At some level, so many of us have experienced emptiness. But very few people know why. And even fewer people know how to fill that emptiness. But we spend our lives trying…

As flawed human beings, we so often cringe at our humanness. We try eveything to erase it. We look for any way to hide from our wounds and to numb the pain. But what if we didn’t have to hide? What if our wound became the door to a deeper understanding of ourselves and God? What if every wound served a purpose and the process of healing made us stronger?

This life and our entire journey here, is not an end in itself. It is a purposeful process, designed by God to shape our hearts. To prepare our souls for the Final Meeting with Him. We must allow the process to refine and remake us. And our wounds are a part of that process. It will hurt. It will seem like the end so many times. But it is not the end. Our journey will keep going and we can rise out of our pain, stronger.

And then in the End, it won’t be how we walked in the sun-but how we handled the storm-that will define us. It won’t be about how we ran.

It will be about how we fell, and then got back up.

This book is about finding strength in God and in our capacity to be both human and beautiful–both flawed and inspired. It is a journey to the understanding that we are flawed by design so that we can find strength and beauty in relying entirely on the Flawless.

This book is about learning why we suffer and how to stop our pain from destroying us. It is a spiritual and psychological manual for healing and growth through our pain. It is about finding peace and purpose, no matter what we’ve been through.

We live in a world where the moment we feel pain, we find ourselves surrounded by countless sedatives, promising to take it away. Sex, drugs, alcohol, materialism, consumerism are some of the many escapes we use to distract ourselves from what hurts in our lives. And some of us use other sedatives. Some of us try to lose ourselves in our work and our careers. Some people try to fill the void by “living online”. We disengage from our real life and our real relationships in order to hide in a false social media world, or in our devices and technology. We become dependent upon the immediate and temporary dopamine rush of social approval. We begin to covet likes and followers and share intimate aspects of our lives in the public sphere, waiting for commentary and praise. Waiting to be seen–even if it’s by perfect strangers.

And yet all along, we only become more empty and even more isolated.

In order to thrive in this life and the next, we must have an understanding of healing. The first step in healing must be diagnosing the root cause of our pain. The second step is removing the barriers to healing. The third step is treating the wound with the necessary medicine. And finally we must keep the wound clean by ensuring our environment is not toxic.