Our bodies are designed to heal. We fall off our bikes and skin our knees―and without effort on our part, the skin looks like new in a few days. But while our skinned knees easily heal, it can sometimes feel like our emotional and relational wounds are left gaping open, broken beyond repair. If our bodies instinctively know how to heal physical injuries, could they also help us understand how to restore painful emotional and relational ruptures? In their book Designed to Heal: What the Body Shows Us about Healing Wounds, Repairing Relationships, and Restoring Community, and on today’s episode, physician Jennie A. McLaurin and scientist Cymbeline Tancongco Culiat:
• address the immense felt need for reconciliation, wholeness, and function in our broken relationships and divided communities,
• explain the science behind the stages of physical wound healing and how this reveals parallel insights into how people can recover from social wounds,
• share current research on brain science as it relates to the damaging effects of trauma and the protective effects of positive emotions and experiences,
• equip readers with new concepts and tools to use in resolving interpersonal conflict, and
• offer hope and encouragement to readers as they pursue the healing of divisions within their greater communities.
Join us to learn how the body is created with mechanisms that optimize a flourishing recovery from life’s inevitable wounds. We pray after listening, you realize we are given a model for hopeful, faithful, and enduring healing in all other aspects of our lives. Our wounds don’t have to have the last word.
Quotes:
“The division that is so characteristic of our culture exhausted me and I didn’t see a lot of new efforts to address it. Instead, I saw a posture of mutual outrage.” Jennie A. McLaurin
“The stages of wound healing—clotting, controlled inflammation, rebuilding and then either scarring or regeneration, became powerful images for me of how we might pursue patient, orderly healing in the wounds that divide our families, society and faith communities.” Jennie A. McLaurin
“I think one of the biggest challenges of people in healing ruptured relationships and communities is getting the injured/involved parties to see each other’s perspectives and get out of the initial stages of anger, defensiveness, distrust, distance/isolation.” Cymbeline T. Culiat
“We are honest about the ways faith has impacted both our wounds and our recoveries and we use some examples that are familiar to Christians.” Jennie A. McLaurin
“Simply put we don’t allow healing because it is a slow and sometimes uncomfortable process! We give up on it before we start. We also don’t have great examples in our current life. Everything is quick and everything is disposable. Not much is made to last. If we don’t like a church, we can leave. If we get annoyed on social media, we can unfriend. If we are upset over political decisions, we can protest. But do we go beyond protest to really listening to someone with whom we disagree? Do we love our enemy enough to have a conversation?” Jennie A. McLaurin
“We are made in the image of God and God made us for healing and wholeness.” Jennie A. McLaurin
“There is a lot of new brain science research that looks at the interplay of emotion, neurotransmitters, and things like cortisol, or stress hormones. Chronic anger is literally deadly. It leads to heart disease, stroke, uncontrolled diabetes, and more.” Jennie A. McLaurin
“The fruits of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness and self-control) actually promote our best health!” Jennie A. McLaurin
“Fostering community requires that we CHOOSE to become part of it (establish), then SUSTAIN and STRENGTHEN (nourish it), DEFEND and REPAIR (stick it out in injured times) when forces or situations arise to weaken or destroy community.” Cymbeline T. Culiat
“The main challenge is how to enable/equip and inspire selfish people to be humbly committed to one another in love. Human beings are not very good at this. Designed To Heal addresses this by focusing our attention on the marvel and power of God’s work instead of our repeated failures and many inadequacies.” Cymbeline T. Culiat
“It is not a DIY manual or to-do checklist but an exhortation to praise/worship and to do good work in our deeply wounded world.” Cymbeline T. Culiat
“Community and collaboration bring in diverse voices, functions, and mutual encouragement to go through painful complicated healing journeys. There is power of community…it enables us to do what we can’t, or won’t, do alone.” Cymbeline T. Culiat
“I chose wound healing to illustrate how my faith and science converged. This area of my scientific work taught me a lot about God’s power, love, and wisdom.” Cymbeline T. Culiat
“God is constantly bringing healing to wounds that hinder His plan for me- an abundant joyful life. Entrusting my life to Him isn’t just about going to heaven when I die, but includes mending my brokenness here on earth.” Cymbeline T. Culiat
“God often works through a process and doesn’t instantly fix things – though I wish often He just get painful seasons of my life over quickly. In doing so, God recruits many players and orchestrates many situations to do this – He loves diversity, unity, and collaboration.” Cymbeline T. Culiat
“First, decide that healing is what should be promoted and sought after. Second, understand that it takes time. Each stage is a bit longer than the one before. Third, don’t go it alone. Cultivate a community of folks who are committed with you to restoration. Fourth, practice. Take baby steps.” Jennie A. McLaurin
“The body’s wound healing process is so simple yet so amazing to behold. I’d love for readers to imagine their own lives and communities transformed by the same picture of beautiful hopeful restoration where unity instead of division is what we see.” Jennie A. McLaurin
“We want people to be hopeful about healing and see it as the healthy design. We believe that readers can extract a lot of principles from the book so they can become better agents of healing in their lives/circles—offering themselves as agents of healing — to be essential components of the healing matrix in the circles they live in.” Cymbeline T. Culiat
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