Video: Holy Discontent

This week we’re launching a series of short videos in which Dr. Dan Allender engages topics related to trauma, abuse, and the hope for healing.

In this video, Dan describes the beauty of declaring that present brokenness is not the end of the story, that something is wrong and needs to be addressed. Dan talks about how the ability to pursue change is rooted in a “holy discontent,” an awareness that our present life is not how we desire to live. Often this starts out as frustration or despair about a current relationship or situation, but that is only the tipping point, says Dan; that holy discontent opens the door for us to engage past trauma and abuse in ways we never have before.

Holy discontent looks at what we are currently suffering and begins to anticipate a day of redemption, a day in which things are radically different.

“You will never take the risk to engage the kinds of things that you have encountered with abuse unless there is that discontent,” says Dan. “And that discontent has to remain there, because the process that you’re entering is not one that will be over quickly, if ever at all. We’re not getting over abuse, we’re going through abuse.”

Dan invites us into a journey of discontent, naming the disconnect between what is and what should be, and choosing to move toward restoration. That is the journey we are engaging in our upcoming Healing the Wounded Heart online course, which has grown out of the material in Dan’s 1989 book The Wounded Heart and the 25-year retrospective Healing the Wounded Heart. This new online course will invite you to deeper engagement of your stories of harm and your hope for healing. We have been humbled by the process of creating this course and would be honored to have you join us when we launch in early November 2016. Learn more here.