Elephants and Antjie Krog

So I just wrapped up Don Miller's To Own a Dragon and the ending was an incredible insight into grace for me. Check out this little excerpt (I feel awkward for plagiarizing),
"And I heard the term before,Wounded Healer. Yet, I had never applied the term to my life. It makes you wonder, doesn't it, whether or not God calls specific people who have specific pain to the authority of empathy? Experience is, after all, the best education. I am the one who will wrestle with security, I am the one who will overcome my fear of intimacy, I am the one who will learn the hard task of staying with a woman and our children, I am the one who will mentor others through the difficult journey of life, perhaps rescuing them from what I have been rescued"...
I took creative liberty to change some of this to make it more personal to me. As I went back and put "I am the one" in bold, I realized that I was leaving something out. Yes, even though it is understood, it must be said. God is the one who kept me through all of the junk in my life. Junk that must be used to help someone else. Too many people use their own junk selfishly. But thankfully, Don Miller didn't. And I will not either. The question is now, what do I do with it. Is it just talking one on one, is it being involved in a group and leading them through it, or even starting an organization for men and people who need this.
The prayer is that God takes the junk and molds it into something beautiful, like pottery. I heard somewhere that He is considered a potter...sarcasm intended.
But through pain comes joy. A rose bush becomes beautiful only after it is pruned. If it goes untended then it becomes overgrown with a bunch of stuff that stunts its growth and beauty.
I have been pruned and fed with a gracious God, THE MOST INCREDIBLE WIFE, ASHLEY, an incredible amount of genuine friends, and the strength to overcome me, to not be me. Livin the dream