Passions and Wounds

I started this specific blog eight years ago but I've been blogging and sharing on various message boards for much longer than that. I have often used this blog to share my deeply personal feelings about various topics, often times sharing probably TOO deeply for a personal blog... but at the same time, it's me, it's my mind, my thoughts, my heart.. and no one is making you come here and read it. Of course I'm grateful that you are. ;)

If you didn't know, I am somewhat of a digital hoarder so it's not uncommon at all for me to find pictures dating back several years sparking memories of all sorts. When I came across this picture recently of Brian Pruitt and myself, I just stared at it for what seemed like hours. In many ways it was representing a completely different time in my life. In fact, it represented what felt like was a completely different version of myself. 

The picture is from about a decade ago when two of my driving passions were Internet Radio and leading live worship. My ministry (Healing Stream Media) was still growing and we would stream live to those stations several times a week. Every couple of months we would do larger online conferences where I would be joined by special guest speakers or guest musicians,

I had such a hunger to see God's Presence flow and touch others back then.

An inescapable question comes to my mind and that is "what happened?"  How did I get from there to where I am today? The answer to that is both simple and complex so for the purpose of this blog I'll use the simple one. 

My passions were slowly replaced with wounds.

Many wounds were inflicted by the local church, specifically many local leaders. Still other wounds came from friends and ministry partners who would start to use our friendship as leverage to get me to make ministry based changes that they wanted to see even if I didn't feel God wanted it done that way.

Over the last few years, the deepest woundings of all came from my personal family. My wife's decision to hide her feelings for another man devastated me at the core of who I was back in 2018. Once THAT bomb was dropped on me, all of the other woundings up to that point paled in comparison.

I went from a conservative Christian ministry leader with an amazing family to a devastated and betrayed husband who didn't know which end was up with that news.

I plan on sharing in much greater detail about the things I have learned over the past four years because I believe that God has a plan to include me in some very wonderful things that will ultimately help a lot of other people...  so more on that stuff soon... but back in 2018 when I first got that news, I instantly pulled back away from any and all public ministry stuff. I stopped blogging nearly as regularly as regular readers would likely already know.  

I took the radio stations that I had created and made them all 100% automated so as not to feature my music or my voice. I shut down the radio shows I was doing and I did it all largely because I didn't know what else to do. 

In the middle of this private emotional hell for me came the lovely pandemic with all of the stresses and drama therein. I'm sure I don't have to tell you all about that as everyone has their own stories of woe about that... but it was just more sauce for the goose for me.

In the last four years I have walked roads that I previously did not even know existed. I THOUGHT I knew what emotional pain and suffering was but this season has shown me I didn't really understand just how dark and painful the human condition can truly become. I engaged in activities that I'm not proud of and after walking on the darkest of dark sides I can report back to all who care that God's Grace IS stronger and greater than any and all sin. 

​In coming weeks I plan to share more and do somewhat of a reinvention of myself. God has been talking to me about living "Victoriously" and what that actually means in our post covid, hypersexualized world. In the meantime, remember that Pure Love is the cure for Fear.  

More soon,

​Mark

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