There is a family I admire. (I do not know this family in real life.) But the couple is in their 60s, together their entire adult lives, their three children are in their late 20s and early 30s. All married. All love Jesus. All passionate about life and their callings.

I heard one of the sons mention being on an anti-depressant.
And another of the children used the phrase “childhood woundings”.

There is an older man I admire. (I do not know this man in real life.) But I consider him a bit of a spiritual father from afar. He loves God, has been faithful to his wife of almost forty years, is a therapist and author, does work that helps people heal and connect with God.

He talked of a recent three-day solo retreat to do more work on his childhood pain.

Girls, what if there are literally no even-close-to-whole families? And I say that in a good way. In a huge sigh-of-relief kind of way.

What if, even those who grew up in what we (and they) would call normal, happy families, still have wounds to work through, that stay with them at least in part forever?

No one makes it from the womb to adulthood with nothing to work on, with nothing that shapes them negatively, with nothing that doesn’t affect their choices and how they show up in relationships.

At least once a week, I’ll comment to myself something to the effect of, “I wonder what it would be like to not think so much about everything all the time,” or “I wish my heart didn’t feel a little bit anxious most of the time,” or, “I hate being this broken…still…after so long and after so much work”.

I am not the exception.
You are not the exception.

Everyone else in the world is not mostly healthy with you (and me) being mostly broken.
It just isn’t like that.

Every person is only human.
You are equally human with every other person on this planet.

And we are living in a world at war.
And being a human can be brutal.
And we all have been through something, at least one something, but usually many somethings.
And we are not yet Home.

You are not wrong or ridiculous or stupid or more broken than the next guy.
There’s no scale.

You are just you.
And I am just me.

And we are loved and being healed and will be completely, one day, made wonderfully whole.

And in the meantime, we’ll keep messing up a bit, and feeling a bit off, and wishing for something we don’t yet have or wanting to be something we aren’t quite yet, and it’ll be okay.

Because God has got us.

Join me (and many precious women) on our collective search for wholeness and healing in Jesus in my private Facebook group, WholeHearted.