Our unresolved issues live within us and affect our ability to relate. If we challenge some of our formative assumptions it’ll change how we respond now. Our emotions form us, inform us, tell us who we are. We can never get away from the fact that we are our history. Our emotional history is our special identity.

We all experience unfinished business in our life story. Our emotions, which are chemicals in our bloodstream, don’t just disappear but keep trying to communicate with us through our body. We can deny or repress a feeling and pretend it’s not there, but it doesn’t go away. Issues that we haven’t resolved are still with us; they accumulate with time, and cause damage to our body.

In the marriage arena what you see is not what you get. We get a whole history. Our lives are about that unfolding history. But God who is always busy with our wounds wants to transform our history, and change us from the inside out.

When we commit as a married couple, we’re creating for each other a safe space to fall. Here we do not have to hide our broken selves, nor to blame, or to demand ‘un-brokenness’ from the other, but know that we share a journey of brokenness. The mystery we discover is that our brokenness is actually our gift, and our transformed wounds become our medals.