Why Spiritual Direction... because spiritual direction transformed my life when I needed it most. In one of my lowest moments, I finally raised my 'surrender flag' (literally, raised my hands!) and opened myself to the gift of spiritual directors and spiritual mentors. They walked with me as I faced the pain I had buried for far too long: overwhelming grief, stress, trauma, shame, anxiety, fear. All of it held behind protective armor I believed would keep me safe. Something about the way they held space helped soften what felt impossible to face. That’s when I slowly began reclaiming the parts of myself I had lost. Still, it was two defining moments that drew me deeper into this sacred path. The 'First Invitation' was naming the wound. It began through a dream… unsettling and deeply embarrassing. It forced me to confront my own sexual brokenness, as if something buried in my soul had surfaced without warning. I tried everything to make it go away... prayer, healing services, repentance, striving. Still, the thoughts lingered. Shame whispered that I was beyond help. When I finally shared this with a trusted spiritual companion, her response surprised me. Instead of condemnation, she offered compassion and said simply, “Cynthia, you’ve been wounded. Those words settled into my body like truth I had been afraid to claim. I wasn’t defective. I wasn’t beyond repair. I was wounded. And Jesus, the Wounded Healer, was not turning away. He was inviting me into restoration. That moment became the beginning of my interior work toward sustainable freedom. The 'Second Invitation' was wrestling with justice. It was a defining moment emerged through my own family story. My auntie, a fierce civil rights advocate for African American nurses, worked alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to break barriers in the medical field. She fought for equity, dignity, and spaces where Black nurses could thrive. Yet in her final years, I witnessed exhaustion, disappointment, and the heavy cost of battles fought without the rest she deserved. I struggled with God. More honestly, I raged. My anger echoed the story of Hagar, an enslaved Egyptian immigrant woman cast into the wilderness, unseen and discarded. I could not reconcile what I was witnessing with the version of faith I had inherited, a faith entangled with colonial ideals and nationalistic identity, promising ease for the faithful while ignoring the wounds of the marginalized. It was not the faith of Jesus. It was a theological derailment dressed in religious language, masking injustice while silencing the cries of the wounded. Yet in that wilderness, Hagar helped me see my own pain differently. I was drawn back to the justice of God... not a justice that promises comfort or reward, but the embodied presence of a God who sees, who stays close, who does not abandon the wounded. Like Hagar, I had felt dismissed and unseen. And still, my anger did not disqualify me. It became a doorway... into lament, into righteous grief, into deeper truth. Even there, God was inviting me further: not only to grieve injustice, but to gently confront my own unexamined desires and instincts, the ones that could quietly mirror the very systems I longed to dismantle.