God can appear to us as a figment of someone else’s imagination until the moment we’re broken — lifting our voice to God in the silliest risk we ever took — one that incidentally pays off! It’s all in response to that situation in our lives where everything turns south, winter descends, and an inescapably and cataclysmic ‘new normal’ arrives. And it just so happens God has our attention, perhaps for the first time in our lives.
At this point in time, God either seems like an uncaring tyrant or worth one last try. For those who have nothing left, it is one last try that often wins the day.
It seems abhorrent in this day to postulate that God would break us for a purpose. Could it be that in being broken, and in seeking the Lord, that we, for the first time, may experience God being broken with us, being broken for us through Jesus on the cross, and being broken beside us, even as we are broken beyond any resistance. In this state, all we have and everything that we are is open to God, and finally God says, “Finally I can say, ‘you are mine, I have redeemed you, I love you’,” and we’re able to hear with ears that accept that this is true. For the first time we feel the urgency of God’s love. We feel wanted, desired, craved. It is a great comfort we subconsciously prayed for all our lives perhaps.
We perhaps have waited all our lifetime to answer the question that lingers on the lips of that moment. “Is God real; is it possible to relate with God?” Having experienced God in the depths of our core, having been broken with God, knowing beyond knowledge that God is being scourged there with us, feeling God’s pain because God can feel ours, we sense the comfort that we will come to know as God’s Inimitable Presence. It completely transforms our perception of God. No longer is God distant and intransigent. God is intrinsically part of us, even as we feel a comfort that transcends the pain.
Could it be possible that there is a sacred joy to be experienced within glowing hot pain? Perhaps it is possible that our perception of suffering is being transformed in that moment. No longer are we fearful of it. We have experienced heaven’s divine compassion, and we can take that experience with us for the rest of our lives, into every realm, whether in trial or tumult or triumph or triviality. We have come to accept that our emotions are mentionable and manageable. We feel as if nothing can conquer us if we can endure pain knowing by experience that God is with us.
Can you imagine the temerity of divine wisdom, that in spite of grief and depression, of mental ills beyond reckoning, that there is a divine compensation extended to us for what we are going through — not to be had only afterwards. But that we may truly experience the mystical God most of all IN the moment of pain. All we need to do is know God’s empathy is with us by faith.
Could it be that we’ve waited all our lives to be met by God, and of all methods and modes, God chooses to meet us where we most need divine care.
Photo by Maria Teneva on Unsplash
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