To us who once believed that our grandest, noblest intention always guarantees our highest and purest attention —
We don’t get it at times.
We don’t always get the fact that life hurts, hearts break, and love leaks.
That we can stand under the here and now, and all that orbiting Sun and stars around the Milky Way’s spiralling galaxy — and believe that despite our brokenness, there’s truly a Creator who cares for, loves on, and is most concerned about us still.
One who’s not confined with what confines us.
That there’s really life beyond our four mile radius of pain.
And that we can be alive and healed — even right in the midst of our pain.
Perhaps we don’t see it at times, that the biggest, most pressing question of our lifetime?— even more important than those debated by the brightest minds of politics and education if we dare face our most honest selves —
Is always the question of what we would do with what pains our lives.
It’s the question no one wants to ask, but everyone wants an answer for.
Ask anyone, search their faces, string together their voiceless echo in the empty chamber of their hearts, and you’ll see —
Everyone carries their own unspoken, hidden pain.
And no matter what pretty picture we’re posting or tweeting, and what mirage of a life we’re painting—
There’s no way of moving ahead, forgetting the past, resolving the hurt, healing the wounds if we don’t deal with pain the way we’re supposed to deal with it.
So name your time.
For him, it’d been 38 long years.
Thirty eight years of living lame, lying paralysed, looming invalid.
Yeah, he had all the reasons to loathe himself.
Decades of not seeing the light of life, or heaving the breath of hope, he didn’t think there’d be a way out.
He had said it over and again — “I have no one to help me… and while I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.”
Who can fault him for being so stuck?
Perhaps he’d just accepted the fact that ‘this is just the way life is gonna be’ — witnessing miracles without ever tasting the miracles himself.
I wonder if it had become his narrative. That his lot in life? — was to see the healing of others without being healed himself.
Have you ever been in his shoes? Seeing others get their breakthroughs, while seeing yourself break apart.
Well, for all us of who feel some solidarity with this invalid man, haven’t we all set ourselves barriers we tell ourselves we can never cross?
We look at our infirmities, confirm our inadequacies, rest our case about our impossibilities. And heck— who cares anyway, since things will never change all the way?
But Jesus asked him, “Do you want to be healed?”
Do you want to be well?
The same question He is asking us too.
The same question He is asking us too.
Because the way we answer that question determines who we become, what we become.
When the life throws us its hard blow; simply embrace the One who holds the key to our healing.
Deal with each pain as they come.
Feel it all – the loss, the lostness, the aloneness.
Address it by the layer – the anger, the guilt, the regret, the hurt.
Because the way God breaks our pain is by first breaking into our hearts.
Our heart can sometimes get so hardened by the hardness of life, that the way to break in is by breaking us up.
Pain has its purpose.
And God can break us up with what holds us hostage, so we can have the biggest breakthrough.
Because snubbing away our pain only masks the root issues of our hearts.
Stuffing away our pain only hardens the rebirth of the new that comes with our tears.
It is sorting pain by sorting it out with God that always leaves new grounds for radical new beginnings.
We can only break through when we allow pain surrendered to the compassion of Christ to break us up, to break us out and to break us forth.
To the man who had been an invalid for 38 years — Jesus confronted his bodily pain as much as he challenged his internal beliefs.
We too, must look inside and see what it is that has held us back for so long.
For us to see healing, we must see that He is able.
We must see the hands who move the mountains and birth the winds and say: that’s all the hands I need.
A barrage of bruises need not be our forever badge, so allow Jesus’ invitation to dare you and defy your limiting beliefs:
“Rise Up, Take Your Mat and Walk”
The proof of God’s healing in us is always in our rising and walking.
This is what He wants to do with the biggest mountain of our lives, the deepest scar of our hearts, the irreparable parts of our past.
Let’s take up our mat and walk…