We cry out from a broken heart,
Shards lying all around us on the ground.
Our tears pour out—
It feels like they will never end.
The pain explodes from within us,
Our chests feeling like they will break apart.
Lying face down on the ground,
Our desperate plea for help and rescue escaping our lips.
Our Kind Shepherd is here,
Never leaving, never abandoning us in grief.
A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief Himself,
He will not turn away.
Hope is often viewed as a destination—like saying we hope for the future, and believing we get the hope when we arrive at the future we are expecting or creating in our minds. We believe that our lives should “normalize” or the tough stuff should stop happening at some point, and that’s the point where hope is manifested.
I was reading Katherine Wolf’s Treasures in the Dark recently, and she addresses this after she has suffered an almost-life-ending stroke, multiple neural events, broken bones and recovery from all of those things. She says:
Whether I acknowledged it or not, hope had been a destination to me. Something to be attained or achieved. I thought I could successfully complete a one-time progressive ascent from hurting to healing to hoping, then hang out at the top for the rest of my life. Easy breezy! Maybe this sounds like something you’ve believed too.
I have noticed in my own life that I will look at circumstances as “bad” or “good” depending on the outcome and how I feel about it. Especially recently, though, I have been challenged to look for the good in every situation—to find God in it. This doesn’t mean that I’m necessarily happy or comfortable in whatever is surrounding me, but I want to push through that discomfort to see what God has for me. I do believe there is always beauty that He can bring from ashes, that He is always bringing good even out of really yucky stuff. This doesn’t mean that He causes the yucky stuff or that we change the suffering by positive thinking, and I think that’s sometimes where we get tripped up. We don’t believe a god of love could watch us go through difficult things because that’s not loving—but perhaps the most loving thing to do is to allow the difficult things but still to bring hope and joy in the middle.
I just finished reading The Watchmaker’s Daughter, a newer book about Corrie ten Boom’s life during and after World War 2. If you know me, you know that Corrie is one of my heroes, so a new book about her life was right up my alley. One of the themes that comes through repeatedly is the way the ten Boom family all tried to find joy and hope in extremely dire situations. Whether hiding Jews and working with the underground, enduring prison, or dealing with the torture and horrific conditions in a concentration camp, they all realized their relationship with God got them through and allowed them to see the good in terrible situations. Her sister Betsie, who died while in the concentration camp, told her sister Corrie that people would listen to them because they had been through such awful conditions. And the message was clear—no matter how deep and dark the pit in which they found themselves, God’s love was deeper still and carried them through. Corrie went on to travel the world speaking about forgiveness and God’s love, and she had earned her place to do so as she worked with communities who were forsaken and abandoned by all other help.
One of the most fascinating things I’ve learned in the last few years is the process of a caterpillar in a cocoon. I had always thought of the couple of weeks a caterpillar spends there as a little nap while their body sprouts wings, and that is the furthest thing from the truth.
After eating copious amounts of leaves and growing to the maximum, a caterpillar forms a cocoon around themselves in order to become a butterfly. Once inside, the caterpillar literally splits its skin apart, and then its own digestive juices digest and liquefy its body. Inside the cocoon, it is just goo—nothing remains of its old structure other than the liquefied, digested slime. Then, the cells reform as an entirely new being.
When the butterfly finally works its way out of the cocoon, it has been completely transformed in what has to be one of the ickiest processes. It comes out beautiful, but, man, did it ever go through it to get there!
Every day a thousand things clamor for our attention, yelling to us about how important they are. Almost everyone in our lives are happy to tell us what should matter to us, what our focus should be. We can so easily live distracted, which also means we live exhausted as we get judged from every side about what should be our primary focus and how to make it so.
I have been rejected and beat up by religious people more than nonreligious. I know it’s because they have decided that the religion they hold is what’s saving them, what’s making God happy and they are terrified I’m doing it wrong. I have often said (as my mentor and friend Mike Wells taught me to do) that I will say things that are wrong, even downright blasphemy. God will allow this because He wants to draw people to Himself, not to follow me. It also keeps me in a place where I know my weakness, and I know I need Holy Spirit to interpret the very words that come out my mouth or my laptop. He is the great interpreter, and He is able to translate and speak through whatever is said to bring His message to the person.
I will be the first to state that I can get it wrong, and I never want to stand up as someone who has all the answers. Because I don’t. All I have to offer is Jesus—a Life who gently invades our hearts and heals us from brokenness. I don’t want to get distracted by whatever program or theology someone has decided is preeminent. I want to be the person with the one-stringed banjo who keeps playing that one string over and over, because it’s the only string that matters to me. There are days often where people accuse me of being affiliated with all sorts of broken people. Isn’t that funny? We are all broken, but have arguments about who is more broken and judge and condemn others to try to make ourselves feel superior.
We cry out from a broken heart,
Shards lying all around us on the ground.
Our tears pour out—
It feels like they will never end.
The pain explodes from within us,
Our chests feeling like they will break apart.
Lying face down on the ground,
Our desperate plea for help and rescue escaping our lips.
Our Kind Shepherd is here,
Never leaving, never abandoning us in grief.
A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief Himself,
He will not turn away.
