The Willing Heart and the Withered Hand

The Willing Heart and the Withered Hand

Understanding Healing through Humility

Personal reflections from a fellow traveler.  Not AA approved literature.  Shared in the Spirit of Experience, Strength, and Hope.

Imagine this…

You are seated quietly in a crowded room, hoping not to be noticed. One part of your life is visibly broken, yet you have learned how to conceal it—to keep it close, guarded, and safely out of sight. Perhaps others already know. Maybe they only suspect. Either way, you have carried the shame of it for so long that hiding has become second nature.

Then the Teacher calls you forward.

Not into a private corner or after the room has emptied. He asks you to stand in the middle, before everyone, and extend the very thing you have worked hardest to protect. Healing will require exposure. Faith will require action. You must open your hand before you know whether it will be restored.

For many of us in the program, this scene feels strangely familiar. We enter recovery guarding the most withered parts of ourselves—our drinking, our dishonesty, our fear, our failures. Yet the path toward healing begins when we become willing to bring what has been hidden into the light.

Here, we’ve found a community where strength is made perfect in weakness.  We die to the false self in order to become our true selves.

Those of us in the Fellowship understand that we must stop pretending to be unbroken.  We learn to reveal what shame tells us to conceal.  We find strength through honest vulnerability.  We allow the God of our understanding to work through our weakness, and we extend our wounded hand toward others.

The inspiration for this writing comes from a book titled: “Steps” by John Ortberg.  In chapter one he hits readers with ‘The Fellowship of the Withered Hand’.  An introspective look into a rather short biblical account of a man who is healed from a disabling physical condition.