Dear future women of the World Race,
The men of my squad are amazing! They are funny and kind and love the Lord. They follow hard after God and truly want to be men of honor and character. They are not perfect and have a lot of baggage. They can sometimes be annoying, immature, and smelly. But they can also be warriors and knights in shining armor. They have stretched me and challenged me in ways I didn’t know needed attention. They are truly my brothers in Christ and it is going to be scary to step back into real life without them.
But what they aren’t, is my past. These are not the men who have lied to me, used me, cheated on me, and played with my emotions. True they may resemble these men. Some may look just like these men, but they are NOT these men.
This is not the man who molested you.
This is not the father who beat you or abandoned you.
This is not the husband, boyfriend or best friend who used you until he found someone better.
These men are gifts that God felt you needed in your life for this season. These gifts will shape you and help you step into womanhood if you let them.
We all have wounds. I, myself, have some really deep wounds. They are real and powerful and scary. Terrible things have happened in some of our lives and naturally there are going to be painful wounds.
Your wounds are important.
They matter to you and they matter to God. They matter so much to God that He is placing you on a journey that will more than likely open and expose those wounds to everyone around you. He has to do this.
In order for a wound to heal properly, it has to be cleaned out regularly and redressed with clean bandages. If a wound isn’t cleaned out, infection sets in and rots away healthy skin cells. If it is left long enough, it can kill you. What I have seen on the Race is a lot of really infected wounds. I have watched as God has used the men on my team and in my squad to open up some pretty deep wounds in our women, and cleaned out the infection.
This is a painful, and sometimes ugly process.
I wish I could say some magic words so you won’t do this to the men on your squad. But the reality is that you probably will. Sometimes you have wounds you don’t even know you have and you react before you can stop yourself. But how you respond and face those wounds is how you know if you are a girl or a woman.
Proverbs 21:18 states, “The tongue has the power of life and death, and those who love it will eat its fruit.” (NIV) The Good News Translation states it this way, “What you say can preserve life or destroy it; so you must accept the consequences of your words.”
A lie that most women believe is that men don’t get hurt. We believe they are unemotional. We believe we can explode on them, rail at them, curse at them, and it doesn’t really matter. That’s a lie.
Men are real. They have emotions.
They have hearts that are capable of being wounded and broken. Your words are powerful and help shape the men that they are becoming. Every time you react out of your wounding, you are helping to shut down parts of their heart, that if left unattended, will greatly effect how they interact with their future wives. You are teaching them about women and you are responsible for what you are teaching.
What I have found on the Race is that most women, myself included, have no idea what healthy boundaries are. We don’t really know what it is like to have a true, godly friendship with a man.
We either cross a boundary and allow this “brother” too much access into our hearts and expect him to fulfill the role of best friend and husband or we label him as unsafe and look for anything we can to prove our point.
We either cling to them and look to them for our affirmation, or we hide from them and hold them at a distance.
Neither of these is a healthy response.
The healthy response is open and honest communication. If you explode, apologize. Find a sister to pray and talk it through with. Figure out what wound was hit and why it’s a wound.
Then talk with your brother and your team. Talk about the wound and assure your brother that you realize he is not the one who caused it and you are sorry you took out your anger on him. Figure out how you can both communicate better in the future and avoid this happening again. Then everyday, make the mature choice to trust the heart of your brother.
Two of the most life changing opportunities of the Race are learning how to form healthy boundaries and face confrontation. It’s been hard. There have been many tears shed and much sleep lost, but if you can keep this in mind now and start in month one, by month eleven your life will be transformed.
I promise.
