Some days attending to my wounds feels exhausting. Good self care, physical therapy, deep breathing and anxiety relieving exercises, psychotherapy, medication and supplements, spiritual direction, prayer, journaling, investing in deep relationships – it can feel like a full time job. I once lamented to my therapist the frustration that it seemed to take so much to keep my body calm. But she encouraged me that the lengths I was going to were normal self care. For so long I had neglected my body’s needs that my new routine felt over the top. I think many women can relate. When discussing these habits with  my patients, they sometimes  struggle to fathom how the practices could be integrated into daily life. As women we are great at taking care of others, but we often neglect ourselves. I try to remind my patients that self care isn’t selfish. It is taking care of the body God gave you so you can better care for those He has put in front of you to love. 

Some of us have had to learn how to take care of this body the hard way, including me. I didn’t seek treatment for my PMOS (formerly PCOS), PMS, and painful periods (which turned out to be Stage IV endometriosis) until I was talking to my patients about diagnosing and treating these conditions every single day. I didn’t establish a good self care routine until my body collapsed from the chronic stress of trauma, unhealthy relationships, and people pleasing. My body was never the enemy as I had so often treated it as. My body was a vessel through which the Lord was trying to speak to me. To tell me when to end a relationship or seek help for an ailment.

And when I sit across from a patient and can share wisdom or compassion with her when she bares her heart, I am reminded why my pain was necessary. It is here that I am continually reminded of this quote by St. Augustine, “In my deepest wounds I saw your Glory, and it dazzled me.” Those same wounds that are the “thorn in my flesh” (as St. Paul laments) are also the conduit through which He brings healing to me and others. 

As Henri Nouwen so beautifully details in his The Wounded Healer when telling a legend of the Talmud, “The Messiah, the story tells us, is sitting among the poor, binding His wounds only one at a time, always prepared for the moment when He might be needed. So it is too, with ministers. Since it is their task to make visible the first vestiges of liberation for others, they must bind their own wounds carefully, in anticipation of the moment when they will be needed. They are each called to be the wounded healer, the ones who must not only look after their own wounds, but at the same time be prepared to heal the wounds of others” (page 88). 

Watch Caroline’s guided reflection here:

I invite you to take this image to prayer. Imagine yourself sitting with Jesus in a comfortable position and place (your couch, the grass, an Adoration chapel). Where are your wounds? What do they feel like? Raw, dull and achy, sharp, scabbed over? What names do you give your wounds? Not good enough, the cause of my own problems, behind in life, hopelessness, infertility, anxiety, trauma? Now let Jesus speak to you. How does He suffer with you in this moment? How does He see you? Now imagine Him touching each wound individually with His healing touch. Light begins to emanate from the wounds. What do you see now? How is He using those wounds to heal you? To bring you closer to Himself? And now how is He using those wounds to bring others to Himself? 

After you have taken some time, go to your prayer journal. Write out and even draw what you saw and experienced. Return to this in times of doubt, anger, frustration, sorrow. And let that return not point you to the healing but the source of healing Himself. “’Yet even now,’ says the Lord, ‘return to Me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; and tear your hearts and not your garments.’ Return to the Lord, your God, for He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in mercy, and repents of evil’” (Joel 2:12-13).

Please know that I am praying for you and rooting for you on this crazy journey to Heaven.

Caroline Gindhart is a nurse practitioner at Divine Mercy Women’s Health in Camp Hill/Carlisle, Pennsylvania. She received her nursing degrees from Penn State University. In her professional work, she diagnoses the root causes of infertility and treats in a way that cooperates with the woman’s cycle using her training in the Creighton Model and NaPro Technology.