How to Renew and Heal Along the Way

I broke my wrist once and didn’t know it for three days. I was convinced it was just a bad sprain, so I wrapped it, adjusted my grip on things, started using my other hand for tasks that required any real pressure, and told myself it would probably renew itself and feel better by the weekend.

It didn’t. And when I finally sat in the exam room looking at the X-ray, the doctor gave me a look I haven’t forgotten. She said I’d been compensating so well that I’d actually started causing problems in my wrist above the fracture from the awkward angles and way I’d been holding it.

I had gotten so good at working around the injury that I hadn’t noticed the new damage accumulating.

I’ve thought about that wrist more times than seems reasonable since then, because it turns out it’s a surprisingly accurate picture of what we do with wounds that go unaddressed in our inner lives too.

What We Do Instead of Healing and Choosing to Renew

We are remarkably creative at working around the places that hurt.

We stay busy enough that the tender spots don’t get pressed. We restructure our lives so certain situations that activate the old wounds just don’t come up very often. Eventually, we learn to function around the injury so smoothly that we eventually stop registering it as an injury at all. It just becomes part of how we move.

And for a while, that works. Life continues.

Until something presses directly on the fracture. A relationship that gets close enough to reach it. A season of stress that strips away the buffer. Or a quiet moment with no distractions where the thing we’ve been working around is suddenly the only thing in the room.

Isaiah 40:31 promises something that sounds almost too good to be practical: “Those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.”

But notice what the renewal requires first. Hope. Not performance. Not having it together. And not having already healed on your own. Just hope. The honest, sometimes desperate turning toward the One who can actually do something about the fracture.

Renewal starts with acknowledging there’s something that needs renewing.

The Process to Help You Renew

The doctor who read my X-ray wasn’t unkind when she told me the truth about my wrist. She was actually doing me a favor. Because continuing to compensate indefinitely, adding new damage on top of the original injury, was far worse than the discomfort of finally addressing the thing directly.

I think God’s gentleness works something like that too. The moments when something tender gets exposed. When the fracture we’ve been carefully working around suddenly becomes visible. That’s God saying, “I see what’s actually there, and I’m not leaving you to compensate your way through the rest of your life.“

Healing requires being found out. It requires letting the X-ray happen, sitting with what it shows, and trusting the One reading it to know what comes next.

This month, our theme is RENEW — Restore Every Need, Expecting Wholeness. Because the Word has a way of finding the fractures we’ve learned to work around and meeting us there with something better than compensation. It meets us with the possibility of actual healing.

Join the Conversation

Have you ever pushed through something physical only to realize later that you’d been running on fumes for longer than you thought?

Maybe it was an injury, an illness, or sheer exhaustion. What finally made you slow down? Share in the comments. We’d love to hear your story.