Before God could bring me to this place
He has broken me a thousand times.
- Smith Wigglesworth
We
want to avoid suffering, death, sin, ashes. But we live in a world
crushed and broken and torn, a world God Himself visited to redeem. We
receive his poured-out life, and being allowed the high privilege of
suffering with Him, may then pour ourselves out for others.
Elisabeth Elliot
When
you sit quietly and listen to the world, you hear the grief of breaking hearts being
borne in utter silence as a fake façade puts up a front and says,
“No, I’m
okay.”
They
lie. But they are so longing to be vulnerable, and so longing to know truth.
And yet
they do not speak……until they want to. And when they speak, it rains. And when
it rains, it pours. But sometimes rain is good because it causes me to stop
cold in my own self-serving path and listen to a person tell me how painful was
their break.
Breaks
are never clean. The heart is like a window-pane that shatters in a thousand
tiny spider-webs when life hits it with a force.
I think I have it hard sometimes with my own
heart, you know. I sob a lot over Poor Old Me who thinks she’s just stepped
across the line to the point of no return. And "poor old me" commiserates with "poor old me" a lot, not remembering that "poor old me" was purchased on the cross.
I’m hit
with utter mourning, realizing just how blind I often am. How blind and deaf do
I have to be – how blind and deaf have I been – to fail to see or hear the corpse-like,
crying, living dead the world around me is?
They’re
looking for an answer. They’re begging me to hear.
And where am I? Am I involved? In tune?
Alert? Or am I with my own agendas, selfish purposes, and fears that keep me far
away from hearing all the breaking hearts around me that are longing to finally speak. Finally cry. Finally bare
their broken soul to someone – anyone – who is willing just to nod and hug and
shout in quiet urgency:
“There
is hope, God is alive, and healing happens even here!”
When I
sit quietly and listen, I hear my own heart beating, and I so long to hear the hearts of every person I hold arms-length, far, or dear, beating through
the healing grace Christ has showered down on me.
So many
want to talk. Want to know. What to hear what is the answer for all the hope and
all the seeds we try to sow. How much then do I hate them to know the answer
and to hide?
Hide
away where I am safe, where I am happy, where the troubles of this world don’t
touch or pull upon my heart.
For how
much, how utterly much, do we have to hate the world to know there is eternal
life and not to tell the wandering soul?
There
is a way to heal all the spider-veiny breaks.
So don’t
lost heart, and don’t resign to the hiding of your faith.
“Always be prepared to
give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for
the hope that you have.” 1 Peter 3:15
