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

This week, Dan talks about his upcoming book, Healing the Wounded Heart, a 25-year retrospective

about everything he has learned working with sexually abused men and women.

Before diving into the content of the book, Dan shares his desires

that readers approach the book with honesty, curiosity, and a deep belief that real healing

and transformation are possible.

It's my privilege over the next three podcasts to tell you about the new book, Healing the Wounded Heart.

It is a new book, a 25-year retrospective, on what I have learned with the enormous privilege of working with sexually abused men and women.

And so this book is not a redo of the Wounded Heart.

It really is a brand new book attempting to say,

what are some of the things that have been crucial for us as a culture, for me as an

individual to address with regard to the harm of abuse? So over the next three podcasts, I want to

highlight a few of the core things that certainly I attempted to capture in writing in the book. But before I

launch into something of the content of the book, what I wanted to do first was to talk about

the stance that I would hope a reader would take as they engage this material.

In some ways, I think we live between these two key words, denial and doubt.

We don't want to fully face the level of extremity and harm that we have endured, or that is being suffered around us.

The cry of God in the midst of the heartache of this world, no one can bear what God sees on a day-to-day basis but God.

And yet our incursions, uh, into news programs or into reports of harm around the world,

most of us have to engage it with a certain level of, I'm sad to hear, but I just can't engage

that 85 people today were blown up in a Nigerian refugee camp because Boko Haram has chosen

to seek revenge for some of their soldiers being killed just a week earlier.

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