God Himself Scraped and Torn

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How is faith to endure, O God, when you allow all this scraping and tearing on us? You have allowed rivers of blood to flow, mountains of suffering to pile up, sobs to become humanity’s song–all without lifting a finger that we could see. You have allowed bonds of love beyond number to be painfully snapped. If you have not abandoned us, explain yourself.

Instead of explaining our suffering God shares it.

We strain to hear. But instead of hearing an answer we catch sight of God himself scraped and torn. Through our tears we see the tears of God.
~Nicholas Wolterstorff  in Lament for a Son

In a daring and beautiful creative reversal, 
God takes the worse we can do to Him
and turns it into the very best He can do for us.
~Malcolm Guite from The Word in the Wilderness

“My God, My God,” goes the Psalm 22, “hear me, why have you forsaken me?”  

This is the anguish all we of Godforsaken heart know well. But hear the revelation to which Christ directs us, further in the same psalm:

“For He has not despised nor scorned the beggar’s supplication,
Nor has He turned away His face from me;
And when I cried out to Him, He heard me.“

He hears us, and he knows, because he has suffered as one Godforsaken. Which means that you and I, even in our darkest hours, are not forsaken. Though we may hear nothing, feel nothing, believe nothing, we are not forsaken, and so we need not despair. And that is everything. That is Good Friday and it is hope, it is life in this darkened age, and it is the life of the world to come.
~Tony Woodlief from “We are Not Forsaken”

We aren’t even capable of truly wanting Jesus
without his help.
Tim Keller

May we remember today, of all days,
the worst that can happen becomes the best that can happen.
We tussle and haggle over the price of what this will cost us, but realizing it has been paid for us makes an impossible loss possible.

We are paid in full, no longer debtors. 

From now on, we are freed from worry: the worst became the best because now we want Him over all else…



4 thoughts on “God Himself Scraped and Torn”

  1. yesterday was the worst day of my life…but your words and the song lyrics are perfectly healing my heart. thank you for “being there”…this blog comforts my heart, and i am sure the masses that follow you would agree. God bless you for sharing with us all.

    Like

  3. All of the selected poetry, text, and striking pictures evoke such intense feelings and images of that fateful torturous day in Jerusalem and Golgotha when mankind executed Jesus, the Son of God, the Christ who was sent by His Father to show us how much He loved and cared for us. But ruling religious rulers were afraid that Jesus would cause an insurrection among the populace and the occupying Roman army. Irony at its worst, when viewed by our world-wide situation today with its suffering
    of innocents, hatred of the ‘other;’ incompetent selfish, government and corporate greed. ‘Nothing is new under the sun.’ (Ecclesiastes 1: 9b.)

    Sadly, we humans have never really tried to live out Jesus’ message to us millennia ago! Then, we blame God when we see the savagery, immorality and crushing destruction of God’s gifts of human and animal life and the grandeur of our environment. We look to the sky (thinking that must be where God lives?) shaking our fist and say, ‘Can’t YOU do something?” Don’t you care? Often when I view this image, HE might say, ‘Why don’t YOU do something?.

    Two of the poets are new to me: LAMENT FOR A SON (Wolstersteroff and WE ARE NOT FORSAKEN (Woodlief).Their poetic soul thoughts are elegant and germane to the specific epic, sacred, saving EVENTS on that day.

    Thank you, Emily.

    .

    Liked by 1 person

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