objects, walking too fast. Sheesh…I ended up sitting on my butt most of the day. Also, I selected my clothing for the day based upon what would best hide the bandage and was loose-fitting, in the event it started bleeding again. And when the family went out to dinner, I slowed everybody down with my less-than-speedy pace.

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When we’re wounded, we bleed out. And it affects everything and everybody around us. We view people and situations through the pains of our woundings, and our bleeding out creates messy situations.

Bleeding out happens in the forms of anger, jealousy, fear, depression, self-loathing, shame. When we’re bleeding out, we think about little else. The effects of our woundings consume our minds and our time.

We calculate everything we do and who we enter into relationships with based on whether they will hurt our wounds, causing us to bleed more. We eventually end up keeping to ourselves and limiting our opportunities, fearful of the bleeding out.

We often do our best to hide our wounds, covering them with appropriate smiles. We look fine on the outside, but we are ever-aware of the wound that festers inside, though we may try to deny it. Interestingly, those who do not know about or understand our woundings can’t understand our bleeding out or our reasons for isolating ourselves.

The only way to completely stop the bleeding is to seek healing…deep-down, heart healing. Unfortunately, many people live their entire lives with wounds. They learn to live with them, ignoring them…only dealing with them when necessary. They bleed out, bandage their wounds long enough that the bleeding temporarily stops, then something happens that causes them to bleed all over again. It’s a vicious cycle that keeps people alone and lonely. It keeps people from being who God created them to be.

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I’ve realized this little, painful, physical wound is an outward demonstration of what’s been going on inside of me since I was a little girl. I think it’s no small coincidence that I decided to re-read Waking the Dead by John Eldredge this week…because bleeding out causes us to live in survival mode in which we are little more than the living dead.

A friend used to ask me, How is your heart? If I had to answer that question today, I’d say that it’s been bleeding out for over thirty years, but the desire to forgive, to offer mercy and grace are slowly beginning to heal it.