The unrequited fight for life is a story known by many of us; daily battles, seasonal conquests of the struggling nature, and a lifetime of spoil for gain that reveals itself as loss.
Life can feel utterly meaningless in the mix of such desolate despair.
Burnout is two events occurring simultaneously: a final realisation that keeping up is no good, and the burgeoning realisation of fear because of it—that sense that life as we knew it, our comfort, is finishing.
This is both a horrible reality and sick hope. Hope because it is, sick because it’s one we cannot yet see.
The Cusp of Salvation
The host in heaven must begin to get excited as we approach the end of ourselves.
As we limp along, hardly recognising the faint trilling light coming irrefutably toward us, we cannot yet see what is to become our greatest joy.
The lower the depth we plummet to, the more in amid the Lord Almighty is with us.
I can tell you, as my fingers dance along these keys I feel that depth; and at the very same time I feel the Lord Jesus reaching down very deep within me, retrieving my soul from the experience of Hades!
As we sink, our Lord is going down with us, deeper down and under. As we claw at our rock-bottoms, God’s there—under us, and pushing us up.
The host in heaven and all around must dance at resplendent glee to see our Almighty Intercessor ringing the changes wrought by our soul’s bequest of poverty.
The cusp of salvation is a glorious place; truly moments in time when one is not just saved for the Kingdom, but affirmed for it, freshly anointed into it, as good as and perhaps better than the very first time was.
The Divine Strike-Back
When we live like we’re losing the battle of our lives, and we’re about to give up in wretched despair, God’s about to swoop down and swoon us away by a strength charged through us that can only be felt, and never understood.
God strikes the devil as we agree to be taken up in the Lord’s arms.
Striking back is the ‘deeper magic’ of Divine sacrifice where we’re put in a hallowed place with God’s Son—the event and meaning of Christ’s cross reaching throughout all eternity, rippling out to this very calamity of our despairing moment, now!
Comprehend just now this reality. The saving of us back then is the saving of us just now, and forever more.
Fighting a losing battle is a sign to us that God is near. What is about to happen, right now, that too cannot be comprehended.
Our circumstances will not change, but something within is transformed—yes, even now, or soon to come.
Salvation is near.
© 2011 S. J. Wickham.
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