Walking With Christ

(Part 5 of 17)

⚓ Floatie:  The Question Jesus Still Asks

Mark 10:51  And Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” And the blind man said to him, “Rabbi, let me recover my sight.”(ESV)

This question is not trivial.  It is diagnostic.

Jesus never begins with the surface.  He begins with the wound.  He asks people to name what is actually broken in them — not what is socially acceptable, not what sounds holy, not what feels manageable.

The power of this moment is simple:  Healing begins where honesty begins.

This message is the pivot of the Durable Souls subseries.  This is where the abstract becomes concrete.  This is where the believer learns to locate the real injury — the one beneath the symptoms — so prayer, Scripture, and spiritual formation finally converge in the right place.  This is mental health work and spiritual work at the same time.  Because naming a wound is the first act of reclaiming wholeness.

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✒️ Forge:  The Biblical Framework for Identifying the Real Wound

Scripture never treats human pain as random.
The Bible assumes that:

• wounds have origins,
• emotions have histories,
• trauma has layers,
• sin has roots,
• fear has a story,
• shame has a voice,
• and the soul bears marks that the mind refuses to articulate.

When Jesus heals, He exposes the root.  Modern believers often address the fruit.

To name the wound biblically, we must understand the three layers Scripture gives us:

1. Layer One:  The Symptom (the visible behavior or feeling).

This includes:

• anxiety,
• anger,
• panic,
• apathy,
• numbness,
• addiction,
• overthinking,
• avoidance,
• relational fear,
• compulsive actions,
• emotional volatility.

These are not the wound.  These are the signals of a wound.  A symptom is not a sin.  It is a messenger.

2. Layer Two:  The Pain (the internal injury that creates the symptom).

This is the emotional layer:

• abandonment,
• betrayal,
• disappointment,
• humiliation,
• loneliness,
• neglect,
• loss,
• instability,
• rejection.

This is closer to the wound — but still not the deepest layer.  Pain is what you feel.  But pain has a cause.

3. Layer Three:  The Fracture (the moment the world broke something inside you).

This is the wound beneath the wound.
Here live the events, seasons, or patterns that formed the pain:

• the night someone left,
• the year you weren’t protected,
• the family that taught you fear,
• the church that taught you shame,
• the friendship that betrayed you,
• the trauma you never named,
• the loss you never grieved,
• the lie you believed because nobody corrected it,
• the failure that rewrote your identity.

This layer is almost always hidden.  Not because people are unwilling to see it — but because nobody ever taught them how.

4. Durable Souls teaches you to trace backward:  from symptom to pain to fracture.

Because if you only treat the symptom, you stay fragile.  If you treat the emotion but not the cause, the fracture stays unhealed.

Christ heals fractures.

The Spirit illuminates fractures.

The Word exposes fractures.

Prayer releases fractures.

But nothing changes until the wound is named.  The soul cannot heal what the mind refuses to acknowledge.

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⚒️ Anvil:  How to Actually Identify Your Wound (A Practical Map)

This is where most believers have never been guided before — how to walk backward through the emotional architecture to the real injury.

Below is the process.  It is simple, but not easy.

Step 1:  Identify the symptom.

Ask:  “What is happening to me right now?”

Examples:

• “I’m panicking.”
• “I’m angry.”
• “I’m numb.”
• “I’m ashamed.”
• “I can’t stop thinking about this.”
• “I feel abandoned.”

Do not moralize the symptom.  Do not interpret it.  Just name it.

Step 2:  Identify the emotion beneath the symptom.

Ask:  “What am I actually feeling underneath this reaction?”

Examples:

• Panic is often the fear of losing control.
• Anger is often feeling unheard.
• Numbness is often protection from overwhelm.
• Shame is often the fear of being exposed.
• Overthinking is often the desire to avoid unpredictable pain.
• Withdrawal is often the fear of rejection.

The deeper emotion is the language of the internal wound.

Step 3:  Identify the belief attached to that emotion.

Ask:  “What story does this emotion tell me about myself?”

Examples:

• “I’m not safe.”
• “No one will come for me.”
• “I can’t trust anyone.”
• “I always mess things up.”
• “Something is wrong with me.”
• “If I let people close, they’ll hurt me.”
• “If I show weakness, I’ll be abandoned.”

These beliefs are rarely spoken out loud, but they are always active inside the person.

Step 4:  Identify the fracture that created that story.

Ask the hardest question:  “When did I first feel this?”

Take your time.

This moment is almost always:

• a childhood wound,
• a moment of betrayal,
• an early failure,
• an unaddressed trauma,
• a pattern of neglect,
• a season of instability,
• a formative experience you were too young to interpret.

This is the fracture.  This is what Christ wants.  This is where healing begins.

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🔥 Ember:  My Witness to Naming the Wound

I spent years praying against symptoms that weren’t the real wound.

I prayed for:

• peace while carrying unspoken fear,
• discipline while carrying exhaustion,
• purity while carrying loneliness,
• clarity while carrying grief,
• joy while carrying shame,
• boldness while carrying rejection,
• strength while carrying emotional malnutrition.

I thought I was failing.  I thought God was silent.  I thought something was wrong with me.  But none of those things were true.  The problem wasn’t spiritual apathy.  It was misidentified wounds.

Once I learned to trace the symptoms backward, things changed:

• My prayers shifted.
• My insight deepened.
• Scripture opened.
• Peace increased.
• The Spirit connected dots I had never seen before.

Naming the wound didn’t weaken me.  It unified me.  And unified people heal.  I’ve witnessed the same breakthrough in others — the moment a believer realizes the thing tormenting them wasn’t sin at all, but an unhealed fracture the enemy kept whispering through.  Once the wound is named, the lie loses its power.

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🌿 Covenant Triumph:  Christ Heals the Wound You Bring to Him

Jesus always asks:  “What do you want Me to do for you?”  Not because He doesn’t know the answer — but because naming the wound aligns the soul and mind in truth.

Once the real wound is brought into the light:

• prayer becomes targeted,
• Scripture becomes relevant,
• worship becomes grounding,
• repentance becomes joyful,
• peace becomes attainable,
• identity becomes stable.

Durability begins where honesty begins.  In the next message — Durable Souls part 6:  The Voices of the Wound — How Trauma, Shame, and Fear Rewrite Your Inner Dialogue — we explore how the fracture begins to speak inside the mind, and how to tell the difference between:

• your voice,
• the wound’s voice,
• the enemy’s voice,
• and God’s voice.

Christ is not afraid of your wound.  He already knows it.  He just wants you to bring Him the right one.

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[⚓ Floatie] [✒️ Forge] [⚒️ Anvil] [🔥 Ember] [🌿 Covenant Triumph]
This post follows the Forge Baseline Rule—layered truth for the discerning remnant.