I’ve learned many things in the past few years – hopefully, I’ve shared most of them here. One of the things I’ve seen is that the best healers are almost invariably wounded people.

When I meet with and talk with the refugees and children, I see gravely wounded people in front of me. No matter how cheerful, they have lost everything. Yet I also know that I am wounded myself, broken I sometimes say. In one sense I am very different from the people I see, in another we are very much alike.

I meet people all the time who forget or deny that nobody escapes being wounded. Everyone has battles to fight, most of them far worse than mine.

The question for me in my own recovery is not, “how can I hide my wounds,” rather how can I share my wounds and own them and put them to some good use besides grievance and self-pity, the first cousins of social media?

When my wounds ceased to be a source of shame and self-rejection,  then I became a healer, a wounded healer.

When I meet another healer, I sense the wounds, connect with them, we often see the same things. Heal them, heal me. Sooner or later, I learn of the loss and pain and hurt that opens up hearts and souls to the suffering of others.

I think that is the birth of compassion, the understanding that no one escapes being hurt or wounded, our suffering is never our own, everybody loses people they love, everybody gets hurt or rejected or disappointed, everyone who loves a dog loses a dog.

Compassion is the sister of empathy, the gift of being able to stand in the shoes of another, the highest level of humanity.

My suffering and sadness is never mine alone. Compassion demands of us that we go where it hurts, writes Henri Nouwen, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear confusion and anguish.

Compassion challenges us to cry out, to stand with those in misery, to comfort those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears, and comfort those who are frightened.

Compassion is about being weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, powerless with the powerless. How else can we relate to suffering and learn how to heal. And it’s simple enough for me to do, I’ve felt all of those things in my life, and sometimes, still do.

I am fortunate to have broken down, to embrace mental illness as a window into my soul and a path back to life. Compassion was the medicine that helped to heal me.

I’ve learned that even the most distressed and wounded human beings can  sense compassion in others, and to me, compassion is really nothing more than the authentic condition of being a human being.

There are all sorts of ways to be wounded. One is anger and dominance – just look at the news. The other is a live full of empathy, living with a soft and gentle hand.

As a wounded healer, I’ve learned to show my own vulnerability.

Everything is a gift, I know now that I can use all of the hurts and wounds in life to good purpose, to do good. I’ve learned that being crazy doesn’t set me apart from anyone, it makes us all the same. I’ve learned there is no shame in it.

I think this is what people mean when they speak of a Jesus Heart.