Why We Hide Our Wounds

Why Do We Hide Our Wounds?

A Reflection on the Wounded Healer in Biblical Perspective

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"When our wounds cease to be a source of shame, and become a source of healing, we have become wounded healers."

— Henri J. M. Nouwen

Introduction: The Instinct to Hide

There is an old reflex in us, as old as Eden. The moment Adam and Eve became aware of their nakedness, they did two things at once: they sewed fig leaves, and they hid. "I heard you walking in the garden, so I hid. I was afraid because I was naked" (Genesis 3:10, NLT). This is the first recorded human response to woundedness, and it set a pattern the rest of Scripture spends sixty-five books unraveling. Before sin was confessed, before grace was extended, before anything was healed, there was concealment. 

Shame moved faster than God's voice.

Henri Nouwen's insight in The Wounded Healer identifies the precise hinge on which our spiritual life turns: the relationship we have with what has hurt us. So long as our wounds remain a source of shame, they isolate us, exhaust us, and disqualify us in our own eyes. But when those same wounds cease to be evidence of our brokenness and become instead the very place from which we serve others, something resurrectional happens. The wound is not erased; it is transfigured. This reflection asks a single, searching question of all of us: why do we hide our wounds?

I. The Shame That Hides

Shame is not the same as guilt. Guilt says I did something wrong; shame says I am something wrong. Guilt can be confessed and resolved, but shame burrows. It convinces us that if anyone really knew what happened to us, what we did, what was done to us, what we still struggle with, we would be cast out. So we hide. We perform around the wound. We attend church with a smile stitched over the scar.

Scripture is unsparing about this dynamic. King David, after his sin with Bathsheba, describes the physical toll of concealment in Psalm 32:

When I refused to confess my sin, my body wasted away, and I groaned all day long. Day and night your hand of discipline was heavy on me. My strength evaporated like water in the summer heat.

— Psalm 32:3–4, NLT

Note what David names: silence itself was the wound's amplifier. The unconfessed thing did not lie dormant; it consumed him from within. Only when he said, "Finally, I confessed all my sins to you and stopped trying to hide my guilt" (v. 5, NLT), did the pressure release. The Hebrew sense is of a covering removed, a lid lifted. What had been hidden was finally brought into the light, and the light, contrary to all his fears, did not destroy him. It healed him. David ends the same verse by saying, "And you forgave me! All my guilt is gone."

This is the paradox shame cannot understand: hiding the wound makes it worse, not safer. The fig leaves never quite cover what they are meant to cover. Every Christian who has lived a double life knows the exhaustion of it, the way the mask grows heavier as the years pass. James writes plainly: "Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and produces wonderful results" (James 5:16, NLT). 

Healing is tethered to disclosure. 

Not disclosure to everyone, but disclosure to someone.

II. The God Who Bears Wounds

If the Bible only told us to stop hiding, it would be a heavy book. But the gospel does something stranger and more beautiful: it shows us a God who refuses to hide His own wounds. The risen Christ, glorified and victorious, deliberately retains the marks of His crucifixion. When He appears to the disciples in the upper room, He does not present a flawless body. He shows them His hands and His side (John 20:20). When Thomas doubts, Jesus invites him to reach out and touch the very places where the nails had been (John 20:27).

Think about what this means. Resurrection did not require the erasure of the wounds. The Lamb in Revelation is still described as one that had been slain (Revelation 5:6). In the eternal state, the marks remain, not as embarrassments but as testimony. They are the credentials of the King.

Isaiah foresaw this with startling clarity centuries before:

But he was pierced for our rebellion, crushed for our sins. He was beaten so we could be whole. He was whipped so we could be healed.

— Isaiah 53:5, NLT

Here is the entire theology of the wounded healer in a single verse. The Servant's wounds are not a side effect of His work; they are His work. He heals by means of His suffering. The very thing that should have disqualified Him, a tortured and executed body, becomes the instrument of cosmic reconciliation. 

If our Savior healed the world through His wounds, 

on what grounds do we suppose our own wounds make us useless?

III. The Wounds God Allowed

Before we go further, we have to face an uncomfortable question that quietly underlies every wound: where was God when it happened? If He is sovereign, then nothing reaches us that He has not at least permitted. Scripture does not flinch from this. Job's losses came through the schemes of Satan, but only with the Lord's explicit consent (Job 1:12; 2:6). Joseph's brothers sold him into slavery, but Joseph later told them, "You intended to harm me, but God intended it all for good" (Genesis 50:20, NLT). Paul's thorn was, in his own words, "a messenger from Satan to torment me", and in the same breath he says it was "given" to him (2 Corinthians 12:7, NLT). The wound came through evil; it arrived by God's permission.

This is hard to sit with, and we should be honest that it is hard. The Bible does not offer a tidy explanation for every individual suffering. But it does offer a promise about what God is doing in the midst of all of them:

And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them. For God knew his people in advance, and he chose them to become like his Son, so that his Son would be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.

— Romans 8:28–29, NLT

Read those two verses together, because verse 29 is the key that unlocks verse 28. Christians sometimes quote Romans 8:28 as if the good means a comfortable outcome, a happy ending, the job that finally comes through, the marriage that finally heals. But Paul tells us in the next breath what the good actually is: conformity to the image of God's Son. The good God is working toward in our wounds is not primarily our comfort; it is our likeness to Christ. And Christ, as we have just seen, is the wounded healer.

This reframes everything. The wound was not random. It was not wasted. It was not evidence that God had looked away or forgotten us. It was permitted, in the mystery of His sovereignty, as part of the long work of shaping us into the image of His Son, who Himself was made "perfect through suffering" (Hebrews 2:10, NLT). The wound is, in some sense we may not fully understand this side of heaven, a tool in the hand of a Father who is making wounded healers out of us.

This does not mean we call evil good. It does not mean abuse was God's plan, or that we should bypass grief, or that we should answer a sufferer with a glib quotation of Romans 8:28. It means that no wound in the life of a believer is finally meaningless. The God who allowed it has bound Himself to redeem it. He does not waste pain in His children's lives any more than He wasted the pain of His own Son.

The God who allowed it has bound Himself to redeem it.

And if this is true, then hiding the wound is not just personally costly; it is theologically incoherent. If God allowed it for a purpose, then concealing it is refusing the purpose. It is treating as shameful what God means to make sacred.

IV. The Treasure in Earthen Vessels

The apostle Paul understood this principle and made it the spine of his ministry philosophy. To a Corinthian church obsessed with strength, eloquence, and impressive credentials, he wrote:

We now have this light shining in our hearts, but we ourselves are like fragile clay jars containing this great treasure. This makes it clear that our great power is from God, not from ourselves. We are pressed on every side by troubles, but we are not crushed. We are perplexed, but not driven to despair. We are hunted down, but never abandoned by God. We get knocked down, but we are not destroyed. Through suffering, our bodies continue to share in the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be seen in our bodies.

— 2 Corinthians 4:7–10, NLT

Fragile clay jars. Not display porcelain. Not crystal. Cheap, common pottery, useful precisely because it is ordinary and breakable. Paul says the very fragility is the point. The light of Christ shines out through the cracks, not in spite of them. A sealed, polished, unbroken vessel would actually obscure the treasure.

This is a direct challenge to the way many of us approach ministry, relationships, and even our own self-image. We assume we will be useful to God once we have our act together, once the addiction is fully behind us, once the marriage is healed, once the depression lifts, once the doubt resolves. Paul says the opposite. 

The very brokenness we are waiting to outgrow is the qualification we are waiting to acquire.

Paul himself begged the Lord three times to remove his "thorn in the flesh" (2 Corinthians 12:7, NLT). The answer he received was not removal but redefinition: "My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness" (v. 9, NLT). Notice what this answer assumes. God did not say, I'm sorry that happened to you; He said, in effect, I am leaving this in place on purpose. The thorn was allowed. It was permitted to remain because removing it would have undone what God was building. Paul's response is one of the most counterintuitive sentences in all of Scripture: "So now I am glad to boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ can work through me". The wound stopped being a source of shame and became the throne from which Christ's power was displayed.

V. The Comfort We Have Received

If 2 Corinthians 4 tells us why God uses broken vessels, 2 Corinthians 1 tells us how:

All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is our merciful Father and the source of all comfort. He comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort others. When they are troubled, we will be able to give them the same comfort God has given us.

— 2 Corinthians 1:3–4, NLT

Read that passage slowly. There is a holy economy at work in it. God does not waste suffering, because, as we have seen, He does not allow it carelessly. The comfort He pours into us in our darkest seasons is not meant to terminate in us; it is meant to flow through us to the next person walking the same road. This is part of what Romans 8:28 means in practice. The good God works through our wounds is not only the slow shaping of our character; it is the very real good that comes to other wounded people when we, having been comforted, are now equipped to comfort them. The mother who lost a child and was held by the Lord in her grief carries something a childless mother of healthy children simply does not have. The man who came out of addiction by the grace of God has a key that fits a lock no theologian can pick from theory alone.

This is Nouwen's insight clothed in Pauline language. The wound becomes a source of healing because the comfort that visited us did not visit us privately. It came so that it could be passed on. To hide the wound is to interrupt the flow. It is to receive grace and then dam it up, refusing the very purpose for which it was given.

VI. The Samaritan Who Stopped

Consider the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37) through this lens. A man is robbed, beaten, and left half-dead on the road. A priest passes by. A Levite passes by. We are told nothing of their reasons, but it is not difficult to imagine: ritual purity, schedule, fear, the simple human instinct to keep one's eyes on the horizon and pretend the wounded body in the ditch is not there.

Then comes a Samaritan, a man from a despised people, a man who himself would have known what it was like to be looked through, walked past, considered unclean. He stops. He bandages. He pours in oil and wine. He carries the wounded man on his own beast and pays for his recovery. Jesus does not tell us the Samaritan's backstory, but the parable insists, in its very structure, that the one most likely to stop for the wounded is the one who has himself been wounded, the outsider, the rejected, the one who knows what it is to bleed by the side of the road.

The priest and the Levite, the religious professionals, the credentialed and respected, walk past. 

The wounded man stops. This is not an accident in Jesus's story. It is the whole point.

VII. Naming the Wound

So far this reflection has spoken of wounds in the general. But every reader carries something specific, and the gospel does not ask us to leave it vague. Healing begins when the wound is named. Let us name some of them honestly, because part of why we hide is that we are not sure our particular wound counts.

There are wounds we caused ourselves. The affair we ended but never confessed. The addiction we still circle. The years we walked away from God and the people we hurt while we were gone. The child we did not parent well. The moral failure that cost us something we cannot get back. These wounds carry the particular weight of shame because we know we are responsible. Scripture does not minimize this, but it does not let it have the final word either. David committed adultery and arranged a murder. Peter denied Christ three times. Paul stood holding the coats while Stephen was stoned. God did not waste any of those wounds. He made them ministers.

There are wounds done to us. Childhood abuse, sexual or physical or emotional. The parent who never showed up, or the one who showed up only to wound. Racism. Betrayal by a spouse. A pastor or leader who used spiritual authority to harm. Bullying that left marks no one else can see. These wounds carry a different weight, the weight of injustice. The shame here is borrowed shame, shame that belongs to someone else but somehow ended up on us. God is especially tender with these. He calls Himself "a father to the fatherless" and "defender of widows" (Psalm 68:5, NLT), and He has a long history of binding up what others have broken.

There are wounds from circumstance. The death of a spouse, a parent, a friend. Infertility. Chronic illness. Mental illness. Financial collapse. The slow grief of watching someone we love decline. Singleness that has lasted longer than we expected. A diagnosis that changed everything. No one did anything wrong; life simply broke against us. These wounds can be the most disorienting because there is no villain to forgive and no sin to confess, only the question of where God was. He was, and is, with us in the ditch.

And there is a wound that deserves its own naming, because so many carry it in silence: the loss of a child. The miscarriage no one acknowledged because the pregnancy had not yet been announced. The stillbirth that left a nursery full of waiting things and no one to fill it. The baby who lived only hours or days. The child lost to illness, accident, suicide, or violence. The young adult whose absence still echoes in the empty chair at every family gathering. Parents are not supposed to bury their children, and when they do, something in the order of the world feels broken. This grief has its own particular weight, and the church has too often been quiet where it should have been tender. If this is your wound, hear it plainly: your loss was real. Your child mattered. Your grief is not a faith problem to be solved but a love that has nowhere to land. King David, after the death of his infant son, said, "I will go to him one day, but he cannot return to me" (2 Samuel 12:23, NLT). David did not pretend the loss away, and he did not despair. He grieved, and he held to the certain hope that one day he would see his child again. That hope is still yours. The God who counts the stars and knows them all by name (Psalm 147:4) knows the name of the child you lost, even the one who never had a name on this side of heaven.

And there are wounds from the church itself. Spiritual abuse. Being cast out for asking the wrong question. Doctrine weaponized against us. A community that demanded performance and called it discipleship. A leader who failed catastrophically and left us wondering whether any of it was real. These wounds are particularly cruel because the place that should have healed us was the place that hurt us. Jesus reserved His sharpest words for religious leaders who burdened people with what they themselves would not lift (Matthew 23:4). He is not on the side of the system that wounded us. He never was.

A Word on Timing

Not every wound is ready to become a public gift. Some are still bleeding, and Scripture honors that. There is a season for the wound to be tended in private with God, and then with a few safe people, before it ever becomes ministry to strangers. Nouwen himself was clear about this. The wounded healer is not someone parading their wounds; it is someone who has let Christ meet them in the wound first, and only then begins, slowly, to offer what they have received. To skip the interior work is to make the wound a performance rather than a gift. The world has enough of that already.

So if our wounds are still raw, we should hear this clearly: we are not failing the gospel by needing time. Christ Himself, after the resurrection, did not immediately commission the disciples in the public square. He met them behind locked doors. He showed them His wounds in private first. The going out comes later. Right now, the assignment may simply be to stop hiding from God and from one or two safe people. That alone is profound obedience.

How God Usually Heals

And here we have to be careful, because the world has trained us to look first to the credentialed expert when we are hurting, and Scripture has a different instinct. Throughout the Bible, the primary instrument God uses to heal a wounded person is another wounded person who has themselves been healed. This is not a denial of professional help; it is a clarification of God's first and usual pattern.

Look at how the New Testament keeps repeating this. The Good Samaritan stops because he himself knows what it is to be despised and walked past. After Peter denies Christ three times, Jesus says to him, "So when you have repented and turned to me again, strengthen your brothers" (Luke 22:32, NLT). The very act of failing and being restored is what equips Peter to strengthen others. The Gerasene demoniac, after Jesus delivers him, begs to follow Jesus into the boat. Jesus says no, and sends him in a different direction: "No, go home to your family, and tell them everything the Lord has done for you and how merciful he has been" (Mark 5:19, NLT). His healing is his commission. And Paul, when he wants to encourage a suffering church, does not appeal to his credentials; he appeals to the comfort he himself received in his own troubles, which is now meant to flow to them (2 Corinthians 1:3–4).

This is why recovery groups, grief groups, divorce care groups, abuse survivor groups, and the quiet ministries of one believer to another are often more powerful than any pulpit or any office. The widow who has walked through grief sits with the newly widowed in a way the well-meaning pastor cannot. The man years out of his addiction holds the hand of the man in week one of sobriety in a way no clinical degree can replicate. The woman who survived abuse and has done the long work of healing is the one who can finally say I believe you to another survivor and have it land. This is not a workaround for the absence of professional help. It is God's first and preferred design. 

He multiplies healing through the people He has already healed.

And this means something important for us. If God has brought us through anything, He has equipped us to help someone walking the same road. We are not waiting on a credential. We are not waiting until we have it all figured out. We are waiting only on the willingness to stop hiding what He has already done.

All of this said, God also works through people He has gifted with specific training. Counselors, Christian therapists, doctors who treat depression, psychiatrists who manage medication, pastors trained in trauma care — these are real gifts and not failures of faith. If our wounds are deep, by all means we should seek them out. We pray and also pick up the phone. We trust God and also keep our therapy appointments. "Plans succeed through good counsel" (Proverbs 20:18, NLT). But we must understand the order: the trained professional is a real gift, and the wounded brother or sister who has walked our road is, in God's economy, often the deeper one.

One more word, gently but plainly. If what we are calling a wound is actually a present sin we are continuing — an affair we are still in, an addiction we are still feeding, a deception we are still telling, harm we are still doing to someone — the first call is not to make it a gift. The first call is to stop and repent. Some things are not yet wounds in the Nouwen sense; they are open rebellions in need of the cross. God meets us there too, with breathtaking mercy, but the door He opens is the door of repentance, not the door of ministry.

Not every wound is ready to be ministered from yet. But every wound is meant, eventually, to be brought into the light — first to God, then to safe people, then, in time and with wisdom, to those God puts in our path.

VIII. So Why Do We Hide?

Return now to the question that titles this reflection. Why do we hide our wounds?

Perhaps it is fear of judgment. We suspect that if people knew about the divorce, the bankruptcy, the abortion, the years of doubt, the secret addiction, the season we walked away from God, they would withdraw. Sometimes they do. But more often, what people withdraw from is the polished version of us they cannot relate to. The mask is what creates distance. The wound, honestly named, is what creates communion.

Perhaps it is pride. To admit the wound is to admit we needed help, that we were not the self-sufficient figures we wanted to be. But Scripture is consistent: "God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble" (James 4:6, NLT). The wound brought low, brought into the light, brought into honest speech, is the doorway through which grace enters.

Perhaps it is the lie that we must be fully healed before we can help anyone else. But a fully healed person is not a wounded healer; they are merely a healer, and frankly, most of us cannot relate to them. What hurting people need is not someone who has transcended pain but someone who is tending their pain honestly while still showing up. The Talmudic image Nouwen drew on, of the Messiah at the gates of Rome unbinding His wounds one at a time so He would be ready when called, is precisely this. He is not waiting until He is whole. He is binding His wounds in such a way that He remains available.

Perhaps, most painfully, it is because no one has yet met our wounds with grace, and we do not believe anyone could. To us the gospel speaks its loudest word. The God who hung naked on a cross is not embarrassed by our wounds. The Christ who still bears scars in His glorified hands is not asking us to pretend ours away. He is asking us to bring them to Him, and then, in His time, to bring them out into the company of His people, where they will stop being a private burden and start being a public gift.

Conclusion: From Shame to Healing

The journey Nouwen describes, from shame to healing, is not a single decision but a long obedience. It usually begins in secret, with God. It moves outward to a trusted few. It eventually, in ways we cannot script in advance, finds its way to strangers who need exactly what we have been through.

Joseph, after years in a pit and a prison for a crime he did not commit, looked at the brothers who had sold him into slavery and said, "You intended to harm me, but God intended it all for good. He brought me to this position so I could save the lives of many people" (Genesis 50:20, NLT). Joseph is Romans 8:28 in narrative form. The wound did not disappear. The betrayal was real. He never says it didn't hurt, and he never says his brothers were not guilty. But he is able to look back across two decades of suffering and see a hand that was always there, working behind the visible cruelty, shaping a deliverer. Joseph had become a wounded healer to an entire nation, and he could only become that because God had allowed the wounds in the first place.

This is the invitation. Our wounds, the ones we have been hiding, the ones we are sure disqualify us, may in fact be the very credentials God intends to use. Not because suffering is good, but because the God who allows all things and redeems all things is good, and He has a long history of taking what was meant for shame and turning it into a source of healing for others. The wounds were permitted by a Father who knew exactly what He was doing, even when we did not. They were always meant to be brought, eventually, into the light.

And this is precisely where the Great Commission begins to make sense in a way it usually does not. We tend to read "Therefore, go and make disciples of all the nations" (Matthew 28:19, NLT) as a missions verse, a programmatic call to evangelism. It is that. But notice when and to whom it was given. In John's account, Jesus first appears to the disciples behind locked doors, shows them His hands and His side, and then says, "Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you" (John 20:21, NLT). 

The scars come first. The sending follows. The wounded Healer is commissioning wounded healers. 

Mark's version is even more direct: "Go into all the world and preach the Good News to everyone" (Mark 16:15, NLT). The Good News is not a tidy doctrinal package delivered by people who have it all together. It is the testimony of people who have been met by God in their woundedness and now carry that meeting outward.

This is why hidden wounds are not just a personal problem; they are a commission problem. The disciple who refuses to acknowledge what God has brought them through has nothing distinct to bring to the nations. They have theology, perhaps, and information, but not testimony. The Great Commission is the natural outflow of the wounded-healer pattern: Christ healed through His wounds, He shaped us through ours, and now He sends us out so that the same healing might reach others through the same kind of vessels. To hide the wound is, in a quiet way, to disobey the commission.

So the question stands. Why do we hide our wounds? And, more hopefully: what might happen if we stopped?

As long as there is breath in our lungs, God is not finished with us. Our woundedness is not a disqualification; it may be the very thing He intends to use. Not despite it. Because of it.

"He heals the brokenhearted and bandages their wounds."

— Psalm 147:3, NLT