Sometimes, pain doesn’t end where it begins. It travels. It changes hands, it changes faces—but it remains the same pain, recycled in new ways. What was once done to us can easily become what we do to others if we never pause to heal what’s been broken inside.

Many of us grew up with words that wounded more than they built. With love that felt conditional, or absent. With people who didn’t know how to show affection because they never learned what love truly looks like. And as we grow older, we often carry those same patterns without realizing it—projecting our unhealed pain on those who had nothing to do with our suffering.

The tragedy is, pain doesn’t always make people softer. Sometimes it makes them harder. Instead of using their hurt to develop compassion, they use it as armor. Instead of learning empathy, they choose indifference. And without noticing, they end up doing the very same thing that once broke them.

But it doesn’t have to stay that way.

At some point, we all have to stop and ask ourselves: What will people remember about me? Not what I’ve been through, but what I became because of it. Not how others hurt me, but how I treated others despite it.

Because our words matter. Our actions—or our silence—shape how others see love, how they see kindness, how they see people. Every day, we are either continuing the cycle or breaking it.

Healing begins when we stop blaming and start reflecting. When we stop pointing fingers and start asking, What am I contributing to this pain? That’s where growth happens. That’s where grace enters.

If only we would let our wounds teach us tenderness instead of bitterness. If only we’d allow pain to lead us back to God, not away from Him.

We may not be able to change what was done to us, but we can change what comes through us. We can choose to be the one who stops the hurt from spreading any further.

Because the cycle only continues if we let it. And love—real love—begins the moment we decide it ends with us.

“Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past.

See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?

I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.”— Isaiah 43:18–19 (NIV)

Sometimes, healing begins with release. When we let go of what hurt us, we make room for what can heal us. God is always ready to do something new in the places we thought were too broken to be restored. All He needs is our willingness to stop repeating what wounded us—and start becoming what love was meant to look like all along.

Until next time,