It is well with my soul.

I think we like to ignore the idea of Christ suffering, or God suffering. No, I know we do because I am guilty of this ignorance as well. We tend to overlook scriptures like Isaiah 53, the suffering servant --

"He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief,"

Well, this school year I have come to terms with the suffering Savior. Because I too have suffered deeply, my family has suffered deeply. And in my pain and tears I have whipped my head around to yell and curse God. But instead of seeing a haughty God, laughing at my pain, or even a distant and abstract God, I saw the cross.

I saw Christ stretched out upon the cross. 

I saw his wounds, I saw His blood. 

I saw his pain and his tears. 

Through my tears I saw a suffering Savior. A man of sorrows, a man acquainted, intimately, with my grief. 

Dr. Neely once said in chapel, 

“Plant the cross of Christ deeply into the Golgotha of your own pain. For His cross casts its Resurrection shadow over all of your life.”

     We are raised into the same power and life that Christ was raised. Not only are we raised, but we now currently live in that life. We share in His great redemption story. But we live in a world marred with sin, a world incapable of full healing this side of Eden. 

How do we live in the ‘already, but not yet?’

 How can we find redemption when this world continues to hand us pain and suffering, when God continues to hand us pain and suffering?

We come to the table, the Eucharist, with our hands full of idols we have fashioned for ourselves, and we try to fit Jesus among our ‘things.’ By doing so, we render ourselves incapable of receiving Christ as He gives Himself to us. 

And so He takes from us, so that He can give Himself to us. He wants to give us life, but we cling to death.

He wants to release us from our trauma, but we keep circling back and cling to our fears. 

He wants to give us peace, but we keep pushing Him away. 

This so-called pain and suffering that we claim God deals out to us in arbitrary fashion is Him giving Himself to us. 

But He has to make our hands empty before He can fill them. 

     We cannot numb ourselves to the pain, we cannot forget who we are. When we ignore our suffering, we ignore the suffering Savior; He is a man that is intimately acquainted with grief, with our grief. 

     We cannot stay calloused and brittle, we do not have to live like this anymore. These fears, these lies, this pain, this trauma is not the end. This pain is not who we are, this pain can turn into hope. 

Ann Voskamp writes,

 “Maybe more than scientific, conclusive evidence of God, maybe the dark depths of us really long for the filling of a wounded, weeping God who doesn’t write answers in the scars but writes His life in our scars. With His scars.” 

We are not alone in our pain, Christ is present. 

And He bleeds with us. 

"Don’t you see these scars on my hands and feet, on my sides? They match yours. I bleed with you." 

     God has set eternity into the hearts of men to remind us that this is not our home.

This is not the end. 

Healing will come, redemption will come, but only through Christ. 

Plunge your hands deep into His scars, get His blood on your hands. There and only there do we find salve for our pain, in His scars we find healing for our wounds.