⁵ “See, I will send the prophet Elijah to you before that great and dreadful day of the LORD comes. ⁶ He will turn the hearts of the parents to their children, and the hearts of the children to their parents; or else I will come and strike the land with total destruction.”

Malachi 4: 5 and 6.

I’ve been thinking about these verses a lot lately. I think we’ve done a really good job in the last 10 years or so of teaching people to recognize their wounds from their parents and how that is impacting their life. We have done a good job of helping people to realize that they don’t have to be like their parents. They don’t have to make the same mistakes.

But…

I wonder if we have done as good of a job teaching people to explore their parents wounds. In other words, what does it look like to look at the people who have wounded me and try to understand what it means to minister to them? I wonder if we worry so much about how others hearts should be toward our hearts that we forget the second half of this verse and others like it that talk about turning our hearts toward those who have come before us.