Speak To Your Hurt, Don't Speak From It

A friend unfollowed me on Twitter.

This was back in 2011, which means it was original Twitter, the good Twitter, the Twitter where your follower count still felt like it mattered. And my friend, a woman I respected, had just removed herself from mine.

Not the sort of thing a friend does, I thought. But she had a reason. A good one, as it turned out.

She told me over email. All my posts about the Church, all my pointed critiques of Christians and their failures, all the questions I dressed up as intellectual honesty but loaded with venom. They were hurting her. She was stumbling over my words on her way to worship, and she was smart enough to stop reading before the damage got worse.

Here's what got me: she was savvy enough to walk away. Others might not have been. How many people had I wounded with sentences I wrote in ten seconds and forgot by lunch?

That question shut me up for a while.

The Wrecking Crew of One

After praying with my wife (who, by the way, has been gently telling me things I don't want to hear since roughly forever), I knew I needed to repent. Not the churchy, low-stakes, "sorry if I offended anyone" kind. The real kind. The kind where you look at what you wrote and feel sick about it.

Most of what I'd written about Christianity and the Church was fueled by bitterness. Old wounds, long unaddressed. Grievances I'd been nursing like pets I couldn't bring myself to put down. The general ideas weren't all wrong. Some of it was true. But truth wielded as a weapon is still a weapon, and I was swinging wildly.

I went for shock value when I should have gone for love. I tore down the Church when I should have been honest about my own failures first. I chose controversy because it felt like strength. It wasn't. It was the cowardice of a man who had a prison record and a forgiven past and still didn't want to turn the lens on himself.

The Part That Makes It Worse

Here's what you need to know about the guy writing those posts in 2011. I wasn't some angry kid who hadn't been humbled yet. I had already been humbled. Thoroughly. By 2011, I'd committed bank fraud, been arrested by the Secret Service, heard God's voice in a Los Angeles jail cell, served eighteen months in federal prison, and married the woman I'd spent a decade abandoning. Megan had forgiven me at a Starbucks when I didn't deserve a second look, let alone a second chance.

I'd had the big revelation. I'd done the time. I'd walked the laps around the track at Sheridan Federal Prison praying for God to change my heart.

And I was still writing with venom.

That's the part that should scare you, because it scares me. You can go through the fire, come out the other side, start rebuilding your life, and still have wounds festering underneath that you haven't touched. I was three years out of prison, married, going to church, trying to be a better man. And I was using my keyboard to tear down the same Church I was sitting in every Sunday. The bitterness wasn't from a man who hadn't been broken yet. It was from a man who'd been broken and hadn't finished healing. The unaddressed wounds were leaking into every sentence I wrote.

The Distinction That Changed Everything

There's a line I wrote back then that I still think about, maybe the only useful thing to come out of that whole mess:

Speak to your hurt, don't speak from your hurt.

When your heart is broken and you haven't dealt with it, everything you say comes out sideways. You think you're making an argument. You're actually bleeding on people. I was speaking from bitterness, from the place in all of us that wants to burn things down when we don't get what we want.

I was acting like a baby.

Speaking to your hurt is different. It means you've sat with the pain long enough to tell the truth about it without needing to make someone else pay. You can write about what broke you and how you chose to deal with it. You can be honest without being destructive.

I didn't learn to do this by getting smarter. I learned it by losing everything and then realizing that losing everything still wasn't enough to fix me. Prison clarified a lot of things. But the wounds I was writing from in 2011 were the ones prison hadn't reached. It took a friend unfollowing me, and a wife who wouldn't let me off the hook, to show me that conviction and cruelty are not the same thing.

What Leaders Owe

If you write for the public, even a small public, even an audience of thirty-seven people who mostly followed you because they felt obligated, you're practicing leadership. I lost sight of that completely.

Jesus didn't tear people down. (With the exception of certain religious leaders, which, fair.) He told stories. He healed the sick. He set people free. He spoke truth so precisely that it cut to the bone and somehow left you more whole than before.

I was doing the opposite. I was speaking truth so imprecisely that it just left cuts.

Paul called it being a stumbling block. Jesus went further and talked about millstones. I don't love the millstone imagery, personally, on account of the drowning involved, but I understand why he used it. Words aimed at God's people carry weight. If your aim is off, someone gets hurt.

Fifteen Years Later

I still write about faith, about the Church, about Christians who drive me crazy (including the one I see in the mirror). But the posture is different now. Not because of prison. Prison was years before that blog post. The posture changed because of the slow, unglamorous work that came after: years of marriage to a woman who tells me the truth whether I want to hear it or not, years of learning that having a conversion story doesn't mean you're finished converting.

When I write about failure now, I'm not pointing at someone else. I'm talking about myself. The bank fraud. The abandoned girlfriend. The decade of running. The blog posts that hurt a friend three years after God had supposedly fixed me.

That, it turns out, is the only way words build anything. You go first. You confess first. You bleed first, on purpose, not because it makes for good content but because it's the truth and the truth in humility is the only material God uses for construction.

My friend who unfollowed me eventually followed me back. I like to think it's because the words got better. More likely, she's just gracious and I got lucky. Either way, I'm grateful she loved me enough to tell me I was causing damage. Most people would have just muted me and moved on.

If you're writing from your wounds right now, if your words taste like vinegar and you're telling yourself it's just honesty, maybe stop for a minute. Ask someone you trust if what you're saying is building anything or just tearing things down.

And if the answer is the second one, that's not the end. That's just where the real work begins.