Healing isn't easy. Sometimes we think will be but it just isn't. It never is and it never will be. We can push it away and burry it, smother it, hide it, run from it, and do everything within our power to ignore it but it will always come back around to find us until we face and embrace it. We have to get right up close to it and look it right in the eyes no matter how painful that may be. Sometimes we have to walk through hell in order to escape from it.Jesus didn't face suffering by praying it away on His own. He didn't just see that there was pain He actually immersed Himself in it. Sometimes we never get past the acknowledgement stage. We may see the dissention and chaos but we can still choose to push it away and thus carry it with us. Some people see the pain and yet they carry it with them even to the grave. It seems easier at first to do this. It seems like it will be less painful to carry it than to face it and deal with it. This is true… at first. But the longer you allow it to well up inside of you the more it will fix itself into your being and the harder it will be to ever be healed from it.
Jesus is called the “man of sorrows.” This is because He chose the most difficult rout that anyone could ever take; the rout to healing. He walked through the Hell of the world in order to defeat it. He was cursed to defeat the cure. He even died to defeat death. The difficult and paradoxical reality is that we are healed already because of Jesus and yet we are still seeking to be healed.
God, bring us through whatever it may take to get to healing. I understand, at least in part, the danger of this prayer but I have placed my trust in you. You’ve failed no one and I believe you will not fail me. Help me to trust you and be faithful to me as you have promised.
3 comments:
Great thoughts here, Wes. Deeply challenging to all who call themselves followers of Jesus Christ.
To nuance it in my own (Wright adopted) language: God is in the business of healing Creation. His method is to draw the evil, the pain, the sin -the fire onto Himself and off of His Creation. But then He calls us to be like Him and follow that path too.
Wright illustrates at one point how a fox gets rid of fleas by taking a tuft of wool in its snout and slowly backs down into a pool of water. The fleas move over the fox's body to avoid the water. Eventually, as the fox is nearly entirely submerged, all the fleas find their way onto the wool. Just as the fox goes under, he lets go of the wool which floats away down stream full of fleas while the fox emerges clean. Wright points out that Jesus is like the wool in the story. Those of us who follow Him are too. That is how God's healing happens.
Anyone want to sign on now?
Many blessings...
(and, been missin' ya lately)
I feel ya - bro. Me too. Really tuff here too.
No worries. You are in my prayers this a.m.
Many blessings...
Thanks Mike
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