John Walt

Every person experiences wounding, some have the courage to heal.

Part of the myth of the strong man is the belief that a man is not weak, and therefore, he doesn’t need to heal spiritually, mentally, and emotionally. I believe that everyone needs healing because everyone has been hurt. Some are small wounds, like things said to you that led you to feel shame and insecurity. Others are massive wounds that come from what other people have done to you and how it made you view yourself. Whether our wounds are large or small, they perpetuate lies in our minds that keep us from who we were created to be and the relationship with God we were made for.

When a man heals from his wounds, it makes him stronger and more clear-headed. Unhealed wounds are vulnerabilities that we carry with us. When they get poked, we react and lose perspective. I see this in business all the time when a leader has unhealed wounds, he struggles to see many things clearly. Let’s say he feels unworthy and is always trying to prove himself. When challenges arise in his business, he takes them personally and starts to control things because he must prove he is worthy. Throughout that challenge, he has lost perspective on what is really going on and is fixated on protecting his own wounds. When that same leader gets healing, he starts to see challenges in his business as opportunities for his team to grow and their processes to improve. Instead of controlling the situation, he shares it with his team so they can play their parts and face it together. If they do fail, then he sees it as a valuable learning opportunity, not a threat to his identity. To become a truly strong man, we must heal from our wounds, whether they are big or small.

Small wounds can come from things teachers, coaches, parents, and peers said to us or how they treated us. It’s easy to look down on these types of wounds because they can seem so insignificant. But little things said at formative times can cut deeply and have a lasting impact, especially when said by someone we look up to. A few of my high school teachers would say negative things to me because I wouldn’t pay attention in class. As a result, I believed I wasn’t smart. I was sort of shocked a few years later when I realized the people I spent time with were all really intelligent people. I wondered why they wanted to hang out with me. I told a mentor that I felt like I wasn’t smart, and what my teachers said, and he laughed. He told me that my teachers couldn’t recognize that I was bored and that I am actually really intelligent. When I believed I wasn’t smart, it affected how I viewed everything in my life. I saw myself as the class clown, the wild man built for wild places, anywhere but a school, an office, or behind a computer. When I started to believe I was actually intelligent, it changed how I saw myself. I began reading more and taking my thoughts seriously. I began to consider that I could actually be successful in business.

Large wounds are obvious, we carry them with us everywhere we go in life. Even if we feel like we have accepted them, that is different than actually healing from them. If someone abused you, manipulated you or took advantage of you, then it probably led you to believe some things about yourself. If you were the perpetrator who caused pain for someone else, then likely you are still carrying the shame and beliefs about yourself that come from wounding someone else. If you know there are major events in your life that caused wounding for you, then it's time to get healing. These wounds are often very serious and can be an incredible burden to carry. Even though the wound is bigger, the path to healing is the same.

We can also wound ourselves with the things we say to ourselves and what we start to believe as a result. For instance, I played tennis for years with some of the top-ranked high school players in the country. My coach always compared me to them, showing me where I wasn’t measuring up. I know he was trying to motivate me to work harder, but it had the opposite effect. I gave tennis everything I had, but it was stressing me out and causing me to hate the game. I tore my rotator cuff at 15 and after surgery and months of rehab, decided to quit altogether. Looking back, I was likely only a few years away from a scholarship and a spot on a great team. I was really hard on myself, I compared myself to the people I played with. When I would lose a match in a tournament, it would devastate me. I would literally drink Pepto Bismol before matches to calm my stomach down. My coach didn’t help me, but I was wounding myself for years through judgment and comparison. I looked at rankings and decided if I couldn’t be one of the best, there was no point in playing. I saw myself fail matches and determined I was a failure. As a result, my strategy in sports after that was not to develop my skills, but to just out-hustle everyone. I believed that I wasn’t a skilled athlete, so what I could bring to the team was work ethic and willingness to collide with other players.

In some weird way, I think the combination of my belief that I wasn’t smart and my belief that I wasn’t skilled athletically led me to conclude that I wasn’t cut out for complex, technical work. When I got healing in these two areas and many others, I started to walk a very different path. What I do for work now is very technical, I help people design strategies and solve complex problems in often challenging environments. I never would have gotten here if I hadn’t experienced healing. That can really be said about every good thing in my life. If I hadn’t healed, I wouldn’t have my marriage, my career, my friendships, and I wouldn’t be writing these notes.

I have shared with you some small wounds I was given and gave myself, but I had some bigger ones too that I won’t go into right now. My Journey is shaped around definitive moments of healing. I never set out to pursue healing, but in my pursuit of God and wisdom, healing became a necessary tool. My sense of identity was shaped for years around my wounds, and it created a broken identity for me.

I was an intense kid, then I was an intense young man, and later an intense man. In each stage, my intensity and passion created pain for myself and others. I would say things and do things that really hurt people. I started to believe things about myself that kept me from fully connecting with God. Those lies I believed only got louder in my head over the years. Each of these lies I have had to break agreement with, hear from God what is true in place of the lies, and renew my mind so that I could agree with Him.

How to heal

I think spiritual and emotional healing is very simple. I believe it has been overcomplicated for a couple of reasons.

First, most spiritual leaders don’t actually know how to lead people through healing, so it gets talked about like it's some crazy, abstract thing that will possibly never get resolved. Even people who believe God can heal us from emotional and spiritual wounding aren’t sure what to say when someone asks them how to find healing. Most churches don’t offer healing prayer, and most pastors aren’t trained in it. So, most of what is offered is a promise to pray for someone about their pain, hoping God will comfort them. I have never seen someone truly pursue spiritual and emotional healing who has not found it.

Second, our culture approaches healing without God, so the solution is generally to pay someone lots of money to meet with you regularly for years so you can talk about it. It’s good to talk about our wounding, but only enough to make sure we have identified the wound we need healed. Now, most churches do the same thing. Got wounding? Let's talk about it for ten years and hope that resolves it. I get frustrated at how so many faith communities empower people to never heal from their wounds. Jesus called us to be healed; there is nothing good or holy about ignoring your wounds.

I believe that all spiritual and emotional healing starts in conversations with God. We take our wound to Him, ask Him to take it from us, and ask Him to give us a truth to replace the lies we believed from that wounding event. What God tells us will help us restore our sense of identity. What He says will often reveal a new depth of who He created us to be. Once we have a new truth to replace the false one, we must renew our minds to agree with that truth. There are three components of spiritual and emotional healing: spiritual freedom, rebuilding our identity, and changing our thinking patterns.

Here is a simple process people can go through to receive healing.

Recognition: To heal, we must recognize that we have a wound in the first place. Sometimes these are big wounds that we have known about for years. Others are really simple wounds that we have never really known we have. Sometimes we don’t know what the wound is, but we can recognize that there must be one. For instance, I had a wound I never knew about, but to a mentor of mine, it was obvious there was something there. He helped me recognize that and guided me through healing prayer.

Prayer: We need to surrender that wound and invite God in to heal it. This can be challenging because we tend to hold onto our wounds, because they have become a part of our identity. We can easily think these kinds of prayers must be complicated, but they aren’t; they don’t need to take tons of time or require a river of tears. It is as simple as releasing our grip on them and handing God the keys.

We might have been abused, shamed, blamed, or bullied, whatever happened, we have undoubtedly started to believe lies about ourselves, God, and others as a result. For instance, I believed that I couldn’t trust mentors because of the way some had hurt me in the past. We must hear from God what is true, and then we need to start believing it.

Here is a simple healing prayer you can pray:

God, I see that I have a wound from ____________ and that it has been shaping how I see myself. I give you my wound and the lies that I have believed about myself as a result of it. I don’t want to hold onto this pain and these lies any longer. Please show me where you were when I got this wound. What truth do you want me to know to take the place of the lies I have believed about myself?

Note: If you don’t feel like you can hear from God, then it’s probably best to have someone guide you through a prayer like this one. Reach out to me if you want to get connected to someone who can guide you through a healing prayer. I will write more on hearing God in another note.

Renewing the Mind: The last step is renewing the mind. Lots of people go through healing but don’t know how to renew their minds, so they end up carrying the same wound they had before, even after experiencing healing. The healing won’t last unless we reshape our minds around the new truth that God shows us.

There are many layers to healing, and therefore, it doesn’t all happen at once. Our wounds can stack up and compound over time, leading to a hard heart. Healing should become a lifestyle where we discover wounds and guide ourselves through healing them. As we practice healing, it doesn’t take us years to find our wounds and the effects they have had on us. We become people who can see wounds happening and heal them right away. We also become people who can help each other heal. I have had other people lead me through healing prayer on many occasions. Sometimes in short prayers during a conversation with a mentor, and other times for several hours when we were going after larger wounds that had deeply entrenched themselves in my heart and mind.

The lingering effects of wounding are found in our minds and our fractured sense of identity. This kind of healing is deep work, but it is not complicated. So many people have an aversion to it because of how vulnerable they feel in the process. We all need healing, and there isn’t a way around it. If you have a hole in your arm, ignoring it isn’t going to make it go away. The same is true with spiritual and emotional healing; ignoring them or learning to live with them isn’t an option.

Unfortunately, most people have not had the privilege of spending time with healthy, healed men and women. We don’t have that many of them running around these days. When you do get to meet one, it is so clear that nothing can shake them. That's because their sense of identity is firmly grounded, and nothing you can say or do will change that. If someone says mean things to them, they don’t get worked up because they know who they are. When we get worked up, it's usually because someone is challenging our fragile sense of identity, and we aren’t confident enough in who we are to be able to reject what they are saying. Our wounds make the foundation of our identity incredibly weak. The longer we carry the wound, the bigger it grows and the more vulnerable we are.

I think the critical missing part to most people's healing and growth is renewing the mind. Jesus talks a lot about it because it is essential for freedom and transformation. To learn more about renewing the mind, you can read my note number five on renewing our minds. If we don’t renew our minds, we will inevitably revert to the thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors that we were stuck in before, regardless of how much healing we have experienced.

- John Walt

‍