Why Spiritual Direction... because spiritual direction transformed my life when I needed it the most. In one of my lowest moments, I finally threw up my surrender flag (basically, raised my hands!) and opened myself up to the gift of spiritual directors and spiritual mentors. They walked with me as I began to face the pain I had buried for far too long... overwhelming grief, stress, trauma, shame, anxiety, and fear... all concealed behind a protective armor I thought would keep me safe. Something about the way they held space opened me up, and that's when I slowly began reclaiming the parts of myself I had lost. Still, it was two defining moments that drew me even deeper into this sacred path. One came through a dream… an unsettling, deeply embarrassing experience that forced me to confront my own sexual brokenness. It was as if something buried in my soul surfaced without warning, and I didn't know where it had come from. I tried everything to make that thing go away… praying, healing services, repenting, striving to banish the thoughts. Yet, they lingered. Shame clung to me, whispering lies that I was beyond help. But it wasn’t until I found the courage to share this with a trusted spiritual companion that I encountered grace. Instead of condemnation, I received kindness and help. She simply said, "Cynthia, you’ve been wounded." Those words unlocked something deep within me. She named the reality I had been afraid to face... I was wounded... and Jesus, the Wounded Healer, was not turning away either. He was inviting me into a journey of restoration and repair. That moment marked the beginning of my interior work of sustainable freedom. The second moment came from witnessing injustice within my own family. My auntie, a fierce civil rights advocate for African American nurses, worked tirelessly alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to break barriers in the medical field. She fought for equity, for dignity, for spaces where Black nurses could thrive. And yet, in her final years of her life, I saw exhaustion, depression, disappointment and the weight of battles fought without the rest and renewal she deserved. It felt like an absence of the tangible rewards I had assumed justice should bring. Where was the peace, the security, the flourishing that should have been hers? I struggled with God. More honestly, I raged at the disparities I saw… and the ones I had felt deep within myself. It was a built-up anger, an unrelenting surge that reminded me of Hagar, an enslaved immigrant Egyptian woman cast out into the wilderness, abandoned and unseen by the world. I couldn’t reconcile what I was witnessing with the faith I had been taught... a version entangled in colonial ideals and nationalistic identity, one that promised ease for the faithful but ignored the wounds of the oppressed. It wasn’t the faith of Jesus; it was a theological derailment dressed in religious language. Still, in that wilderness, Hagar’s story invited me to see my own pain differently. I was drawn into the mystery of God’s justice... not one that promises ease or success, but the embodied presence of a God who sees, who weeps, who walks with the wounded. Like Hagar, I had felt dismissed and unseen. But my anger didn’t disqualify me from faith; it became a doorway into Jesus’ own lament and righteous grief. Even there, God was not absent but inviting me deeper... not only to grieve injustice, but to confront the unhealed desires within me, the ones that, unchecked, could mirror the very systems I longed to dismantle.