Devotions from Henri Nouwen’s book, The Inner voice of Love

Today’s devotion is about telling our story and it is important that we look at the pains of our past realizing that it has led us to our new life now. But if the new life is not fully ours, then our memories will continue to cause us pain. For when  we keep reliving painful events of the past, we can feel victimized by them.   But we can instead tell our story from the place where it no longer dominates us and causes us pain.  We can speak about it with a certain distance and see it as the way to our present freedom. We will then find that the pain has left and we don’t have to go back and relive it or depend on our past to identify ourselves.  We don’t need to tell our stories compulsively and urgently to keep returning to our past hurts. But instead they can lose their weight and be remembered as God’s way of making us more compassionate and understanding towards others