When someone or something causes a wound to our heart, our heart can feel like it has been rent into many pieces. The result may be a numbing and closing off that part in self-protectiveness and move to difficulty trusting again. The degree of the hurt is most often related to the significance of the person or thing that caused the brokenness. Our responses vary also by our experience, our personality, our values, and our faith.

Whatever our spiritual life may be when such hurt occurs will tend to impact our feelings about where God is in the pain we feel. If we believe we are to forgive what happened, we can find it hard to do the very thing we believe we should and must. Most often we need to find a way to process what has occurred.

Debbie Wilson’s newest book, Big Hurt, Bigger God (Finding Freedom Through Biblical Forgiveness), offers a path to healing, forgiveness, and hope through the author’s experience of hurt and her own grappling with big hurts as she seeks God’s help to find hope.

Her words look at how abandonment, betrayal, abuse, and other deep wounds leave our hearts shattered. We want to find a way out of the pain that haunts us and causes us to question if forgiveness is even possible.

Debbie looks at the following questions big hurt opens:

      “How do you forgive the unforgivable? Why doesn’t forgiving erase the pain? Do I have to trust the one who hurt me? Does forgiving minimize the wrong done?”

At the very beginning of the book, Debbie gives this counsel to the reader:

“You won’t find pat answers or quick fixes in this book. But you will find real hope and steps to freedom and healing. If you follow along and do the work laid out, I believe you will experience peace and freedom. Using the acrostic FREEDOM as an outline, I’ll explore some of the relevant points on forgiveness. Some areas will receive more attention than others.

FREEDOM stands for: For my sake, Real, Emotional, Experience, Decide, Over and over, Manage yourself.”

The book is divided into two parts with short chapters including questions to help along the path as well as prayers. and an exercise called “Strength Finder.” Part One is entitled the Art of Forgiving and Part Two is entitled The Art of Managing Ourselves with Discernment. There are also notes and additional resources listed at the end of the book.

As you travel with Debbie on the journey she lays out, she shares near the close of the book the following reminder:

“Few of us can imagine, let alone see, God’s good purpose in the middle of betrayal and pain. Yet God offers peace that surpasses understanding – a peace that is better than knowing the why and how of his ways. (Phil.4:7)

Trust and surrender produce a peace and joy that transcend our circumstances. When faced with life’s wrongs, we can surrender each person, wound, and hurt unto God’s capable hands with thanksgiving that he knows best. We thank him that he loves us even before we were loved. We thank him that he’s working for our good before we see how.”

You may have looked at more than one or two resources on forgiveness already, but Big Hurt, Bigger God, opens the door to new understanding of how to move to a better place and discover God waiting with open arms.