You're listening to the Allender Center podcast with Dr. Dan Allender.

This week, Dan wrestles with the category of ambivalence.

That feeling of being stuck that comes when we find ourselves moving in two different directions without actually moving at all.

We see this ambivalence whenever we launch a new offering, like the Healing the Wounded Heart online course.

As people wrestle with the reality that the movement toward restoration will lead them first through stories of heartache and harm.

Dan invites us to consider how we might engage that end of violence with courage, kindness, and integrity.

I had the privilege of being in Philadelphia a few weeks ago doing a conference on the wounded heart

and the reality of sexual abuse and harm and the effect on our heart, our

identity, our relationship, certainly the kind of warfare that comes in the midst of that.

I had the privilege of talking to a woman who came up and asked me to sign a very battered looking copy,

in fact, a very old copy of the wounded heart.

And it was a great honor to be able to do so.

And I simply mentioned to her.

I said, this book looks like it's traveled.

And she said, well, this book

has hit the wall more often than perhaps any book I've ever read. And she said, actually,

this is, I think, my third or fourth copy. And at one level, I couldn't have been more honored

that someone would allow themselves to engage the material in that book

with a level of intensity that would cause that book to travel against a wall a number of

times. And then she said, you know, I have helped your sales, obviously, a great deal. And then a

phrase that really took my breath away.

She said, it took me 11 years to finish the book. And she said, for me to be at this conference,

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