Hurt, pain, tears, blood, suffering... do you not see?
One of the number one things that people have against God is this: If this God of yours is so loving, why would he allow this to happen? "This" could be anything from a car wreck to cancer to the death of a loved one to the brutality of humanity.
Several days ago, I was reading Mark 2 where the leper asks Jesus to heal him and the Word says: He had compassion on the man. Jesus could have healed this tortured soul because it was "right" or because others were watching... but instead, he was MOVED by the pain of that man. How often do we question that in our own minds whether or not the God of the universe sees us?
On Sunday, I heard a sermon about the book of Habakkuk. In the first 5 verses, Habakkuk just cries out, “REALLY??” As he cried out, my soul cried out too. During worship that night, I stood before my God broken. A hundred names came to my mind, faces flashed through my memory… people who had lost children, were in constant pain, or suffered for no reason at all. I began to weep uncontrollably as my mind switched to stories I didn’t know personally: kids in my school who grow up without parents to love them, homeless on the streets, prostitutes in Thailand. Do you SEE?! How long oh Lord? I began to cry out to the Lord that he would do something, that he would allow me to do something. And you know what, he did. He opened my eyes to see.
About once a year, I need to reminded to see people; their hurts, their fears, the reality of who they really are.Yesterday I was moved by Jesus’ emotions when I read Mark 3. The Pharisees were trying to trap him when they saw a man with a crippled hand in the Synagogue… will he heal or not? It says: “He looked at them with anger, grieved by their hardness of heart…”
He was anger at their unwillingness to help and grieved because they missed the point. PEOPLE.
Why did Jesus come? To save PEOPLE.
What does he call us to? To love PEOPLE.
The next time you’re tempted to look away when you see someone begging on the side of the street or you want to dismiss a co-worker who answers “good” when you know that’s the furthest thing from the truth, risk it all and look deep in their eyes… just enough to SEE… like Jesus does.
1 comment:
My 3-year old son fell about 13 feet through a hole in some bleachers just before Thanksgiving. Miraculously he was not hurt at all, other than some minor muscle strain. As he has revealed more and more details of his experience we've had conversations about how God caught him & kept him from getting hurt, but that God doesn't always decide to do that. In this case, the goal of the conversation was to encourage my son not to jump off high places & assume God will catch him :) But a couple weeks later he came back to me & said something that struck me as really profound wisdom. He said "Mom, it's ok if sometimes we get hurt, because Jesus got hurt when the people were beating him." It just reminded that God has felt the pain of His people.
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