The Gift of Inner Wounds

I do not believe that once our eyes are opened, we will fall back into
a complacent sleep. Nor do I believe that our inner wounds, once
healed, will be forgotten and wasted. God's spirit wastes nothing! We
are told in the twentieth chapter of John that the risen Jesus showed
Thomas and the other disciples his wounds. I used to wonder why those
wounds remained on his risen body of light. Why weren't those earthly
marks of suffering swallowed up, forgotten, in glory? Was it so his
friends could identify him? Partly. But I think there was a more
important reason. I think all his friends through the ages to come
were being shown that wounds, especially when healed, can become
sources and signs of new radiance of life. No longer the sources of
pain and despair, the wounds now healed can become the channels of
healing for others. ...

The Comforter, the Holy Spirit, will not remove the lines of hard-won
experience from our faces. A new power of light, the light of the
divine passionate compassion, will shine through those lines on our
faces.
-- Flora Slosson Wuellner, PRAYER, STRESS, AND OUR INNER WOUNDS

Healing and Forgiveness

How many times have you heard someone say, "Even if God could forgive me, I could never forgive myself"?

I thought of the apostle Peter and how he denied Jesus. (See Luke 22:61-62.) What if Peter had been so full of self-condemnation that he had languished for the rest of his life, refusing God's forgiveness because he could not forgive himself? A life of valuable witness and all that Peter did in the early church would never have come about. But Peter, despite his failures, accepted God's grace and moved forward.

Lack of forgiveness can keep us from serving God. For that reason we are called upon not only to forgive others but to forgive ourselves.
--Taken from the Upper Room Daily Devotional

To be an effective leader it helps to have as little unfinished business as possible. Forgiveness is one of those things we tend to push to the back. As a result, this unfinished business saps our energy, drags us down and even unconsciously distracts us from the current work before us. To not forgive ourselves when God has forgiven us is to set ourselves up as a higher court than God. Finally,there is strong evidence that when we have not forgiven ourselves of something, we become more judgmental of others. From the Kingdom point of view, a judgmental leaders is an ineffective leader.

Holy Spirit Healing

Part of the inner journey of growing in Christ is allowing the Holy Spirit to peel back the layers, heal the underlying hurts, expose our pride, and show us how to make creative and redemptive responses to things that happen in the external world. As we cooperate with the Holy Spirit in this work of inner transformation, the ego’s false-self weakens; and the true self in Christ emerges.
--Gary Straub & Judy Turner, Your Calling as a Leader