Monday, August 22, 2016

Daily Lesson for August 22, 2016

Today's Daily a lesson comes from Job chapter

17 “Behold, blessed is the one whom God reproves;
therefore despise not the discipline of the Almighty.
18 For he wounds, but he binds up;
he shatters, but his hands heal.

The most significant growth we experience in life is usually born out of some deep experience of brokenness and pain.  Something in us has to be cracked open. Or, in the John the Baptist's words, the wheat has to be freed from it's husk.  Something hard in us has to be made vulnerable.  We must be made to connect with our own pain; and there we connect with the pain of others.  This is what Isaiah meant when he said of our relationship to the Messiah, "we are healed by His wounds".  We find our deepest healing when we allow ourselves to connect in the place of deepest woundedness.

Those still trying to put up a strong front or and show no vulnerability can never reach or be reached in the place of their deepest pain. Most of what they do is closed and defensive. There is a wall around their emotions. The shell remains. There is never any real intimacy because there is never any real vulnerability.

In Sonnet 14 the great poet and Anglican Divine John Donne, wrote, "Batter my heart, three-personed God".  To be broken is a deeply painful, yet necessary part in the experience of becoming more human.  This is how we discover the tender place, the place of our own vulnerability and woundedness.  It it is in our woundedness that both we and others can be made whole.

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