Day 93 - Wounded Healers

Blaise Pascal, known to most as a French mathematician, was also a man of great faith with an innate ability to see within the realm of the ordinariness of life.  In Abba's Child Brennan Manning shares Pascal's insight with regard as to how we "unwittingly project onto God our own attitudes and feelings about ourselves" when he writes, "God made man in his own image and man returned the compliment."  Repeatedly in the scriptures and in the writings and teachings of Jesus we clearly observe that "He loves us as we are not as we should be." This is the good news we are meant to proclaim.

But in our insecurities, our guilt and shame, our ups and downs, victories and failures we are too ashamed to reach out and take His hand, feeling we are not worthy of His love. Even as mature Christians who have witnessed His wavering, steadfast love, we dare not approach the throne of grace when we fail again. We will always fail again, and again...yet His love changes not.

We live broken lives, but this should never hinder our walk with the Lord. He takes the reality of our lives and molds us into vessels of honor fit for his use. I have walked the paths of rejection, divorce, abandonment, pain, unworthiness, guilt, shame, and abuse, but none so destructive as the words I speak to myself of my shortcomings and failures. Anyone who has gone through the pains I have described understands poverty and brokenness. Nicholas Harnan in The Heart's Journey Home, A Quest for Wisdom wrote,

"This brokenness is what needs to be accepted. Unfortunately, this is what we tend to reject. Here the seeds of a corrosive self-hatred take root. This painful vulnerability is the characteristic feature of our humanity that most needs to be embraced in order to restore our human condition to a healed state."

We have such self-loathing that we cannot accept who we truly are "in Christ." We want to be perfect, and that just is not going to happen this side of heaven. We will never "arrive," and if we think otherwise, we are truly deceived by the great deceiver. God continually takes me back to His teaching on the subject of coming as we are in his Sermon on the Mount, Mathew 5. We come as we are - broken, poverty stricken in our hearts, fully understanding our own need.  Not judging the other fellow, simply being honest about our own need. Why is it so hard for us to accept the fact that He loves us even when we are so unlovable. Thomas Merton says, "Surrender your poverty and acknowledge your nothingness to the Lord. Whether you understand it or not, God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you and offers you an understanding and compassion which are like nothing you have ever found in a book or heard in a sermon." (The Hidden Ground of Love:Letters)

I have often felt that I am my own worst enemy. Throughout my life I have been told to use my head, you are not smart enough or "as smart as your brother, are you?" and other such disparities. Words wounded, paralyzed, and crippled me, but no longer. Jesus has embraced me and accepted me just as I am, and to Him I am beautiful, I am intelligent, I can do anything, because He believes in me! Do you know why He believes in me? Because He loves me just as I am not as I should be.

My younger son has suffered much in his thirty-eight years, choosing to believe the lies hurled at him from people who claimed to love him, Christian brothers and sisters, even family. In his hurt and self-loathing he has been face down in the muck and mire of the world's corruption, but he is now beginning to rise from the dust and proclaim God's endless love and unquestionable compassion for prodigals gone astray. Still to this day there are those who judge him by his sins of the past and his failures in their eyes today, simply because he does not conform to the world's ideas of how a Christian should dress or live. He fully accepts everyone as they are, never inflicting them to the scrutiny of his eyes as he checks them out from head to foot to see if they measure up to the world's standards. My son has a very high calling on his life, and I am proud of the steps he has made, even when he slips, because I know my son's heart, as does God see his poverty and brokenness. He is working with Teen Challenge reaching out in a city that has known corruption in the schools as far as I can remember as a teenager. Yet, he feels the same tug on his heart as I do for the "misfits" and "ragamuffins" of this world, and he longs to walk beside them, loving them, as Christ has loved and walked beside him. The thing is he knows their hurts, failures, because he has gone through the same pain, just as Jesus through any suffering and heartache imaginable. 

In Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke says, Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness and remains far behind yours. Were it not otherwise he would never have been able to find these words."  Or the words of Paul to the Corinthians:

"I shall be very happy to make my weaknesses

my special boast that the power of Christ may stay

over me."

2 Corinthians 12:9