A couple of weeks ago, I had a group counseling intensive for school.
At one point, I started talking about my tendency to overthink. How easily I can question myself. How hard it can be for me to trust what I think, what I feel, or sometimes even what I know.
And somewhere in that conversation, I brushed against a wound I thought had healed a little more than it actually had.
I didn’t expect it to affect me the way it did.
Maybe that was the hardest part.
Because I’ve done a lot of healing over the last several years.
So when something reaches back into one of those old places, and it still hurts, my first response isn’t always compassion.
Sometimes it’s frustration.
Seriously?
We’re still dealing with this?
I thought I was further along than this.
Around that same time, I was talking with a friend about… life… and how I don’t always extend much grace to myself.
I’m really good at extending it to other people.
Me?
Not so much.
She said something that stopped me:
“You don’t give yourself grace when God gives it to you so freely. How audacious is that?”
And the more I thought about it, the more I realized she was right.
It really is kind of audacious.
Why am I so quick to believe in grace for everyone else, yet struggle to believe it applies to me?
Why do I expect myself to have every wound completely healed by now?
Why do I treat the places in me that still hurt like evidence that I’ve failed somehow?
Sometimes I think I’ve confused healing with never hurting again.
But maybe those aren’t the same thing.
In my Bible reading right now, I’m in the Gospels.
And one thing I keep noticing over and over is Jesus’s compassion.
Matthew 9:36 says, “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless…”
I keep coming back to that word: compassion.
Jesus saw what people were carrying.
He saw what had worn them down.
He saw the places that were hurting.
And His response wasn’t frustration.
It wasn’t, “Why are you still struggling with this?”
It was compassion.
I love reading that.
I love seeing the way Jesus notices people others overlook. I love how He stops. How He sees them. How He moves toward them.
Where I struggle is realizing that compassion extends to me.
I tend to meet my own wounds with impatience.
Jesus meets wounded people with compassion.
I look at the places in me that still hurt and think, “Shouldn’t we be past this by now?”
And Jesus is looking at those same places with far more tenderness than I am.
That doesn’t mean I stop growing.
It doesn’t mean I excuse unhealthy patterns or avoid the work of healing.
It just means maybe I don’t have to shame myself every time I discover there is still another layer.
Maybe healing isn’t a straight line.
Maybe finding another tender place doesn’t mean all the healing before it was wasted.
Maybe an old wound hurting again doesn’t mean I’m back where I started.
Maybe it simply means there is another place that needs grace.
That group intensive didn’t erase the healing I’ve already done.
It just showed me there is still more healing to do.
And maybe that’s okay.
Maybe I don’t have to be ashamed of the parts of me that still need reassurance, still overthink, still struggle to trust.
I can notice them.
I can work on them.
I can bring them to Jesus.
And I can do all of that without being cruel to myself in the process.
I’m still learning that grace isn’t just something I’m supposed to extend to everyone else.
It’s something I’m allowed to receive too.
