Gallantly entering, with soul silence, The Wound

Photo by Sean Pierce on Unsplash

I cannot tell you how I came across the inspiration for this article other than to say it was two brave men who inspired me.

They sat there, with me, as we sat silently, letting the words we had just spoken rest there… for what seemed like a minute or so.

We sat there silently. Immediately something like the Presence of God descended. It was palpable.

Resignation, but not hopelessness. Surrender, but not forlornness.

Truth ushered into experience what these men had never quite ever known, yet now did know. Wow, it is that simple? Entering my pain takes me to Jesus? Entering my wound takes me to Him?

The penny dropped. Words were superfluous. A calamitous truth. A crushing reality.

But, with it, a lasting peace. And such a peace is the revelation we always sensed was available, but never quite experienced before. Such a peace we quickly come to understand was a capacity promised to us from eternity old. And now it is our sweet possession — for the cost of an accepting silence of soul that frees us from the shackles of our own bitter torment.

Gallantly entering the wound is the life abundant. There, in the sorrow that realises the pain cannot be fixed, we arrive at Jesus, and He fixes us even as we cannot be fixed.

As we accept the things we cannot change,
we come to accept that we can change.

As we surrender our demands,
acknowledging the strength of our desires,
we acknowledge that surrender makes no demand.

There is a ‘deeper magic’, as C.S. Lewis put it, in this gospel of being in the heart of God’s conquest for us, through the reality of our deepest dejection. That’s where God shows up; at the end of the road, and at the end of ourselves, right where there is nothing else.

These men did in a few minutes what God is inviting us to practice in our moments of despair — to enter them unto brokenness, with the full realisation that life is meant to break us in order that we would come to reach for God. That, in reaching for God we accept life on life’s terms. That, in the unpalatable, in coming to terms with what we would prefer to deny, God makes Himself known by a mysterious spiritual grace in such encounters with reality.