The bridge of grace will bear your weight…
~Charles Spurgeon

Where God tears great gaps
we should not try to fill  them with human words.
They should remain open.
Our only comfort is the God of the resurrection,
the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
who also was and is (our) God.
~Dietrich Bonhoeffer from “Circular Letters in the Church Struggle”

An old man going a lone highway,
Came, at the evening cold and gray,
To a chasm vast and deep and wide.
Through which was flowing a sullen tide
The old man crossed in the twilight dim,
The sullen stream had no fear for him;
But he turned when safe on the other side
And built a bridge to span the tide.

“Old man,” said a fellow pilgrim near,
“You are wasting your strength with building here;
Your journey will end with the ending day,
You never again will pass this way;
You’ve crossed the chasm, deep and wide,
Why build this bridge at evening tide?”

The builder lifted his old gray head;
“Good friend, in the path I have come,” he said,
“There followed after me to-day
A youth whose feet must pass this way.
This chasm that has been as naught to me
To that fair-haired youth may a pitfall be;
He, too, must cross in the twilight dim;
Good friend, I am building this bridge for him!”
~Will Allen Dromgoole “The Bridge Builder”

A terrible accident collapsed a massive bridge yesterday,
taking lives from grieving families,
creating a great gap for those who depend on the span
for connection and transport.

No human bridge builder could instantly repair
the deep and wide gap left behind
when the bridge came down.

Christ – the Divine Bridge to humanity from heaven –
was broken too, separated from His Father, the Builder.

The chasm left behind was so wholly unbridgeable.
Forsaken, Christ suffers for His brothers and sisters
who are drowning in sin by paying, with His life,
a ransom we on our own could never satisfy.

His grace is the only bridge
able to bear our awful weight.

We need a Mediator, a divine engineer,
whose grace is strong enough
to fill our every hole, bridge our every gap,
carry hope to our emptiness and grief
and deliver us wholly to our Father,
who was and is our God.

Lord, comfort us
by spanning our troubled waters,
bearing our weighty burdens,
to ensure we will safely reach the Other Side
where Your arms await us.

For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.
1Timothy 2:5

This Lenten season I reflect on the words of the 19th century southern spiritual hymn “What Wondrous Love is This”