Before God can use you in a huge way, first you need a really good wound. Or in the words of A.W. Tozer, “It is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until He has hurt him deeply”.
That’s the reason few are lining up for a dose of what I’d call “real Christianity”, but happily accept a more user-friendly version. But that “Jesus-lite” is decaf, fat-free, and devoid of the power to really change a life.
If you really want God to work through you to bring healing to others, get ready to embrace His cross and welcome suffering. Wounds are God’s training camp, His 101 courses, before you can move onto anything else.
Few people ever make it through that course with a passing grade. Most just repeat the class for the entirety of their lives, always “playing it safe” trying to avoid the very pain that following Christ demands.
Wounds are important to God because they strip you of your personal power, your self-sufficiency. That limp God gave Jacob required that he lean on something just to get around. Likewise, the limp life leaves you with demands you lean on God. It’s no longer a choice to depend on God’s grace; you simply can’t function without Him. Which is exactly where He wants you.
“Good”, you say. “Already been through the grinder, got the wound. Glad I’ve already got that over with!”
One more detail…the wounds keep coming, because we forget so, so very easily. We never stop trying to move away from weakness and on to “the Victorious Christian Life” those TV preachers always tell us about. But there’s no victory without a battle, and you can’t make it through many fights without some kind of wound. The wounds keep our hearts tender toward the struggles of others, and keep us leaning on Jesus.
For our family, the biggest wound recently came in the form of a little foster boy we’ll call “Danny”.
We weren’t really looking to adopt again, not at this point in our lives. Our two little girls were 8 and 9 at the time, and we already had grandkids just a few years behind them. I’ll already be attending my kids’ graduation ceremonies using one of those walkers with the tennis balls on the legs. But unlike our adopted girls who we’ve raised since birth, Danny had already known a tough life.
Danny’s biological mom abandoned him at 6 months. The boy eventually came to live with his dad, who suffered from schizophrenia and lived with him in a tent in the woods. Then after being passed around to other relatives, welcoming him in our family was a bit like letting a feral animal into your home. Literally.
Sometimes when he would get mad at us, he would relieve himself somewhere inside the house but not in the bathroom. It became a game for us. First, you’d smell something. Then after a search you’d find it, either in a closet or around some corner. It was like a Scavenger Hunt, but one that meant winning came with lots of paper towels and cleaning supplies. At least that was better than the screaming and hitting when you told him no about most anything.
But in the back of our minds we knew if we didn’t eventually adopt him, he’d go back to a group home like the one where my wife found him. Another foster parent had showed her a photo of a 6 year-old boy who’d been thrown in a facility for teenage boys nearby. If ever there was a recipe for potential abuse, a little boy in the midst of troubled teens was it. So my wife tracked him down and got him placed in our home. So please don’t ever tell us the foster system is “broken”. What happens to many kids in the system should be criminal.
We had to do lots of soul searching about whether to adopt Danny. You ask yourself how it may negatively impact your kids, because it most certainly will. Before his morning medication has taken effect, it’s like having a drunken little man spreading havoc through the house. He simply couldn’t control himself. My girls just sat quietly as I’d try to help him take all his meds and get ready for school. They automatically got less attention with Danny around.
The other thing floating around your brain is that, at first, you don’t feel the same affection for him that you do for the other two. Maybe that’s too honest, but anyone who says they feel for a new child the same as one they’ve raised from birth is lying. We were always careful to give him the exact same privileges as the other two, but the feelings were different. And that makes you wonder if adopting him is the right thing.
But that’s when God reminds you that real love was never a feeling, it’s a commitment. So you repeatedly do the “actions of affection”, trusting that one day soon the feelings will come too.
Danny had never known what prayer was before he came to live with us. Now I prayed with him every night before bed. When my girls mentioned Jesus, he asked who they were talking about. But after a few months, he asked me every night to pray with him. If he had trouble falling asleep, he’d ask me to pray again.
When Danny was himself, he was incredibly caring. I fell one time on a hike with him, and I swear he wanted to carry me back down the hill himself. But when he got angry, he could lose all control and become violent, towards me and my wife. The first few times he lashed out, I’d tell him if he did it again, we would probably need to send him back to the group home. But then, somewhere around the fourth month he was with us, something shifted in my heart. I stopped threatening to send him back, even though he was still just a foster child. Something was different now, and the feelings were starting to follow my actions.
Now after an outburst, I just wrapped my arms around him and told him he was our little boy now, no matter what. I whispered in his ear how no little boy on earth was loved anymore than he was. And I actually meant it
That’s when the wound cut the deepest.
His violence kept being a problem, and we suspected that some of his medication wasn’t right. We talked to his therapists, who said he probably needed some longer term care. They needed to see how he responded to certain medications in order to find that balance between helping him control his anger and just doping him up like a zombie.
So we kept asking our case worker for extended treatment for him. But they said treatment facilities were hard to come by, and basically dismissed our pleas for help. They said when he got violent, just call the police to come out. I guess they thought this would put the fear of God in him. The officers did their best to lecture him and tell him to mind us. We appreciated them trying, but Danny couldn’t stop himself. He had too much trauma from years of neglect, not to mention what brain chemistry he may have inherited naturally from his father.
While we kept begging for help, we kept battling Danny most every day. Our lives were constant chaos. Finally, after repeated trips to the emergency room to try to get him sent for treatment, our case worker decided she’d had enough. Since we’d brought Danny with us from Florida when we moved to Tennessee, the case worker figured he should be Florida’s problem, not hers. So we got a call one day that Danny was to be sent back to Florida, and that we had no say in it. He would be put on a plane and sent back in the care of the Florida foster system.
We knew what that would mean. They would first try to place him in some homes, where he would act out so much that those families would send him back. Eventually, he would be tossed back in to some group home where he would get little personal care. We wanted him to be part of our family, but now he’d be thrown back into the system we were trying to save him from, and his illness would never be properly treated. Most foster homes or state children’s homes won’t touch a kid like Danny. If they are deemed “problem kids”, they are placed, and then replaced, and finally forgotten.
Danny was sent back to Florida in May of 2024, and we’ve spent the entire next year trying to get him back. From the thousands of dollars we spent on attorneys, all we got was the knowledge that we had the right to contest Danny’s removal from our home. Only our case worker had told us we had no say in the matter, and now it was past their deadline to be heard. As far as we can tell, we’ve run out of options now.
With only a few shining exceptions, people have not been helpful to us in dealing with Danny’s loss. They don’t understand why we aren’t relieved that he’s gone, as if fate cut us a break. But frankly, most of them don’t understand why we took him in the first place. They seem to think we’re foolish to tip over our lives for a child that isn’t “our own flesh and blood”, as if a child has value only if he comes from your body. They wonder if we’re being crazy to love this way, but we think we are just loving Him like Jesus would.
We wonder if you say Jesus really lives inside you, why don’t you love like Jesus did?
I see Danny’s picture every day and evening in the revolving photos on a digital monitor in our bedroom. With each one, my heart aches anew. Each time, I say a prayer, asking God to find a way to send him back. The feelings I’d once worried wouldn’t come for Danny are now effectively killing me, twice a day, every single day. Sometimes, when I think of him scared and alone, my body actually aches physically for the desire to hug him and protect him again.
We’ve moved houses now since Danny left. But in our new home, there’s a room still set up for him if he ever comes back. My daughter Gracie protects it like a shrine, shouting at any friend who would dare touch any of the toys. No child has ever been so absent, yet so loved.
As I write this, it has been a year and four months since Danny was removed. Though foster care has cut us off from all communication with him, we actually tracked him down once a few months ago and called into a facility where he was staying. A kind worker there let us speak to him on a video call. We all told him quickly how much we loved him, that we were desperately trying to get him back, that we hadn’t forgotten him. We wanted him to know he wasn’t just abandoned. It seemed to please him, and he smiled. But he also seemed to be doped up pretty heavily. That’s what they do to kids like Danny, to keep them docile. But as he talked to us those brief few moments, I took a screenshot of his face. I keep it on my phone to look at, when I can bare to.
That ache I feel every day reminds me of how strong God’s love must be if it’s greater than what I feel for Danny. The love of the Father for the Prodigal Son, as he looks over the horizon every single day and hopes his boy will run down his street toward home again. That ache is my great wound right now, and it reminds me how wounds were so important to Jesus, He kept them as a permanent part of Himself.
Ever notice how even when sporting His perfected body after the Resurrection, Jesus still said to Thomas, “Put your hands in my wounds”? Even in His glorified state, He wasn’t willing to let go of the wounds.
That’s because it’s the wounds that prove how deep your love really is.
