The Wounded Pilgrim

This one is written to you.

Not to the person helping you, and not to the Church about you. To you, in the second person, in short chapters that can be read on a bad night, with a place in each one where you are told you may stop if it is too much.

It begins with the day you stopped pretending, because that is where it began for me. Then it tries to say plainly what a wound is and what it is not. A wound is what the event left behind, not the event. It is not a sin, not weakness, not weak faith, and not who you are. A wounded person is not a broken object. The alarm in your body that goes off years later does not read the calendar. The ways you learned to survive were intelligent, even the ones that are hurting you now. And if it was the Church that hurt you, God is not the people who hurt you in His name.

From there the book walks toward Jesus rather than toward a programme. Where He is in the wound. What healing with Him actually looks like, which is slower and stranger than the testimonies make it sound. When to seek help from the Church and when to seek help elsewhere, and why both can be obedience. And what all of this is for, which is not a lifetime of recovery but the fullness of life He came to give.

Where it stands

The first two parts are drafted. The remaining three are outlined and waiting. Every clinical claim in it will be checked against the research before it is treated as final, because a book for the wounded owes them accuracy as well as tenderness.

Letters drawn from it will appear here as they are written. Several of the earliest letters will come from this book, because its ideas are the ones people most need to hear said out loud.