S9 Ep. 3 / Trauma: Walking with Others

Feb 18

How can we avoid being miserable comforters? As we encourage sufferers towards comfort and change, we must recognize our past failures and our current shortcomings. As we humbly understand our own limits, we can begin to embrace a biblical framework for suffering and sin and support others to find hope and healing.

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For those of you who enjoy behind the scenes videos, here is an unedited video of Episode 3 of Season 9:

For the full unedited transcript from this episode click here.

You don’t need a degree to provide vital comfort and support for someone processing their suffering story. Yet many of us struggle to know how to help or we’ve misstepped in the past and fear another failure. In this episode, we offer advice on using the comfort God has given us in our own stories to comfort others.

As we explore a biblical framework for trauma, we need to recognize the mistakes we’ve made and the Church has made when supporting others who have been traumatized. Too often we have re-wounded someone who has disclosed a traumatic experience or experiences to us. In order to effectively support others that come to us for comfort, we must be willing to see how we’ve failed in the past and where we need to grow.

When we walk alongside others, we can shift the narrative that’s too often applied to trauma discussions. “What’s wrong with you?” can become “What happened to you?” As we recognize how trauma has distorted our creation desires, we can purposefully reinforce God’s original design for our desires by supporting agency and reminding the sufferer of their identity in the Father.