Today’s Daily Lesson comes from 2 Corinthians chapter 1 verses 3 and 4:
3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all consolation, 4who consoles us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to console those who are in any affliction with the consolation with which we ourselves are consoled by God.
Frederick Buechner used to speak of our call to be “stewards of our own pain” and that seems exactly what the Lesson is saying this morning. We all have pain. We all have stories of hardship and suffering. To be a steward of these things is allow others to come into our stories and find solace and hope amidst their own pain.
Stewardship of our pain is not easy and we have to be careful with it. It is not bragging about our own pain. It is not comparing scars. It is not dismissing others’ stories by too quickly sharing our own.
It is not bragging. It is vulnerability. Vulnerability comes from the Latin word “Voluntas”, which means “wound”. As Henry Nouwen said, we are the “wounded healers”. Just as Christ was “wounded for our transgressions . . . And by his stripes we are made healed,” so too can our sacred stories of suffering and survival, pain and consolation, bring hope to others in the place of their woundedness.
We enter now Holy Week. This is the week Jesus came into the fullness of human suffering. It is a sorrowful and agonizing week and Jesus would have wished to be spared. But this was the way. His own suffering was the way. His own pain was the way. His woundedness was the way; and when it was over he would say, “Come; come and place your finger in the holes of my wounds.”
And all who did found their own healing also.
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