Holding Fire and Fracture: Living in the Tension of Trauma, Healing, and Pursuing Jesus

By Dylan Verdun Sullivan
There’s a tension I’ve been learning to sit in.
Not fix.
Not escape.
Not rush through.
But actually sit in.
And if I’m honest, it’s uncomfortable.
Because it feels like two realities that shouldn’t coexist… yet somehow they do.
On one side, there is trauma.
Past wounds.
Memories that still carry weight.
Patterns that didn’t just disappear when I decided to change.
And on the other side, there is something equally real.
A fire.
A deep, undeniable desire to pursue Jesus.
A longing to live differently.
To walk in truth.
To move forward.
And what I’m learning—slowly, sometimes reluctantly—is this:
You can live in both.
You can hold that tension.
The Expectation of Resolution
For a long time, I thought it worked differently.
I thought healing meant the past would lose its voice completely.
That once I stepped fully into faith, into transformation, into pursuing Jesus—everything else would fall away.
That the wounds would close.
The memories would soften.
The patterns would disappear.
Clean.
Clear.
Resolved.
But that hasn’t been my reality.
When the Past Still Speaks
There are still moments where the past shows up.
Not always loudly.
Sometimes quietly.
Unexpectedly.
A thought.
A feeling.
A memory that surfaces without warning.
And in those moments, it can feel confusing.
Because part of me thinks:
Why is this still here?
Shouldn’t I be past this?
Does this mean something is wrong?
A Real Moment From Yesterday
Yesterday was a perfect example of this tension.
I had an incredible day finishing my first term at Kings Bible College.
Six weeks.
I honestly can’t believe how quickly that time has passed.
It feels like just yesterday I was stepping into it, unsure of what to expect, and now here I am—on the other side of a full term, carrying everything I’ve learned, everything I’ve felt, everything that’s been stirred in me.
It was a deeply impactful day.
There was a sense of joy.
A sense of grounding.
A sense of clarity.
I felt settled.
I felt thankful.
I felt like something real had taken place in my life over those six weeks.
But then something shifted.
As the afternoon unfolded and the busyness of the day began to settle, I found myself in a completely different space.
My mind and my heart went from being calm and anchored to suddenly cycling through everything.
It was like my mind was flipping through pages of a book.
Emotion after emotion.
Thought after thought.
Fast.
Unfiltered.
Uncontrolled.
And within about 15 minutes, I felt like I was drowning in it.
The Sudden Shift
That’s the part that catches me off guard.
The speed of it.
One moment I’m grounded.
The next moment, everything feels scattered.
And it’s not just one emotion.
It’s all of them.
Joy.
Sadness.
Frustration.
Reflection.
Memories.
Questions.
All layered on top of each other.
Trying to Make Sense of It
In those moments, my instinct is to try and make sense of it.
To analyse it.
To understand why it’s happening.
But sometimes, there isn’t an immediate explanation.
Sometimes it’s just the reality of carrying a lot internally.
A lot of history.
A lot of growth.
A lot of change.
All moving at once.

The Lie of “Either / Or”

What I’m starting to see is that I was living with an assumption that wasn’t actually true.
That it had to be one or the other.
Either I am fully healed and free…
or I am still broken and stuck.
Either I am walking in fire…
or I am still defined by my wounds.
But life isn’t that clean.
It doesn’t divide itself that neatly.
Because the truth is
Both can exist at the same time.
Carrying Two Realities
I can have a day that is deeply impactful, full of growth, full of joy…
And still find myself later overwhelmed by emotion.
That doesn’t cancel out the day.
It doesn’t erase what happened.
It doesn’t mean something is wrong.
It means I’m human.
It means I’m in process.
Trauma Doesn’t Follow a Schedule
Trauma doesn’t operate on a schedule.
It doesn’t wait for the “right” moment.
It doesn’t say, “You’ve had a good day, so I’ll stay quiet.”
It can surface at any time.
Even after something beautiful.
Even after something meaningful.
And that can feel confusing if you don’t understand it.
The Fire Is Still Real
But here’s what matters.
Even in that moment—when everything felt overwhelming—the fire didn’t disappear.
My desire to pursue Jesus didn’t vanish.
My direction didn’t change.
Even if my emotions were unstable, something deeper remained steady.
The Tension Is Not Failure
That moment yesterday could have easily led me into discouragement.
I could have looked at it and thought:
“Why am I still like this?”
“Why can’t I just stay steady?”
But I’m learning to see it differently.
The tension is not failure.
It’s part of the process.
Learning to Sit in It
Instead of trying to fix it immediately, I’m learning to sit in it.
To not panic.
To not overreact.
To let it move through without assuming it defines me.
Because not every emotion needs to be solved.
Some just need to be acknowledged.
The Fire in the Middle of It
Being on fire for Jesus doesn’t mean I don’t have moments like that.
It means I keep coming back.
It means my direction stays the same—even when my emotions fluctuate.
It means the fire exists in the middle of the tension, not outside of it.
You Can Hold Both
This is the truth I keep coming back to.
You can hold both.
You can have a powerful, life-giving day…
And still have moments where everything feels overwhelming.
You can feel grounded 
And then feel like you’re spiralling.
And neither cancels out the other.
The Reality of Being in Process
I am still in process.
That’s the reality.
Not finished.
Not fully formed.
Still learning.
And moments like yesterday remind me of that.
Closing Reflection
As I sit with all of this, I don’t have a perfect conclusion.
But I do have clarity.
You can live in both.
You can carry trauma and healing.
You can feel overwhelmed and still be grounded in truth.
You can be set on fire to pursue Jesus… and still have moments where everything feels messy.
And maybe that’s where real growth happens.
Not in eliminating the tension.
But in learning to remain steady within it.
Even when your mind is racing.
Even when your emotions are shifting.
Even when it feels like everything is happening at once.
To stay.
To breathe.
To not walk away.
And to keep moving forward—right in the middle of it all Jesus is enough.

About the Author

Dylan Verdun Sullivan is the founder of Refined by Fire Press and an Australian author indexed in the National Library. As a Level 7 Local Guide with over 1.2M views on Google Maps, he documents the intersection of faith, recovery, and the "light in the mundane."

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