Magnifying Pain: The Wounded
The thought of being supremely happy so that I magnify God my Savior hits me wrongly for two reasons. Firstly, I am reminded of all the times I felt hopeless and could only magnify the problem. I am so good at that.
Secondly, the thought of someone peering deeply into me, pausing, looking closely, sounds terrifying. I’m reminded of a character named Maz in “Star Wars, The Force Awakens,” who wears huge magnifying goggles. She spots fear in Fin, a main character who is hiding his true identity. As she crosses the table to look into his eyes, she zooms in with her goggles; he backs away. She sees into him. She magnifies the thing he wants to hide: the identity of which he is ashamed.
We want to be known but fear we will be rejected if we truly are. Rejection is not just a fear, it’s something we have all experienced. It might have been subtle when our need was not met by the person we loved. It might have been blatant: we showed our ugly side and we were left alone or condemned. Whether you are a Christian or not, you know the disconnect of wanting intimacy yet protecting yourself from it. Most of the time we have so much shame covering our secrets we don’t even know we have them.
We crave intimacy with one another but do things that create the opposite. Our coping patterns betray us. We eat. We watch. We drink. We sabotage. We abuse. We take abuse. We connect on screens but feel lonely. We show our best pictures because we hate how we look in real life. We want to be known but don’t want anyone to really know us. We might be rejected. We already have been. We are caught in a cycle of shame.
Marriage is God’s gift to us to reinforce that he “sees into us” and loves us as we are. Yet, divorce tells us we are professionals at seeing and rejecting.
Children are God’s gift to us to carry on our existence as well as to love and be loved. Yet mental health professionals and antidepressants show there is a disconnect between the love we need and the love we receive in families.
In Dandelion, we sit on the pain button because it’s already there. God is magnifying it in order to save us in it. We know the depths of his love in the depths of our pain.
This is what God first does to us. He exposes. He looks closely. As Sean wrote, God is love. Because he loves us, he exposes how we don’t love—ourselves, one another, and certainly him. It feels like he’s opening our wound. He is. And we run away! We’ve been running ever since we turned away from him at the beginning of our human story (Genesis 3). God wandered through the Garden looking for his favorite people, but they hid from him. They felt shame. They lost their first love and believed a lie about him. As a result, they turned on each other, they turned on him, and death took its hold on all of us.
We reject each other because we rejected God. We bear the wounds. No one hates it more than the Triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He stopped the cycle with forgiveness. The Spirit of God is like a heat-seeking missile that searches out the hidden pain, the fear, the doubt, the resentment, the shame in all of us. He exposes it in order to take it. When he died on the cross, Jesus willingly took our sin and its consequence—death—upon himself. On the cross, God unleashed his full anger at our disconnection, rejection, shame, and death. Jesus willingly took our place. Jesus had the power to lay down his life and to take it up again (John 10:18). I couldn’t do that for you, nor you for me. At the cross, God rejected his Son so he would never reject us. That was the plan all along. Jesus reversed the cycle. In our worst place, where we killed the Son of God, Jesus says, “I do not condemn you. I forgive you.” This means we have an advocate, a friend, and a redeemer in our deepest wounds. Where others have done their worst to us, Christ knows the pain and can redeem it. Where we have done our worst to others, Christ knows the pain and can redeem it. “By his wounds you are healed,” Isaiah writes in the Old Testament (Isaiah 53:5).
God sees into us, sees our wounds, and says, I see you and I love you. In Jesus, he has already forgiven you. He heals our disconnection. He makes the things we hide into the things we share because he is with us in them. He brings us out of hiding and into community with those who know this forgiveness. If Jesus is not relevant in our place of suffering, then he isn’t relevant at all. There is no wound beyond his healing, no sin beyond his redeeming. Sean and I need to hear this every day. We are wounded messengers of God’s grace. Jesus heals your wounds, too.
Recommended Articles
