There’s a line I can’t get out of my mind—Mary DeMuth’s hard-won conviction that “an untold story never heals.” It’s the kind of phrase that lands with the simple ring of a proverb, yet carries the awkward, painful labor of a lifetime behind it. If you watched our recent conversation, you know that Mary has built her life on the truth of those words. We should take note.
Too often, we grow up in a world where silence is safety, where memory gets redacted, where the realities we carry as children are disputed or denied by those meant to protect us. We minimize or edit, learn the rules of unspoken things, absorb the gaslight—that’s not the way it happened, you must be confused, why bring old pain into the open now? Sometimes, long after the wounds themselves have faded, it’s their denial that aches the most.
The act of telling the story, then—of naming what happened, in the face of resistance or erasure—is not a mere exercise in self-expression. It is, I am beginning to believe, the point of conversion itself: the movement from silent victimhood toward the possibility of healing. Testimony, whether whispered to a friend or shared for the world, is as sacred as prayer, as dangerous as a prophet’s rebuke, and as necessary as water to a parched spirit.
Scripture seems to know this instinctively. The Psalms reverberate with the unvarnished record of suffering and complaint. The Gospels, too, are not shy about the flaws and failures of even the heroes. Healing begins with naming—sometimes “only” in the presence of God, other times before a crowded, skeptical room. Sometimes, as both Mary and I have experienced, it is the journal, the paintbrush, the muddled half-spoken sentence that first dares to make sense of the chaos within.
Yet let’s not stop the story there.
From Brokenness to Blessing: What Healing Makes Possible
If the telling of the story breaks the dam, healing is the river that flows outward, replenishing not just ourselves but the land around us. You will recognize this shift if you’ve ever made it far enough through your own pain to lift up your eyes, look around, and begin to ask, “Who else is in need? What can I now give?” Mary’s own life—moving from the interior work of voice and survival to the outward work of mercy and solidarity—is a testament to this law of spiritual physics.
Until we name our wounds, service becomes performance or duty. Once we name them, and keep naming, we are, paradoxically, freed to serve not from compulsion or codependency, but from the deep sureness that healing is real and meant to be shared.
A broken heart, it turns out, can become the very vessel of both empathy and courage.
Solidarity in Malawi: Healing That Travels
All of this came home to me as I listened to Mary recount her recent days in Malawi. There was no sentimentality in her report—just the humble awe of presence. Her team went not as “saviors,” not to impose Western solutions, but to enter in, listen, and walk alongside. It is only those who have done their own work of truth-telling who can genuinely enter another’s vulnerability without needing to be the hero of every story.
Mary described the moment she sat with women—widows, some HIV-positive, some utterly marginalized. She realized that what was most needed was not information or even material help, but connection, kinship—solidarity forged by sharing honestly from her own journey. “Just be honest, just be vulnerable and tell the story,” she felt led by the Spirit. It was this act—the admission of weakness, the confession of having been lost—that opened doors that programs and policies alone rarely breach.
This is how the movement works: from confession, to compassion, to real, incarnate action.
The liberation we claim by telling our own story cannot stay locked within us; it’s meant to pulse outward—to our neighborhoods, our cities, and sometimes the corners of the world we never expected to visit. And the further we go, the more humility is required. To serve—whether at home or in Malawi—is to confess the limits of our knowing, the dangers of the “savior complex,” and to hang back and ask what God is already doing among these people, in this place. (As Mary observed, “The Lord’s already wherever you’re going, you’re not bringing him there. He’s already there working and doing miracles.”)
From the Local Dirt to the Far-Off Well
It’s a cycle I see everywhere the Spirit is at work. Telling the truth leads to healing. Healing grows into gratitude and empathy. Gratitude—realized or still in progress—overflows into humble service: sometimes for the neighbor next door, sometimes for the stranger on a continent you cannot pronounce. Repeat, as needed, in every generation.
Maybe it’s time to let go of the notion that “our story” is ever complete, or private, or just ours. The story wants to travel—across friendships, testimony, and acts of mercy. When it does, our wounds become the places where God’s love leaks out over boundaries of class, color, border, and church. Our healing is not just ours; it’s an offering.
The Power of Spirit—Everywhere
May we have the courage to begin with truth: not for its own sake, but for the freedom it brings. May we be those who know what it is to stand alone, so we are never surprised by loneliness in others. And may the comfort we ourselves have received return, a hundredfold, in whatever places the Spirit calls us next—whether across the street or across the world.
The invitation stands: tell your story, receive your healing, and then give—locally, globally, heart to heart, with the freedom and power that comes only from truth made flesh.
If this speaks to you, I’d love to hear your own story of courage, healing, or service—whether the work is ongoing or just begun. How has truth-telling changed what you can now give to others? Add your thoughts below, and let’s keep building communities of Spirit, story, and solidarity.
