Why spiritual direction? Because it transformed my life when I needed it most. In one of my lowest moments, I finally lifted my "surrender flag," literally threw up my hands, and opened myself to the spiritual directors and mentors who have shaped my life. They walked with me as I faced pain that I had buried for far too long: grief, stress, trauma, shame, anxiety, fear. All of it had been held behind a kind of protective armor I believed would keep me safe. There was something about the way they held space that helped me face what had once felt impossible to face. Piece by piece, I began reclaiming parts of myself I had lost along the way. If you have ever carried something you couldn't quite name, you already know something of this story. It's not just mine. It belongs to anyone who has learned to survive by keeping their truest self hidden. Two defining invitations drew me deeply into this sacred path. The First Invitation: The Courage to Name the Wound. It began through a dream, unsettling and deeply embarrassing. Something buried in my soul surfaced without warning, forcing me to confront my own sexual brokenness. 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 from me. He was inviting me into restoration. That moment marked the beginning of my interior work toward sustainable freedom, a freedom that has since become the foundation of the work I now offer to others. The Second Invitation: Wrestling with Justice. This one emerged through my own family's story. My auntie was a fierce civil rights advocate for African American nurses who 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 her exhaustion, her disappointment, and the heavy cost of battles fought without the rest she deserved. I struggled with God. More honestly, there was a burning indignation in me that I could not quiet. My anger reflected the emotional weight carried by everyone who has ever been unjustly cast into wilderness places, unseen and discarded. I could not reconcile what I was witnessing with the version of faith I had inherited, a faith entangled with individualistic, caste-like ideals, promising ease for the faithful while overlooking the wounds of the marginalized and oppressed. What I encountered in that season was not the life of Jesus I had come to know, but a theological derailment dressed in religious language, one that masked injustice and silenced the cries of the wounded. Yet in that wilderness, something shifted. I was drawn back to the justice of God, not a justice built on prosperity logic or merit, but the embodied presence of a God who sees, who stays close, who does not abandon the wounded. I had felt dismissed and unseen. Still, my anger did not disqualify me. It became a doorway into lament, into righteous grief, into deeper truth and advocacy. And even there, God kept inviting me further: not only to grieve injustice done to me and to others, but to confront the emotional and spiritual structures that formed within my own self, the unexamined desires, the inherited ways of seeing and surviving, that could subtly mirror the very systems of empire and religious entitlement I longed to dismantle.