Voice

Life is full of lessons learned. Sometimes they shatter your world and tragically turn things around, leaving you running in a direction you never intended. Sometimes they return the smile to a face that has felt nothing but tears. And sometimes, the lessons just leave you numb and disillusioned. I think we most often get stuck in those lessons; not really wanting to learn them but having begun the journey that won't allow us to turn back.

Eventually, our lessons turn into stories, told in brilliant colors as painted on the canvas of our souls. I love the times I get to paint it myself; the times I get to write the script and edit the final draft. I dread the times I am left helpless in the audience to watch the storyline of my life be drawn out by a stranger; rough drafts of who I am, torn apart and rewritten in an altogether different tone, not my voice at all.

They say difficulties produce perseverance. I say it just produces brokenness and it's in that brokenness that we learn to live, or maybe just survive for a time. Where is the hope for a generation who is told to believe in a God who has the power to take away our brokenness and yet chooses not to? Shallow words are often all that is offered to such an assembly.

I have no formulaic solution, no standard response to give. But I can offer an experience, my experience, of a relationship with someone who has given up his deity to share in our brokenness and through such now offers us his wholeness. Make no mistake, this experience will not take away the pain that comes from living in a fallen world. It will not save you from the harsh realities of living in relation to fallible beings. It will not shield you from lonely nights of tearful sleep; but it will give you a reason to continue in the morning.

It is a beautiful thing when God himself takes over the script of our lives, picks up the paintbrush and molds together all of the broken pieces of who we are; molding us into each other and into himself. It is through Christ that we are made whole, made complete; not by our doing, but by the artistic hand of God, painting a mosaic of all that is his creation. And we are healed.