The Good Hurt!
14“Look,
the highest heavens and the earth and everything in it all belong to the Lord
your God. 15Yet the Lord chose your ancestors as the objects of his love. And
he chose you, their descendants, above all other nations, as is evident today.
16Therefore, change your hearts(Hebrew circumcise the foreskin of your hearts) and
stop being stubborn.
17“For
the Lord your God is the God of gods and Lord of lords. He is the great God,
the mighty and awesome God, who shows no partiality and cannot be bribed. 18He
ensures that orphans and widows receive justice. He shows love to the
foreigners living among you and gives them food and clothing. 19So you, too,
must show love to foreigners, for you yourselves were once foreigners in the
land of Egypt. 20You must fear the Lord your God and worship him and cling to
him. Your oaths must be in his name alone. 21He alone is your God, the only one
who is worthy of your praise, the one who has done these mighty miracles that
you have seen with your own eyes. – Deuteronomy 10: 14-21 NLT
The smooth rounded edges sharpened to a point. Everywhere
you turn there are snags left. Cloistered and suffocating, burrowing under the
ash and sediment of stagnation – change, at times, brings ugly things to the
surface. There is an aching chasm that only He can fill. Yet, in moments of
doubt and desperation, He doesn’t feel as if He will be enough. It hurts too
much to let Him break us wide open. The tearing of the scales is excruciating
to the flesh. So, instead, like Eustace as a dragon, we sit and lick at our
wounds.
The scripture above is as equally encouraging as it is
challenging. God knew our stubbornness. Change is painful. We are often laid
broken in its wake. I love that “change your heart” equates in Hebrew as
“circumcise the foreskin of your heart”. God knew our stubbornness, that we would
fight the best He has for us. We would seek our way over His time and time
again.
Yet, He ever calls us and speaks tenderly to us. Our hurt
and broken spaces are where He really goes to work. He pushes in, plants the
seed of love, and if we allow Him to till it, the harvest is great. He desires
not to strip us bare, but give us more. More of Him is the richest gift we
could ever imagine.
I see it all around me. I see suffering first hand each
and every day at work. I see it every day in hollowed eyes and downcast faces.
These last few months, especially amongst my women friends, my soul sisters, I
have witnessed and heard desperation in sorrow. The bearing up under the
insurmountable load – the weight is almost too much to carry.
These warrior women are broken, but trusting. The glory
in them, exuding from cracked alabaster, is almost more than I can behold. They
may feel they are just surviving, but through God’s strength, they are
thriving. The hurt is real. It cuts deep and can leave one grasping to keep
their head afloat.
I, personally, get so caught up in the trivial. There are
day to day nonsenses that mire me up. I am a firm believer in owning your own
pain, but there comes a perspective point in a person’s life. The need to
understand that the temporary things, are just that, temporary. The lasting
things are how much you love God, how much you allow Him to love you, and how
much you are going to love others.
I want to be a part of the broken, down trodden, love
doing, Jesus clinging crowd. The ones, when the chips are stacked high against
them, plow through with Christ at the helm; those that not only hide the Word
of God in their hearts, but do the Word of God for others.
The need to write this post came from a, “sick of myself”
moment. I don’t ever want to get to a space where I cannot accept change as
beautiful, where I can see the space where joy and sorrow meet.
Lord soften our jagged sharp edges...
May each of you know how richly loved you are, how worthy
you are of that love, and just go and do what love does.
"But the kind of love that God created and demonstrated is a costly one because it involves sacrifice & presence. It's a love that operates more like a sign language than being spoken outright." - Bob Goff
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