One of the great things about following God is that he is in the game of restoration. People who have been harmed, devastated, indeed scarred by those around them, or even due to the consequences of their own failures, can come to God for healing.
Though often quoted out of context, Matthew 11:28 has traditionally been quoted as an invitation to those who are birds with broken wings to see comfort and restoration with God.
Unfortunately often, indeed, most of their healing isn't instantaneous.
Luke 6:45 tells us that the pain, hurt, sorrow, anger, humiliation can be stored in our hearts, such evil will eventually, sooner or later, wells up and will be exposed to others, which unfortunately may cause further evil to them.
Deeply embedded conditioning takes time to undo.
Thus if an authority figure such as a parent caused the harm, its easy to project this onto another authority figure and they can become overly sensitized and wrongly accuse the authority figure of being a similar threat.
You can see it in the relationship between Jacob and his sons. By playing favorites, he hurt his other sons and created bitterness, jealousy, and indeed hatred between them and Joseph. They in turn sought to harm Joseph (Genesis 37-50).
David offended Absalom when he allowed the rape of his sister to go unpunished. The resentment and hostility to his father grew to open rebellion, and David had to flee the country. There can be no doubt that Absalom's hurt caused further hurt for his father.
My father, for example, saw us children as cheap labor. Every hour of our day was accounted for. If we were late home from school, we would expect to be punished.
After a while, we brothers developed a kind of passive resistance to the tasks he assigned us. Never rushing to do it straight away, and when we did start, not doing it quickly, as there was no hope of finishing and having a rest.
Later in life, I had to consciously work against my own unconscious passive resistance to tasks being imposed by those around me as I realized that I had fallen into the habit of feeling the same way about them that I had when my father assigned me tasks, so many years before.
Of course, this caused my managers and colleagues the same frustration, animosity, and anger it evoked in my father so many years before. See how it's contagious?
Over the years, I've worked hard to be more responsive. And people hardly notice it now. But inside, I still have to overcome the resistance to put aside a task immediately before circling back.
If I caved in, it'd be career-limiting. But it's not that easy to break many years of conditioning. It's a habit, that comes with associations of bad memories of the past and the pain, violence, and tears of so many arguments and beatings in those early years can be readily re-lived in my mind's eye.
The way back is through a complex process of forgiveness, knowing that God had given me grace and forgiven my sins. Equally, I needed to show grace to my father, now long dead, too.
It's a process of healing, as I've vented my feelings to God in prayer and trusted friends who you could confide in, which resulted in more tears, but now tears of healing.
It involves consciously letting it go as I realized the loss of human potential, and clinging to it meant, "the years that the locust has eaten away" (Joel 2:25) would mean more years being eaten away.
Why hang on to it at all? I suppose there is a perverse enjoyment out of resentment and unforgiveness, re-living the injustice over and over, which causes me to relish the thought of how "in the right I am".
I experienced wonderful relief as the days, turned into months and years, it became clear that the needle was moving, that the balance between dysfunction and function was perceptibly shifting.
And with those early results, hope and trust in God grows.
